Читать книгу Special Category - Ruán O’Donnell - Страница 11

CHAPTER 1

Year of Crisis

In a radio interview broadcast on 8 January 1978, Irish Taoiseach Jack Lynch called on the British Government to state its intention to withdraw from the North of Ireland and claimed that in such an environment, outstanding prisoner issues would be resolved.1 This pragmatic and domestically shrewd declaration angered Britain’s Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, Roy Mason. At a meeting with Senior Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA) officials in Dublin on 5 May 1978, Mason noted somewhat illogically that ‘references to a possible amnesty had sown seeds of doubt which have now been removed’ by assurances on cross border security.2 Various British agencies knew that the Irish Government was unwilling to formally confer political status on IRA prisoners concentrated in Portlaoise Prison. On 29 April 1977, they had been one of eighteen powers who abstained when the Diplomatic Conference on Humanitarian Law, Geneva, recognized guerrillas as meriting prisoner-of-war status. Ending the bitter conflict, however, required de facto acceptance of captured and sentenced IRA and INLA members, as well as pro-British ‘Loyalists’, as political prisoners. Thus, their treatment pending a negotiated settlement was a highly sensitive matter.3

Negative trends within the Dispersal System fully warranted the retrospective characterization of 1978 by the London Times as a year of ‘crisis’.4 Acknowledgement of a trying period by Britain’s paper of record stemmed from the undeniable and diverse pressure points being exerted on the establishment. The Prison Officer Association (POA), an innate bastion of conservatism, had instigated a muscular campaign of industrial action to assert the rights of its beleaguered union membership. Understaffing, demoralization and a stressful labour environment exacerbated loss of paid overtime and sundry workplace entitlements. Overtime in the late 1970s ‘local’ prisons could be compulsory and obliged junior staff to present themselves for thirteen days’ duty in a fourteen day period.5 Extra pay for longer, and budgeted hours in uniform, was otherwise lucrative. The resultant ferment was described by the taciturn Home Office as ‘unprecedented’, and far in excess of the disturbances of 1972, when generally passive resistance from prisoners coincided with POA members working to rule.6 In the course of 1978, senior prison officers stood trial for alleged criminal offences arising from the violent suppression of the Hull riot in August 1976. The illusion of omnipotence and immunity was permanently shattered. Overcrowding all but ensured that physical confrontations with inmates increased in frequency and seriousness. The range of countermeasures developed to maintain control, not least common usage of tranquilizing drugs, draconian punishment ‘F Wings’, and secretly trained riot units served to discomfort moderates. By early 1979, when Justice May conducted a root and branch inquiry into the prison service, 42,000 prisoners were held inside a system with a Certified Normal Accommodation (CNA) of 37,735. Only 31,656 had been jailed in the jurisdiction in 1969, when both recorded crimes and convictions were considerably lower than 1978.7

As the unpopular conflict in Ireland entered its tenth year, the presence in English jails of militant republicans fostered a distinct range of challenges. The British Government received an embarrassing check on 18 January 1978 when the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) in Strasbourg found it had breached Article 3 of the European Human Rights Convention (1953) by its administration of interned persons in the Six Counties from August 1971. This revelation was palliated by the Court’s careful description of pertinent unlawful seizures and interrogations as constituting ‘degrading treatment’, despite the Commission’s prior use of the politically loaded yet applicable term ‘torture’.8 The extraordinary delay in official deliberations permitted equivocation and disavowal. Britain’s NATO allies were circumspect with regard to formalizing allegations of human rights’ violations on the western side of the mutually militarized ‘Iron Curtain’. UK Attorney General Sam Silkin dutifully assured the European Court in February 1977 that such controversial practices had been discontinued, but he could not defend the fact that the conveniently mild verdict from Strasbourg came in the midst of numerous claims of gross excesses in the treatment of detainees in the North of Ireland. This reality, coupled with developments in England’s Dispersal System, indicated that further recriminatory judgements in higher Continental courts were in the offing.9

Right wing and predominately Europhobic British Conservatives were appalled by the ECHR decision and Airey Neave, Shadow Northern Secretary, decried Silkin’s ‘unprecedented incompetence’ in failing to vindicate the UK.10 Neave, a former British Intelligence operative during the Second World War, had received milder handling by German captors in 1940s’ Colditz than many Irishmen interned by Britain did in the early 1970s.11 Numerous men detained without trial and with little or no connection to the IRA had aside from been badly maltreated in Gough Barracks, Ballykelly and Long Kesh as well as the advanced interrogation techniques inflicted on the selected ‘hooded men’. Irish republicans Noel Jenkinson, Sean O’Conaill, Michael Gaughan and Frank Stagg had all perished in custody by February 1976 as a direct result of their imprisonment in England.12

