Venue: The Courthouse - Meath County Council Stage
Biographer and polemicist Richard O’Rawe reinvented himself as a crime novelist late last year with the publication of Northern Heist, his first novel. The storyline is based loosely on the 2004 Belfast Northern Bank robbery, which netted the thieves more than £26m. Richard O’Rawe became involved in Republican politics in the 1970s and, after his own arrest on bank robbery charges, found himself in Long Kesh as a provisional IRA ‘press officer’ during the 1981 hunger strikes. His account of how that crisis played out is at variance with that of the received wisdom from Republican leadership of the day. He has written about those experiences in Blanketmen: An Untold Story of the H-Block Hunger Strike and Afterlives: The Hunger Strike and the Secret Offer That Changed Irish History. He is also author of In the Name of the Son: The Gerry Conlon Story, for which Johnny Depp wrote the foreword. Richard will be in conversation with Myles Dungan.
