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A woman wrongly implicated in the €36million Northern Bank raid has said the ordeal robbed her of the will to live.

Kathryn Nelson, from Athy, Co Kildare, went on a 56-day hunger strike to clear her name after she was accused of money laundering in what was then the largest bank robbery ever in Ireland or the UK.

Worse was to follow, as a prolonged six-year legal battle against a Sunday newspaper left her penniless and in poor health.

Kathryn told the Irish Sunday Mirror: “I was aware of my life going and it had gone a fair way.

“I’m still aware of that. I knew I was right, I knew I had done nothing wrong.

“If it took my life, so what? They had taken everything else. The will to live is not a tangible thing today or any other day.

“I wouldn’t particularly want to go out and kill myself but that I’m alive is not a big deal.

“If I had to go, I had to go. It’s no longer that relevant really. I’m not interested, why would I be?”

(Image: Cork Courts Limited)

Kathryn, 66, originally worked as a teacher in Kildare and then Libya before becoming a globe-trotting diplomatic liason officer.

In December 2004, when the Northern Bank in Belfast was robbed, she was living in Sofia, Bulgaria, and recovering from a major operation.

She said: “I had had surgery in April. I hopped out of bed one morning and hit the floor like a

ton of bricks.

“I went to the doctor and within a week I had the surgery. My hip was removed, part of a knee and part of my ankle.

“It was an extraordinary type of arthritis that you get from your mother after you’re born and which doesn’t affect you until it’s too late.”

(Image: PA)

While in Bulgaria, a country then on the cusp of EU membership, Kathryn was meeting prospective investors, helping them to navigate the country’s laws and economy.

It was then that she briefly met Cork financier Ted Cunningham who would become the only person ever convicted in the Northern Bank raid.

Cunningham would later admit to laundering some of the proceeds.

That connection was enough to get Kathryn arrested when she returned to Ireland in February 2005. At the time, she thought the whole thing would blow over. She added: “What I thought was that it would all be cleared up in 24 hours.

“I was sure it was just a misunderstanding. I couldn’t believe it, shortly after serious

injuries [her operation].

“There was no reasoning in the whole thing. It was a festival of stupidity.”

(Image: Photopress Belfast)

Despite her innocence and release, Kathryn spent years trying to secure a written statement from gardai clearing her of any wrongdoing.

The charges were eventually dropped, but the Sunday following her arrest Kathryn awoke to a newspaper headline that read “Busted”, above her picture. Stories then appeared that implied she was part of an IRA crime gang.

With her career in diplomatic relations effectively destroyed, Kathryn relocated to the Isle of Man, where she began the fight to clear her name publicly.

The legal battle was ultimately successful, but dragged out to the point where she was left penniless.

In her book A Terrible State she describes huddling at the wall that separated her from her neighbour’s apartment in the dark, hoping to feel the warmth from next door.

She said: “I had gone through two or three years of nobody taking any notice. Time was passing by and I had spent a huge amount of money.

“The ‘poor woman’ tag wears thin after a while. I had done everything honourably, I had spent everything I had and I had sold valuable jewellery to live.

“That lot over here, the paper, they kept saying they hadn’t the information they needed from

the gardai.

“Well, I had spoken with the gardai and they said the information was there should they have applied for it, which they didn’t do.

“It’s not just the time that they took.

“They have taken energy and emotion from my life that I will never get back, never.”

(Image: Photopress Belfast)

Kathryn is now enjoying strong sales for her book, particularly abroad.

An Italian legal consulting firm have widely praised the work and have called for it to be made into a feature film, focusing not on the robbery but on Kathryn’s plight.

For her own part, Kathryn remains hugely sceptical about the official version of events surrounding the Northern Bank raid.

She said: “My own feeling is I don’t believe there was any robbery.

“I believe money was removed or transferred, which is not the same thing as having a robbery.

“Are you telling me that you could take €36million and get it away?

“C’mon, it’s was a white van parked outside the bank. That’s the picture that the world saw.

“I don’t believe a word of it, not a word. I wasn’t here when it was going on.

“People must have been arrested, people must have been questioned. Are we keeping an eye

on them?

“I don’t know if the IRA had anything to do it with. It may have been given to the IRA, but it wouldn’t have been the IRA that did the robbery, or whatever it was.

“It went somewhere but I don’t believe it went out in a white van.

“Where could it go and why wasn’t the PSNI more worried? It happened in the North of Ireland, yet the Garda Siochana were running themselves ragged.

“That’s in the book, I ask the question of sovereignty. What were they doing?”

Kathryn says the ordeal has ruined her lifelong love affair with Ireland and plans to leave the country again, this time for good.

She revealed: “I suppose the basic question of the whole matter is, ‘It’s over, can you get over it?’ And the answer is no, I can’t.

“If I could turn around to a bunch of decent men and women and say that tomorrow morning you may be destroyed for the hell of it, what would they say to me, ‘You’re mad’?

“I’m not mad because that’s what happened.

“There’s more ways of killing a person than decapitating them or hanging them.

“You don’t have to take life away to kill the being.”

(Image: PA)

An armed gang seized £26.5million (€36m) from the Northern Bank in Donegall Square, Belfast, on December 20, 2004.

The British and Irish Governments and then PSNI chief Hugh Orde blamed the Provisional IRA for the heist, although this has always been denied by both them and Sinn Fein.

The night before the robbery, the gang arrived at the home of two officials at the Northern Bank, Chris Ward and his supervisor Kevin McMullen.

Their families were held at gunpoint while the two men were instructed to go to work the following day and follow a set of instructions.

At lunchtime, Ward brought out around €1.3million in a sports bag and handed it to one of the robbers in what was regarded as a test run for the main robbery that night. Ward and McMullen stayed behind after the

bank closed and let the gang inside later that evening.

The thieves brought the huge sums of cash in bags to one or more vehicles

parked outside on Wellington Street and then escaped. Following the raid, Northern Bank announced it would recall all £300million worth of its bank notes in denominations of £10 or more, and re-issue them with a new logo and serial numbers.

Chris Ward was arrested and tried for robbery and two counts of false imprisonment in 2008 but the trial collapsed and he was cleared of all charges.

Ted Cunningham remains the only man to be convicted in connection with the heist.

The Corkman, now 66, was originally convicted and sentenced to 10 years in prison in April 2009.

He served three years and two months but the conviction was later quashed because of a problem with the specific type of warrant used by gardai.

A retrial was ordered and in May, 2012, Cunningham was given a five-year suspended sentence after pleading guilty to two counts of money laundering at the Cork Circuit Criminal Court.