The announcement in Strasbourg coincided with a significant statement by Taoiseach Jack Lynch. On 18 January 1978, Lynch called upon the British Government, headed by Labour Prime Minister James Callaghan, to state its intention to withdraw from the Six Counties. This bid to break the stalemate in the North of Ireland was supported by Cardinal Tomas Ó Fiaich who would have inferred from Lynch’s overall comments that the Taoiseach was prepared to grant an amnesty to IRA prisoners in the southern jurisdiction. Open political commentary of this kind rarely emanated from Dublin and was underpinned in this instance by the prior public engagement of US President Jimmy Carter. The mild-mannered Democratic Party leader had expressed a willingness to offer political and economic sponsorship to an Irish peace process in late 1977. Callaghan, however, failed to respond with the requisite degree of commitment for which he incurred the criticism of powerful Irish-Americans, such as Senator Ted Kennedy. If high-level negotiations had commenced in the course of 1978, the immediate or phased release of IRA prisoners would have featured on the agenda. The Strasbourg censure remained to agitate both poles of political opinion in the interim.13

Celebrity intellectuals Jean Paul Sartre, Angela Davis and Herbert Marcuse were amongst those who backed leftist calls for an international tribunal on British crimes in Ireland to be convened in London. Davis had a deep interest in the maltreatment of black American prisoners and spent eighteen months in jail prior to her June 1972 acquittal of aiding a bloody courthouse escape bid in August 1970.14 Sartre had condemned the conditions imposed on Red Army Faction (RAF) members in West Germany’s Stammheim Prison in 1974.15 Despite evoking the scorn of the politically ‘sectarian’ revolutionary left, British MPs Joan Maynard, Tom Litterick, Dick Kelly, Arthur Latham and Maureen Colquohon declared their support, as did Irish-based moderates, media, trade unionists, socialists and constitutional republicans Dr Noel Browne, Eddie McAteer, Bernadette McAliskey (nee Devlin), Matt Merrigan, John Mulcahy and Michael Mullen. Numerous additional public figures promised solidarity. Among the litany of essentially rhetorical questions posed were requests for information from the authorities in London concerning ‘allegations of abuse and assault on Irish prisoners in British, including English, jails’.16 Sinn Féin correctly interpreted this development as one of the salient ‘issues for 1978’ and expected the England dimension to be raised in Strasbourg.17

In Britain, the Government’s legal position appeared, superficially, to have been rendered more secure. Recent domestic court cases, primarily Becker v The Home Office, had confirmed that the Prison Rules were ‘regulatory’ and not subject to ‘civil claim’, even if found to have been breached.18 Prisoners effectively had no rights, merely privileges, which governors were entitled to either suspend or modify without external consultation and statutory oversight. Moreover, the High Court in London had ruled in 1977 that the adjudications of Board of Visitors were ‘separate and immune from ordinary judicial procedure and review’.19 BOVs were fundamental to the adjudication of discipline within the jails where they operated on an individual basis. They exercised responsibility for administering often significant penalties for infractions of locally observed rules. The disparity between their function and actual legal capacity was found to be in breach of Article 13 in March 1983.20

An important and unexpected development arose in the Court of Appeal in London in October 1978 relating to the suppression of the Hull Riot of 31 August–2 September 1976. Lord Justice Shaw, in R v Hull Prison Board of Visitors, ex parte St. Germain, found that BOVs performed a quasi ‘judicial role’, contrary to the sense of an earlier judgment in the High Court. As such, while BOV rulings were not subject to standard external appeal mechanisms, they were open to ‘judicial review’, during which the integrity of decision-making processes could be reassessed and outcomes potentially ‘set aside’.21 Prisoners could contest BOV punishment. The Home Secretary retrospectively, in October 1983, described the St. Germain ruling as strategically significant in that it initiated a novel process whereby ‘the [Queen’s Bench] Divisional Court [of Appeal] began, in 1978, to exercise its supervisory jurisdiction over the [prison] system’. This inspired inconveniently imaginative implications for ‘what kind of adjudications’ could reconcile ‘effective determination’ of disciplinary cases with ‘safeguards for the prisoner’. This perennial conundrum of insecure political elites informed the agenda of the Prior Report which the Home Office commissioned from the Committee on the Prison Disciplinary System. Personnel were selected in the emergency environment of May 1984. Eventual publication of the Prior Report in October 1985 followed serial acts of subversion by numerous IRA prisoners in England, as well as non-republican militants, which profoundly altered the tenor of life in the Dispersal System.22

