Episode 3 of Mna an IRA features Pamela Kane on Thursday 19th January TG4 10:30pm

Pamela Kane

Pamela Kane comes from a Republican family. She grew up in Baldoyle, in north Dublin but her roots lay in Tyrone where her father is from. Throughout all the family holidays she spent in Cappagh in Tyrone as a young girl, she learnt of how the “nationalist population was treated” and felt she wanted to do something about it. She became actively involved in the republican movement during the 1980 Hunger Strikes. She joined Na Fianna Éireann, the republican youth movement, at 16.

One of the more daring publicity stunts she was involved in was the climbing of the RTÉ TV mast on the eve of the 1984 European elections to protest Section 31. Sinn Féin candidates were banned from the airwaves because of the state censorship of Section 31 of the Broadcasting Act. Herself and the other young people who climbed the mast were arrested but given the Probation Act. After she was arrested in London in 1988 and held for seven days in Paddington Green top-security police station, Pamela was told by a Special Branch detective on her ‘escorted’ journey back to Ireland that she would be in prison or dead within five years. On May Day 1990, she was arrested during a botched bank robbery in Enniscorthy, County Wexford, along with five others. She was sentenced to 10 years and sent to Mountjoy Prison. Shortly after she began her sentence, she was moved to the high-security Limerick Prison and served the rest of her sentence there.  She was released in 1995.

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
•