WITH HIS feet and hands bound for the entire 12-hour journey, 1983 Maze escapee Pól Brennan was deported from the US on Thursday, returning to Ireland for the first time in 25 years early yesterday morning.
"I was shackled, hands and feet, the whole way," Mr Brennan claimed during a phone interview with The Irish Times, shortly after his 8am arrival at Shannon. "And the plane was as cold as a refrigerator once we got out over the Atlantic," he added. Responding to a query about the use of shackles, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) spokesperson said that "the restraints for officer safety and are standard procedure when deporting aliens with criminal convictions. Mr Brennan had significant criminal convictions."
After being processed for removal from the Port Isabel immigration detention centre in Los Fresnos, Texas, Belfast-born Mr Brennan was put into a minivan and driven in a three-vehicle convoy about 45km (28 miles) to an airport at Harlingen, Texas.
Once on board a Lockheed Orion P-3 Long Range Tracker aircraft, Mr Brennan was flown to Norfolk, Virginia. After a stopover of several hours, he was flown to Shannon. “And the Irish officials were extremely helpful. They didn’t cause me no bother and helped me in every way that they could. They were just great,” he said.
Mr Brennan was met in Shannon by family members who then drove him to an undisclosed location in the west. He said he hasn’t decided when he is going to return to Northern Ireland.
Mr Brennan was deported after he failed in his attempt to have Homeland Security secretary Janet Napolitano stay a November 2008 deportation ruling against him. Texas immigration judge William Peterson ordered Mr Brennan to be deported because he had a 1995 felony gun conviction, a 2005 misdemeanour assault conviction, and he had admitted to moving IRA packages in the 1970s which he’d believed to contain explosives.
Mr Brennan was serving a 16-year sentence for possession of explosives and a handgun when he and 37 IRA prisoners escaped from the Maze. The FBI arrested him in Berkeley, California in 1993. Two years after the Belfast Agreement, Britain scrapped its seven-year extradition case against him. Mr Brennan had been in US immigration custody since January 2008 when he was detained at a Texas checkpoint over an expired work permit. He had applied for its renewal on time, but never received it.