The well-informed Home Office evidently anticipated a spate of tactical reverses. In November 1983, the Divisional Court ruled in R v Secretary of State for the Home Department and Board of Visitors of Albany Prison, ex parte Tarrant and others, that BOVs must properly consider a prisoner’s request for legal representation if they were facing serious charges. This progressive reform gravely weakened the virulent potency of both in-house Governor dictations and BOV prescribed adjudications.23 It did not go unanswered by the Prison Department of the Home Office in St. Anne’s Gate, London. Justice Webster accurately predicted in late 1983 that ‘charges of mutiny’, amongst the most detrimental to any prisoner proved guilty of the offence, could be ‘referred to the criminal courts’.24 Webster, in fact, advised that any BOV proceedings involving possibly severe repercussions for transgressors should be tried within ‘the normal criminal justice system with all the rights and protections which automatically go with such [a]process’.25

The 1985 Prior Report also recognised the complaint taken to the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) in Strasbourg by IRA prisoners Sean Campbell and Fr Patrick Fell which was ‘adopted’ on 12 May 1982.26 Campbell and Fell had initiated their historic action in 1978, arising from the illegal manner in which they were treated during and following their assault by prison staff in Albany in September 1976.27 From January 1984, the cumulative effect of Tarrant and Campbell and Fell was that prisoners not alone received legal advice from outside lawyers but enjoyed their actual representation at adjudications if basic reasonable criteria applied. The ‘implication’ of this breakthrough for the Home Office, according to the Prior Report, encompassed nothing less than ‘the whole question of the proper limits of the disciplinary system’.28 Unwelcome judicial attention into the often secretive affairs of the Prison Department occurred in tandem with extraneous political developments which altered the physical structure of the Dispersal System during years of Conservative Party governance. The IRA inside and outside the prisons in England played a notable part in stimulating this far-reaching reconsideration between 1978 and 1985. Indeed, the Prior Report claimed: ‘In the context of the prison disciplinary system, the most important [ECHR] case … is that of Campbell and Fell’.29

The IRA had featured prominently in the strategic planning of the Prison Department since the early 1970s. Home Office writer Roy Walmsley highlighted the importance of the 8 March 1973 London explosions for contemporary prison policy-makers. The first car bomb attacks in Britain had raised the prospect of ‘future similar incidents’ and a generation of ‘new candidates for [special security] unit places’ in England. The IRA had inadvertently disrupted Home Office projections at a critical juncture and halted the abolition of the SSUs, which the influential Mountbatten Report had regarded as uncivilized in 1966.30 According to Walmsley:

It was immediately clear that Irish republican bombers, once detained and convicted, would pose a serious new threat to security, and there was real doubt as to whether they could be held safely within the dispersal system. This perception removed the impetus behind the policy of progressively phasing out the security units... By the beginning of 1978 there were already five bombers among the total of fourteen unit occupants [in Leicester and Parkhurst], and it was strongly felt that nowhere but the security units could safely contain such men... The case for the retention of two units and the construction of a third thus rested on the arrival of the Irish republican dimension, the dangers of increased terrorism from a variety of sources, and the increasing number of robbers with resources to finance their rescue.31

The British Government and subordinate Home Office was understandably anxious to prevent public sympathy accruing to their Irish republican opponents in English jails. In January 1978, Merlyn Rees responded to a question on the numbers of IRA members either convicted or beaten in custody by denying any such subcategory existed. Rees sidestepped Sheffield MP Joan Maynard’s query in the Commons, as well as the declared raison d’etre of the Prevention of Terrorism Act (PTA), by claiming that ‘there is no separate offence of terrorism in our criminal law’, and it was therefore impossible to collate the desired data.32 Despite this disavowal of any form of tailored protocols adopted in relation to republicans, the IRA intuited that the Home Office was devising a fresh approach to pressurize its most vulnerable imprisoned comrades. It was alleged that Wakefield had retained an anomalous place in the Dispersal System after the official closure of the Control Unit in late 1974. Trainee Assistant Governors reportedly received courses in Wakefield in the psychological dimension of long-term maximum-security detention. This reputedly encompassed the controversial theories of Fields Medal recipient Rene Thom, whose ‘Catastrophe Theory’ straddled mathematics, singularity theory, philosophy and biology with a penological application in the 1960s.33 ‘Sociobiology’, another alleged Prison Service area of interest which republicans found sinister, was defined in a 1975 American publication by Edward O Wilson. Insights into biological determinants of social behaviour and adaptation also offered potentially pertinent guidelines for those running penal institutions.34 Despite parliamentary privilege, Rees declined to comment on whether he believed Prison Regulations met European Convention standards on the distinctly evasive grounds that the question was then ‘under consideration’ in Strasbourg.35

