Hugh Doherty (Irish republican)


Hugh Doherty is an Irish republican and former volunteer in the Provisional Irish Republican Army. He is known for his role in the Balcombe Street Siege of December 1975, at the resolution of which he was sentenced to eleven terms of life imprisonment for offences including murder, with a judicial recommendation he serve at least 30 years.
Doherty and fellow members of his active service unit had targeted tourist attractions, soldiers, police officers, politicians and other establishment figures as part of the IRA's campaign against British rule in Northern Ireland.
The Balcombe Street gang, who were named after the London street on which they were arrested after a six-day siege that was broadcast live on television and watched by millions, were responsible for a 14-month campaign of bombings and shootings across the south-east of England.
At his trial at the Old Bailey in 1977 Doherty received eleven life sentences and seven other sentences ranging eighteen to twenty-one years imprisonment. In 1987, Jeremy Corbyn handed a petition to then-prime minister Margaret Thatcher which demanded better visiting conditions for Doherty and his fellow IRA prisoner Nat Vella, along with "the immediate transfer of Irish political prisoners to prisons near their homes". In May 1998 he was transferred from England to Portlaoise prison in Ireland. Following his transfer Doherty made an appearance at the 1998 Sinn Féin Ard Fheis at which the party accepted the Belfast Agreement, under the terms of which Doherty was later released from prison.
He was born in Glasgow, Scotland, and now works as an artist in Ireland. He is the brother of Sinn Féin MP and MLA Pat Doherty.