Sean Aloysius Bourke (1934–1982), from Limerick, aided in the prison escape of the British spy George Blake in October 1966.
Having moved to Britain, in 1961 he was convicted of sending an explosive device through the post to a Detective Constable Michael Sheldon, against whom he bore a grudge.
The Soviets refused to allow Bourke to take the manuscript of his book, The Springing of George Blake, out of the country; he later re-wrote the text.
[16] The British documentary includes a recording which Bourke made of a two-way radio conversation he had with Blake inside the prison, on 18 October 1966, four days before the escape.
[17][18] An attempt to get him extradited on the separate charge of threatening the life of Detective Sheldon (in an abusive letter he had sent to the policeman) also failed.
Randle and Pottle were prosecuted in 1991, but the jury found them not guilty, accepting their claim that their acts had been a moral response to the excessively long ("inhuman") sentence that Blake had received.
[20] He also wrote a number of articles, including a harrowing account of his time in Daingean reformatory, published in Old Limerick Journal in 1982.
[21] By 1981 Bourke had left Limerick and was living in a caravan in the Percy French Estate in Kilkee, and claimed to be writing a book on his life in Moscow and his conversations with George Blake, with the working title The Scrubbers.
A local newspaper report added the following specifics to the circumstances of Bourke's death:[23]"Only a few hundred yards from Kilkee, he was seen to stagger, clutch his chest and fall dying onto the grass margin.
In the vital hours between word of his death reaching Limerick and relatives, the manuscript that Sean Bourke had been working on somehow disappeared.
The BBC Radio play After the Break by Ian Curteis examines his relationship with George Blake after the escape from Wormwood Scrubs.