Persons connected with republican prisoners held in England require neither Home Office admissions nor Strasbourg rulings to confirm the routine discrimination meted out to Irish republicans within the Category A population. Civil Rights advocate Fr. Denis Faul enlisted the aid of Sr. Sarah Clarke in January 1978 to answer queries posed to him on the subject by Lord John Kilbracken (John Godley). The republican nun was attached to the La Sainte Union Convent in Highgate Road, London, and worked with the city’s Irish Chaplaincy. Her primary endeavour was at the hub of a discrete circuit of contacts that extended welfare assistance and legal liaison to Irish prisoners in England. Prior to going to England the Galwegian had taught at the prestigious Our Lady’s Bower in Athlone, County Westmeath. Fr. Faul learned that often-fraught family visits provided the clearest evidence of policy differentiation of prisoners assigned an identical security rating by the Home Office. In her briefing to Kilbracken Sr. Clarke explained:

The visits esp[ecially] in Albany are limited. The Irish prisoners have visits in a special area. Three small rooms are set aside for them. One of these rooms is for closed visits, i.e. behind glass & wire etc. Two rooms have a large table and there are two screws behind the prisoner & two screws & a police woman or security woman in civilian dress behind the visitors. A large table is between the prisoner & the family. All other than Irish Cat[egory] A prisoners have visits in open rooms, well heated [and] comfortable at coffee tables with free access to canteen facilities. There are approx 12 Irish prisoners in Albany … The Irish visitors however cannot visit when it is convenient for them, they must come when one of the two rooms mentioned above is not being used by other prisoner’s visitors. Nobody wants a visit in the ‘closed’ room.36

The basic situation outlined by Sr. Clarke, who had assisted prisoners’ dependents from the early 1970s, described the unacknowledged existence of a ‘special’ Category A cohort of Irish republicans.37 She also ascertained that visitors to IRA prisoners in Albany in late 1977 and early 1978, who frequently arrived at the complex at the same time as others calling to see criminal inmates, were not permitted to use the Waiting Room. Being required to stand outside the main gate imposed hardship on the elderly and the young during winter months, some of whom travelled to the remote Isle of Wight from as far as Donegal. It was obvious to all but the most hardened cynics that this physical dislocation inflicted, possibly intentionally, psychological harm on the families of the imprisoned. This, in turn, discomforted the prisoners. However, scenes of this nature were replicated across the Dispersal System, as Sr. Clarke knew well on the basis of constant interaction with the families her network conveyed to and from England’s many prisons and airports.38 The Prisoners Aid Committee (PAC) astutely regarded such aggravating policies as ‘a kind of “political status” within the Brit prison system’.39

Kilbracken had sought precise information from Longford in the light of reading Faul’s disturbing In prison in England pamphlet, circulated in December 1977.40 This consultation was intended to assist him in framing a parliamentary question for the House of Lords which was aired on 7 February 1978. Writing from his home address in Killegar, Cavan, Kilbracken claimed to be ‘personally in favour of Irish prisoners being transferred to Ireland’, but felt that the objective could not be fruitfully addressed as the ‘UK Gov[ernmen]t have clearly set their minds against this’. His well-intentioned intervention did not enlist support from republicans as it envisaged a proposal to concentrate Irish Category A prisoners in a ‘convenient’ location for family visits. Wormwood Scrubs in London was posited as the best option for this purpose; it was a prison designated the Lifer Assessment Centre for southeast England in January 1975.41 This resembled a superseded line of argument in the Mountbatten Report, albeit one substituting humane visiting conditions in lieu of security considerations as the underlying justification.42 The Ministry of Defence appreciated the importance of family contact and made elaborate arrangements vis à vis accommodation, allowances and communications for dependents of soldiers serving in the North of Ireland under ‘Operation Banner’.43

