[1] Following his capture, at 26 years of age, in the spring of 1982 he made Irish legal history as the first citizen of the Republic of Ireland to be charged with an offence committed in another country.
[5] According to the family the Garda shot a traditional musician called Finnegan in the leg and this was followed by a gun battle reminiscent of the Irish Civil War.
In that year, he was using the nom de guerre David Coyne and was believed to be a young businessman of German-Irish extraction when he met a nurse called Helen Griffiths at a party in London in the summer of 1978.
These and other items, including car keys and voice recordings, linked him to other bombings as well as the targeting of senior British Conservative and royal figures.
[5] According to historian J. Bowyer Bell, he had been involved in no fewer than eighteen bombing attacks in five British cities with Patrick Magee, the Brighton bomber, alone.
[11][12] In July 1982 he made Irish legal history when he became the first man sentenced in the Republic of Ireland for offences committed in the United Kingdom.