The directors of a film centred on English heiress turned IRA volunteer Rose Dugdale want to make contact with the one-time bomber to let her know about its imminent general release.
Co-directors Christine Molloy and Joe Lawlor deliberately avoided attempting to get in touch during the production of Baltimore, to be released across Britain and Ireland next week, including 13 venues in the north.
“We never felt that we needed to meet up with her in person and speak with her directly,” said Ms Molloy.
“We think it would have felt presumptuous to be honest. If we were doing a biopic or a journalistic book…that would be a different matter.”
But Ms Molloy added: “As it happens, we are approaching Rose Dugdale to let her know about the release of the film.”
Dugdale, 83, is believed to be living in a nursing home in Dublin.
The film starring Imogen Poots, due for release next Friday, focusses on the 1974 Russborough House, Wicklow, heist by an IRA gang that netted 19 paintings worth £8 million, approximately £100m today.
Dugdale and other members escaped and hid out in a cottage near the west Cork village of Baltimore. She was pregnant at the time.
Following an eight-day nationwide manhunt in late April, early May, 1974, gardai descended on the cottage. She was arrested the paintings recovered from the boot of a car.
“Baltimore is about a very specific series of events in her life. The raid and the time she spent in the cottage before her arrest,” said
Ms Molloy, noting the 50th anniversary of the heist is next month.
“We try to trace and unpick the steps she took that lead her to Russborough House. Our aim was to look at this woman whose story is so particular and think about connections to the world we live in now and how people can become radicalised.
“In a way, not just about her but also about the ideas and social context that surround her and what she did.”
Lead actor Imogen Poots added that the decision to meet a person an actor is playing “depends ebody you are going to play it sort of depends what they have done with their life”.”
“We wanted our story to be objective, tell it from the point of view of the heist and I think the film makers were intrigued on focussing on the introspective, psychological landscape of her as a person,” Ms Stubbs in a BBC interview on Monday.
Oxford graduate Dugdale, the daughter of a millionaire insurance broker from London, was already highly politically motivated when in the early 1970s she became attracted to Irish republicanism, cemented it is said by the events of Bloody Sunday.
In London she met Eddie Gallagher, the Donegal IRA man who was later father of her child.
Weeks after arriving in Ireland in late 1973, Dugdale with Gallagher hijacked a helicopter with the plan to drop four milk churns packed with explosives on Strabane RUC station.
The load was way too heavy so two were dropped in water, the third exploded but was off target and the fourth was close but did not detonate.
