Talking to Terrorists: A Personal Journey from the IRA to Al Qaeda

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Peter Taylor. Talking to Terrorists: A Personal Journey from the IRA to Al Qaeda

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PETER TAYLOR

Talking to Terrorists

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Oatley went to see the Permanent Under Secretary at the Northern Ireland Office, Sir Kenneth Stowe, to attempt to work out a solution that would bend the prison rules and provide a face-saving formula for both parties. While talking to Stowe – a pragmatic civil service mandarin, not a dogmatic ideologue – Oatley kept in touch with Brendan over the phone to make sure that the ‘escape hatch’ being devised would be acceptable to the IRA. A formula was agreed, with the question of what constituted the prisoners’ ‘own clothes’ being left imprecise, or as Oatley described it to me, ‘fairly open-ended and in some ways ambiguous’.19 Stowe got in touch with Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, whose Private Secretary he had previously been. She signed off the deal, no doubt reluctantly. All this, of course, was done in the utmost secrecy. Oatley was then driven at top speed along the M4 to Heathrow, from where he would take a plane to Belfast’s Aldergrove airport to deliver the compromise formula to the IRA via another intermediary, Father Brendan Meagher, a priest from Dundalk in the Irish Republic.

Brendan had driven from Derry, and was waiting at Aldergrove with Father Meagher. When Oatley arrived he handed the envelope containing the formula to Brendan, who gave it to Father Meagher, who conveyed it to the Provisional leadership waiting in Belfast, who relayed its contents to the hunger strikers in the Maze. The strike was called off at the eleventh hour, and no one died. But that was only the beginning of the tragic story. When families and relatives subsequently arrived at the prison carrying their loved ones’ clothes, the prison authorities would not let them put them on. There was a total breakdown in communications. Brendan was desperate, as he knew what the consequences would be. ‘It fell apart because the language of the prison governor and prison warders was quite different from the language of the Republican prisoners.’ The prisoners thought they were getting political status, but they weren’t. The prison authorities did not share Oatley’s and Stowe’s flexibility, and apparently the government was not minded to force the issue, as it depended on the cooperation and goodwill of the prison administration and officers to run the gaol.

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