Dramatic rise and fall of Stirling's 'Big Mags' Haney explored in podcast
Controversial community figure and convicted drug dealer 'Big' Mags Haney is to be the focus of a new BBC podcast series.
'The Ballad of Big Mags' will explore the life and times of Mags, who rose to prominence in the late 90s.
Margaret Haney or McMenamin from the Raploch estate in Stirling grabbed the headlines in the 1990s as a self-styled anti-paedophile campaigner.
And when a sheriff branded her clan 'the family from hell', further garnering attention, it cemented her place in public consciousness.
Decades later she continues to divide opinion, and, in the BBC podcast series, award-winning journalist Myles Bonnar 'reveals new insights as he speaks to people closely connected to her and intimately involved in the astonishing series of events that took place in the late 90s and early 2000s'.
Myles said: 'Mags Haney's rise to prominence and her dramatic fall after revelations of her criminal activities, was a story which played out in the media over years.
'The series not only examines her contradictory life but also wider issues of mob justice, community dynamics, poverty, and the creation of the so-called media personality.
'Many people only partially know the story of this controversial figure and this series will give a full account of how she rose to fame and became a source of fascination to the media and public before her criminal life was exposed.'
Chain smoker Mags, 70, who was suffering from lung cancer which spread to her brain, passed away in hospital in August 2013, surrounded by her family.
The mum of 11 – two of whom died in infancy – and gran of 48, rose to fame nationally in the mid-90s when she led a campaign to oust convicted paedophiles from the Raploch estate where she and her family lived.
She had also led protests in the estate against the Poll Tax and spoke out about everything from the need for regeneration in Raploch to directly telling senior politicians she wouldn't give stockpiled tins of European mince being handed out to pensioners and the poor 'to her dug'.
Mags rallied other mums to demand one sex offender in particular was moved out of the area and sparked a string of protests across the country against sex offenders being housed near families, even appearing on the chat show Kilroy to discuss her campaign.
But as her fame spread, the spotlight turned on Mags and her own family. She and her children , in 1995, were branded 'the family from Hell' by a sheriff, as they racked up scores of convictions for everything from housebreaking, assault to mobbing and rioting.
Some in Raploch turned on the Haneys, who eventually fled the estate after a mob laid siege to their house.
After a succession of communities campaigned to keep her and her family from moving to their areas, ironically she eventually ended up housed only a few hundred yards outside Raploch, in Lower Bridge Street.
It was from there that she was arrested in a police drugs snare and in 2003 she was sentenced to 12 years in jail after being branded the controller of her family's drugs empire.
Three members of her family also received sentences of nine, seven and five years for their roles.
But, even as she began her sentence, Mags – who had a string of previous convictions for assault, breach of the peace and fraud – contacted the Stirling Observer from jail to insist she was the victim of 'conspiracy and a set-up' and insisted she only pled guilty to drug dealing to protect her elderly husband John, known locally as Smacks.
Mags told us: 'I had no alternative but to plead guilty; he's 72 now and I just couldn't let all this go on for his sake.
'I was just watching him go more and more downhill and I eventually gave in.'
Asked why so many people had been willing to testify against her, she claimed they had been put under pressure either by being threatened with being put on indictment themselves or because they were addicts who became prepared to say anything just so they would be let away for their next fix.
Claims that Mags was one of the main beneficiaries of an operation which was raking in at least £200,000 a year from drug dealing, were also rubbished by her.
'I am in over my head in debt,' she said, adding if any cash was found it had nothing to do with her.
But after she plead guilty, families came out accusing Mags herself of peddling drugs to their children and relatives, including in some cases going as far as to blame her for their drug-related deaths.
She said: 'These stories are rubbish. I never ever agreed to members of my family selling drugs. But at the end of the day they are adults and free to make up their own minds whatever they do.'
Asked why so many people were willing to 'shop' her, she said: 'There are people out there who hate the Haneys for reasons I don't really know.'
Asked if her notoriety had been her downfall and if she had courted publicity she said: 'Never. I fought a cause for justice for the innocent children of our nation. Why shouldn't I have done that?'
Haney eventually served six years in Cornton Vale Women's Prison, before being released in 2009.
In jail, she battled cervical cancer and her health began to decline, and latterly she was using a wheelchair.
A larger than life character who at various times both revelled in and rued her notoriety, her dry sense of humour was on display as she spoke to a Stirling Observer reporter while on day release from prison and sitting in an otherwise packed McDonalds in Stirling - surrounded by empty tables.
'Look at this lot,' she laughed. 'What do they think I'm going to do? I'm a pensioner with cancer and a walking stick...'
The six-part series will be available on BBC Sounds from Friday August 8.
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