On the run immediately after the 1983 Maze prison break-out, Brendan “Bic” McFarlane and other IRA escapees took over an isolated farmhouse near Dromore, Co Down, and held its occupants hostage. After checking radio news bulletins for reports of the escape, McFarlane and his gang gathered a few useful items for their night-time trek on foot across the border.

Before he left, the IRA commanding officer in the Maze and the brains behind the break-out wrote and signed a list of the items he had taken — a map and a compass among them. McFarlane told the family to bring the list to Sinn Fein headquarters in Belfast, where full compensation would be paid.

Earlier that day, the escapees had shot a prison officer in the eye and stabbed another in the chest. The man later suffered a heart attack and died. It was the biggest prison break-out in British history, but hadn’t gone entirely to McFarlane’s plan, although 38 IRA men had managed to break free from what was supposedly the most heavily fortified prison in Europe.

By the time McFarlane’s gang arrived at the Dromore farmhouse, roadblocks were being erected throughout Northern Ireland and RUC helicopters were circling overhead. It seemed almost farcical that McFarlane should fret over taking a few pounds worth of possessions belonging to his hostages, who included two small children and a baby, for whom the trauma of being held captive by terrorists surely vastly outweighed the loss of a map or compass.

McFarlane was in the Maze serving five life sentences for the 1975 bombing of the Bayardo bar on the Shankill Road, in which five Protestant civilians died. What made the attack particularly horrific was that those who had tried to escape the explosion had been machine-gunned by the terrorists.

Although the IRA has now stood down and decommissioned, McFarlane is facing more time. Last week the Supreme Court in Dublin decided that he should stand trial for the kidnapping of the supermarket executive Don Tidey in December 1983. Tidey was taking his 13-year-old daughter to school when he stopped at what he believed to be a garda checkpoint. A gun was put to his head and he was bundled into a waiting car. A few days later his photograph was sent to Associated British Foods, and this was followed by a phone call demanding a IR£5 million ransom.

The gardai eventually tracked Tidey and his kidnappers — four in all — to Derrada Wood in Ballinamore, Co Leitrim. In the subsequent shoot-out, a trainee garda and a soldier were killed. Tidey’s kidnappers escaped.

McFarlane was arrested in Amsterdam two years later, extradited to Northern Ireland and released on parole from the Maze in 1997. He was then charged with Tidey’s kidnapping, but challenged this on the basis that gardai had lost a number of exhibits containing fingerprints — the central evidence in the case. The Supreme Court ruled last week that the trial can proceed — paving the way for a fascinating case involving one of the IRA’s most notorious figures.

McFarlane was born in 1951 and grew up in the Catholic Ardoyne area of north Belfast. His family was deeply religious and he served as an altar boy at the local church. At 17 he joined a missionary school in Wales to begin his studies to become a priest.

According to Fr Aidan Troy of Holy Cross in Ardoyne, in another world he would indeed have been Fr McFarlane. Troy has worked with him on several occasions over the past few years since McFarlane’s release from prison.

“He’d be a big figure in the area, to put it mildly,” he said. “On a personal level I find him amazingly respectful to me. During the Holy Cross protest he was a very affirming presence. He was always very calm.”

Fr McFarlane never got to hear confessions, however. Returning home in the summer of 1969, McFarlane decided his community needed guns more than they needed God, and he joined the IRA.

For his role in the Bayardo bar bombing, McFarlane was sentenced to a minimum of 25 years. He earned the nickname Bic, after the pen maker, because he took notes during IRA meetings in the Maze. In 1978, McFarlane made his first attempt to escape, dressed, not surprisingly, as a priest. The bid failed, McFarlane’s “special category” status was withdrawn, and he joined the dirty protest in the H-blocks.

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