It’s the numbers that jump out when reading Glenn Patterson’s absorbing account of the 2004 Northern Bank robbery, fleshed out from his excellent BBC podcast on what was then the biggest bank raid in Irish and British history.
The stolen £26.5 million remains the eye-catching figure. But we also have: the 18 minutes it took police to arrive at the bank after a tip about suspicious behaviour in a side street by the building; two constables, from the three-year-old Police Service of Northern Ireland, responded while patrolling Belfast’s bustling evening streets five days before Christmas.
The city is mostly peaceful six years on from the Belfast Agreement, and slowly recovering from the Troubles. It takes just seven minutes for £18.5 million to be moved from the bank to a white getaway van. The robbers then audaciously decide on a second run: giving the two Northern Bank staff, Kevin McMullan and Chris Ward, whose families are being held hostage, 15 minutes to load two metal cages with as many used banknotes as possible (approximately £8 million). It takes a bit longer than this, but then they are away.
The figures are just a flavour of the depth of detail Patterson methodically compiles in his reconstruction of the Northern Bank case; a criminal operation that, as the author admits, remains startling, fascinating and confounding to this day. Suspicions were quickly directed towards the Provisional IRA, which has always denied responsibility.
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Another number worth recollecting: only one person has been successfully prosecuted for anything to do with the Northern Bank, Cork moneylender Ted Cunningham, who was convicted of laundering £3 million in cash from the robbery. No one has been convicted for the robbery itself.
The bank raid’s impact is what makes Patterson’s book truly valuable, including the stories of the families who endured the ordeal. The author shrewdly looks at the “bank job” through the prism of the complex peace process. While never downplaying the gravity of the incident, Patterson bitingly satirises the political establishment’s response with the heady punch of Belfast paps soaked in Buckfast.
“The biggest challenge to the investigation of the Northern Bank robbery was the fact that everything in Northern Ireland has for two and a half decades been subservient to the peace process,” Patterson told the Orwell Foundation, “Or, rather, that the peace process is invoked as a reason not to delve too deeply into certain events.” This book reminds us this is a story that has never really had an ending.
NJ McGarrigle is a journalist based in Co Derry
