Brendan McFarlane

He served as an altar boy at the local church, and at the age of 17 joined a missionary school in Wales, where he began training to become a priest.

[1] In 1976, McFarlane was sentenced to life imprisonment in connection with the Bayardo Bar attack on Aberdeen Street in the Protestant and Loyalist Shankill Road district of Belfast, which killed five people (three men and two women) and injured 60 more on 13 August 1975.

[3] In a 1995 House of Lords debate, Gerry Fitt, formerly the SDLP MP for West Belfast, alleged that McFarlane had machine-gunned three pedestrians who were passing by the Bayardo as it was blown up.

[6] According to journalist Peter Taylor, the attack was carried out by the IRA in retaliation for the UVF's ambush of the Dublin-based Miami Showband on 31 July 1975 which had resulted in the shooting deaths of three bandmembers.

Immediately following the escape, McFarlane and other prisoners commandeered a remote farmhouse near Dromore, County Down, and held the family inside hostage.

In the subsequent shoot-out, following which Tidey made his escape, a trainee Garda and an Irish Army soldier (Gary Sheehan and Patrick Kelly) were killed.

On 16 January 1986, McFarlane was recaptured in the Netherlands along with fellow escapee Gerry Kelly, and subsequently extradited to Northern Ireland, and released on parole from the Maze in 1997.

[14] In 1998, McFarlane was first charged in the Republic of Ireland with Tidey's kidnapping, but he challenged this on the basis that Gardaí had lost a number of exhibits containing fingerprints – the central evidence in the case.

[15] The Gardaí based the Tidey charges on items recovered from the kidnap site, including a milk carton and a plastic container, on which fingerprints were discovered.

However his legal team launched a second judicial review in May 2006, on the grounds that McFarlane could not get a fair trial due to "systematic delays in bringing the prosecution".

[20] In August 2004, Gerry Adams suggested that the IRA might disband to prevent its existence being used as an excuse to delay a power-sharing agreement which would include republicans.

[citation needed] In 2017, McFarlane canvassed for Kelly and Carál Ní Chuilín in the 2017 Assembly elections, along with Sinn Féin's deputy leader, Michelle O'Neill.

[citation needed] In the 2017 film Maze dramatising the 1983 prison break, directed by Stephen Burke, McFarlane was portrayed by actor Tim Creed.