About a year ago, Deirdre Connolly and her husband Darius met with the head of the British Post Office, Nick Read, to discuss their involvement in what’s considered one of the most widespread and significant miscarriages of justice in UK history.
A couple of weeks later, the former sub-postmistress got home from work to find a large brown envelope lying on their doormat, boldly marked with the Post Office symbol.
‘My heart sank, honestly I felt sick,’ she says. ‘I thought, Jesus, Mary and Joseph, what’s going on here? It turned out it was just a letter of apology from them, but that’s what it’s like for me now, for all of us, it’s the trauma. We’re all still living with it every day. That’s why some people aren’t strong enough to come forward.’
That acute feeling of nausea returned when she sat down last week at her home in Strabane, Co Tyrone, to watch the explosive new ITV series — shown here on Virgin Media — Mr Bates Vs The Post Office. A gripping, stomach-churning drama, it charts a 20-year long scandal that has rocked one of the UK’s most integral institutions.
Deirdre Connolly (pictured) from Strabane in County Tyrone who has received a letter of apology from the Post Office
‘It gave you a better insight into everything we’ve been through,’ says Deirdre. ‘I think that’s why everyone is up in arms; people didn’t really understand or care about what was going on.
‘That drama was the best thing that ever happened. I could relate to a lot of things they showed, all the fear and confusion, and the shame. Trying to explain that to people is really hard. After watching it, I was emotionally drained, I couldn’t look at the phone, I couldn’t do anything.
‘Darius said to me, ‘Did you ever think we’d get to this point, where the Post Office was all over the TV and everyone was supporting us?’
For a long time, well over a decade, the Connolly family felt utterly alone and cut off from their community. Like hundreds of others who worked for the Post Office, they stood falsely accused of stealing thousands of pounds from their workplace.
Alan Bates (pictured) who is portrayed by actor Toby Jones in the ITV drama Mr Bates Vs The Post Office
Across Britain, between 1999 and 2015, around 900 people were prosecuted for theft, false accounting and fraud. The fault was never theirs, it was down to a newly-installed IT system, created by the Japanese multinational technology company Fujitsu.
This flawed software system, called Horizon, was later found to have duplicated entries, lost transactions and made bad calculations. According to the Post Office, however, this massively expensive software was completely failsafe, and any reported losses or discrepancies had to be paid by the sub-postmasters themselves, according to the contracts they’d signed.
Victims of the scandal have spoken out about the bullying and abuse they claim to have suffered at the hands of investigators and auditors sent out by the Post Office — it’s since been revealed they were offered bonuses for every successful prosecution they secured.
Homes were re-mortgaged, life savings used up, relatives and loved ones gave loans to plug all the holes. Those who couldn’t pay, or fought back, were taken to court. Some went to prison, including one pregnant woman who had to give birth while behind bars. The stress, shame and toxicity of the fallout led to at least four people taking their own lives. There were bankruptcies and countless broken marriages.
It’s a story that’s been known for some time, through newspaper investigations, TV specials and a book and a podcast by the journalist Nick Wallis.
But it seems it’s taken this new drama series, watched by more than nine million people and which stars Toby Jones as the quietly determined former postmaster Alan Bates, to finally get a serious response from the UK government.
So far, 95 of those prosecuted have had their convictions overturned in the court of appeal.
On Wednesday, British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said the government will now legislate to exonerate and compensate all of those involved.
The British police have also stated they will investigate whether Post Office bosses should face charges. On Tuesday, after an online petition was signed by more than one million people, former Post Office chief executive Paula Vennells announced she was handing back her CBE honour.
A public inquiry into the scandal, chaired by retired judge Wyn Williams and launched in 2021, resumed on Thursday after the Christmas break. It’s expected to sit for several more months, before handing in its report next year.
In Northern Ireland, it’s still unclear how many Post Office staff were caught up in this catastrophic miscarriage of justice. Belfast-based solicitor Michael Madden, who represents around 20 of the victims in Northern Ireland, said that since the ITV drama was broadcast, he’s been approached by at least six more.
But even now it’s still not clear if Sunak’s announcement on Wednesday will apply in Northern Ireland or in Scotland, where the courts system is different to the one in England and Wales. However, a Downing Street spokesman said they’re ‘keen’ to include them.
Former Post Office boss Paula Vennells (pictured) who is to hand back her CBE following the fallout of the Horizon IT scandal which led to the wrongful prosecution of hundreds of subpostmasters
Deirdre Connolly is hopeful, but still cautious, that clarification will happen soon. ‘I watched Rishi Sunak’s announcement,’ she says with a tired sigh. ‘Thirty seconds and that was it. Where was the apology? I know he’s apologised before but today, when everyone was glued into it, why didn’t he say sorry?’
The 54-year-old’s story is fairly typical of the chaos and devastation caused by the Post Office and its insistence that nothing could be wrong with its costly new IT system.
Originally from a small townland outside Castlederg in Tyrone, close to the border with Donegal, Deirdre has been married to her husband Darius for 33 years. They live in Strabane, where Deirdre was working as accounts administer for a cooking oil company.
The couple decided in 2006 to buy a grocery shop with a post office attached in the village of Killeter, near where she grew up.
