n 1958, 17-year-old Rose Dugdale was one of 1,400 young women who curtseyed before Queen Elizabeth II in the most prestigious event of the summer’s debutante season. It was the last time that the well-bred daughters of the most aristocratic and affluent families in the country would be presented to the monarch in a ritual that dated back 200 years. Princess Margaret, with characteristic hauteur, would later say: “We had to put a stop to it. Every tart in London was getting in.
The pair also created a powerful new explosive that was detonated outside the fortified Glenanne barracks in May 1991, killing three soldiers and seriously injuring 11. The next year, it was used in a bomb that destroyed the Baltic Exchange and surrounding buildings in the City of London, killing three people and causing damage estimated at £800m. As O’Driscoll believes: “Rose Dugdale did not kill anyone directly, but she was indirectly responsible for the deaths of a lot of people.
The latter part of the film concentrates on the 10 days Dugdale spent with the stolen paintings in a cottage in a remote part of west Cork before her arrest. Alone, pregnant and perhaps vulnerable, the film-makers suggest this must have been a rare moment of reflection for a woman whose life was defined by recklessness and risk.“For an intense period of time, she must have been alone with her thoughts,” suggests Molloy.
Ironside remembers the young Dugdale as “a bit gawky and masculine-looking – a big girl with a deep voice”, who was “not conventionally pretty, but exuded such energy, positivity, intelligence, generosity and, yes, even kindness that she was instantly attractive”. She even admits to having had “a secret crush” on her, as did many other pupils, and of sensing, even at this early age, that she was bisexual.
Throughout her life, Dugdale was drawn to maverick male would-be revolutionaries such as Eddie Gallagher, a renegade IRA member who took part in the helicopter hijacking and the art theft, and later, Jim Monaghan, her fellow bomb-maker. The first of these was Wally Heaton, a self-styled “revolutionary socialist” with a drinking problem, who had been traumatised by the brutality he witnessed while serving with the Coldstream guards in Malaya.