‘We wanted to be our own bosses and also have more time to spend with our kids,’ explains the mother-of-two.
During her testimony last year to the public inquiry, when it came to Northern Ireland, she told how they believed it would be their ‘forever job, with a big trusted national organisation’.
She also explained how the Horizon system was already installed by the time she took over, but she never got any training from the organisation on how to use it. She experienced issues almost straight away and was ringing the helpline two to three times a week.
‘It was a really complicated system,’ she says. ‘So when there were discrepancies, I just put the money in myself to make it right.’
There’s a scene in the first episode of Mr Bates Vs The Post Office that she recognised only too well, when distressed postmistress Jo Hamilton watches her loss figure literally double on the screen in front of her.
‘That stuff happened to me,’ says Deirdre. ‘I pressed the icon for a first-class stamp. When I looked at the basket it had put in 58 of them. To do that I would have had to do three movements with my finger. I know I didn’t do that.’
Did she have suspicions that the system was faulty? ‘You don’t, you just keep going on because you just don’t know,’ she says. ‘It was kids on those helplines, they had a script to read and they’d tell you that nobody else was having any problems.’
It was a striking feature of the scandal, how every person who reported issues with the system was told that they were the only one. We’ve learned since that the helplines were inundated with increasingly terrified post office managers begging for assistance.
On the morning of June 2, 2010, an auditor arrived unannounced at the post office in Killeter. An hour into his review he told Deirdre he had found a discrepancy, there was a shortfall of almost £16,600. He demanded her keys for the Post Office and said she was suspended.
‘There was no process at all,’ Deirdre told the inquiry. ‘I was utterly stunned.’
She was subsequently called to a meeting at the Royal Mail offices in Belfast.
A man ‘who had flown in from England that morning to interview’ her quizzed Deirdre for several hours. At one point he asked her if she’d ‘taken the money for paramilitaries’.
‘I began to shake and was absolutely petrified,’ she told the Inquiry. ‘I remember my mouth was dry. At that point in time, it was quite common for people accused of collaborating with paramilitaries to be killed.’
Now fearful for the safety of her family, she felt like ‘we had to pay the Post Office or risk death’.
Their parents, along with loans from an elderly uncle and aunt, helped them to scrape the money together. ‘I feel like we paid the money under threat to our lives,’ she said at the Inquiry. ‘It was like having money extorted from you with menace.’
The shame of having to go to their families, ‘cap in hand’, still burns.
The nightmare continued. They tried to keep their small grocery shop open, but ‘in the eyes of the community, we were thieves’. Customers stopped coming in, their shop was repossessed, and they were declared bankrupt in 2013.
Around the same time, at the age of 43, Deirdre developed epilepsy, a condition she has been assured was brought on by the stress she was dealing with.
Her son was just 16 years old when he found her on the floor in the middle of a seizure. She didn’t recognise him when she came to. ‘He sometimes says to me even now, how he’ll never forget that day, it scared him so much,’ she says. ‘I’m still on daily medication for it, but that’s what the stress did. I couldn’t drive for a year, so [the scandal] took my independence away from me on top of everything else.’
She would later get one of those brown, officially-stamped envelopes from the Post Office, informing her there would be no criminal proceedings instigated against her. It was her darkest day, she told the inquiry. ‘I was naive and never even thought of criminal proceedings as I knew I hadn’t done anything wrong,’ she says. ‘I was on the brink of committing suicide that day.’
Like many of the post offices involved, Deirdre’s small business was at the very heart of a tight-knit community, which can be a curse as well as a blessing. ‘Oh, everyone knew who I was and everything else,’ she says. ‘I grew up there, it’s so rural that everyone knew everybody’s business.’
Indeed, it’s the only time she gets emotional, when thinking about how people believed or suspected she was a thief. Does she think she can ever forgive them?
She falls silent.
‘Nobody has ever asked me that question,’ she says quietly. ‘Can I forgive them? I can rise above it, yes, I can. They didn’t know any different. But that no smoke without fire thing, and being in a rural area, that’s what comes out, so it does. I’ll have to think about it.’
She believed she was alone until a relative read about Alan Bates’s story in a newspaper.
‘I phoned him and at the end of the conversation he says to me, ‘you thought you were the only one, didn’t you? We’ll look after you from here on in.’
‘I tried to get it highlighted in Northern Ireland, which was really hard because people were very slow to come forward, but then suddenly they did.’
Like many of those affected, Deirdre — who now works in the accounts department of a dog food company — has received some small interim payments but the process for full compensation has been agonisingly slow.
‘There are three different schemes for compensation, that’s how complicated they’ve made it,’ she says. ‘My claim went in before Christmas, so the government now has 40 days to make me an offer. But I’ll believe nothing until I see money in my bank account and the rest of the convictions overturned, there’s a guy here [in Northern Ireland] still waiting for that. They’re making him jump through hoops, he’s devastated.’
She wants to see the entire spectrum of those responsible for the scandal held to account.
‘The investigators, they put people through absolute hell, they’re bully boys,’ she says. ‘But somebody had to give the order to do that. It all goes up the chain.’
She adds: ‘I do have faith in the inquiry and Williams, I really do. They’re getting down to the nitty gritty now, this is when everyone will see exactly who was responsible for what.’