Sr. Clarke, who furnished much of the original data drawn upon by the campaigning Ulster priests, reviewed the Kilbracken letter on behalf of Fr. Faul. In her draft response she wrote: ‘Rees, when I spoke to him … said something about [why he] could not return them [to Ireland. It was] because they would have to enjoy political status’.44 If this viewpoint was accurately recalled, Rees admitted that the key reason for opposing the repatriation of IRA prisoners was their subsequent entitlement to political status in Long Kesh, site of the H-Blocks. His own Labour Government, however, was moving purposefully to eliminate the last vestiges of this much-resented vestige of internment in Belfast, Derry and Armagh, a process that led to an uncompromising republican reaction in 1976–81. This historic policy shift may well have been a critical element in shaping Home Office attitudes towards the republicans it retained in England. On 7 February 1978 Lord Harris deflected the central thrust of Kilbracken’s representation by claiming ‘there simply are not enough facilities in any one dispersal prison to take up to 100 IRA prisoners who at the moment are serving sentences in this country’.45 The prisoners in question, meanwhile, persevered in their efforts to use the courts to expose injustices within the Dispersal System and exact a financial toll from their captors. ‘Uxbridge Eight’ prisoner Gerry Cunningham reflected:

It was attack …a way of getting back … The system was there, why not use it? … Numerous cases [mounted by other IRA prisoners] as well, not because they believed in British justice, not because they believed they were going to win, but because they were going to court. And because they’d get legal aid and because it was costing the state … for those cases to be defended. They had to defend them.46

Legal initiatives mounted by Irish republicans, and their willingness to make common cause with British prisoners, raised the status of the IRA among those confined in the Dispersal System. Derry republican Brian McLaughlin noted: ‘They more and more came to respect us because they witnessed that on different occasions we had protested not only for ourselves but for better conditions for them also’.47 The solidarity demonstrated between the IRA, British gangsters and others during the 1976 Hull Riot, and the court proceedings that ensued, had accelerated the process, and Irish republicans in English prisons believed that the system ‘changed’ in consequence.48 More generally, the basic approach of staff towards Category A prisoners fell, in the late 1970s, within the theoretical definition of ‘coercive power’ coined in the 1990s. This was the most severe of several available modes of interaction and was characterized by ‘increased use of segregation, transfer, privilege removal, disciplinary punishments and lock-downs’.49

The Prison Department maintained its remit of estranging the IRA from the general Dispersal System community at a time when they were, as evidently suspected, utterly determined to disrupt jail administration. According to Eddie O’Neill: ‘[Hull] put fire into a lot of prisoners. It empowered a lot of prisoners who previously felt impotent’. The attack by staff on the IRA men in Albany, furthermore, enraged their comrades: ‘That finished us with any idea that there was some course of diplomacy to deal with things like minor protests. It was all out war at that stage … [and] the Hull riot empowered a lot of guys … The fear that had been generated by repression before that suddenly dissipated ... for a long period of time the place was just a tinderbox’.50

Broadening the front

A Bloody Sunday commemoration parade from London’s Hyde Park on 24 January 1978 attracted around 500 persons, while another 500 marched from Shepherds Bush to Hammersmith. The scale of the events was a decrease on the numbers that had attended Irish demonstrations prior to the implementation of the PTA in 1974, and a pale shadow of those that had protested internment in Trafalgar Square in 1971.51 The highly emotive Derry anniversary, however, served to promote joint political activities of pro-republican bodies based in Britain in 1978. Twenty members of the United Troops Out Movement (UTOM) from Leeds, Sheffield, Bradford and Doncaster picketed Wakefield prison four days later as part of a week of interlinked events.52 This linked to a notorious and specifically English concern for the wider Irish struggle, albeit from a numerically small subsection of the British population.53 Statements of support from the PAC and the IRA prisoners in Wakefield were as appreciative as ever, even if opportunities to reach receptive audiences were steadily diminishing.54

An Cumann Cabhrach, the charity that assisted with the welfare of prisoner’s dependents, continued to receive funds from its international associates, which in February 1978 included the Celtic Club of Melbourne, Australia, and Na Fianna Éireann (NFE) in San Francisco, California. Income of the level that had preceded the Birmingham bombs of 1974 was no longer available from UK sources, although newspaper sales and discreet donations continued.55 The international pro-prisoner networks contained elements with multiple lines of communication to the Republican Movement. The Cathal Brugha Slua of NFE, San Francisco, did not come under the umbrella of the Dublin HQ, yet produced republican activist Christina Reid, one of the IRA linked ‘Boston Three’ in 1990. She was an acquaintance of San Francisco-born IRA member Liam Quinn, who was jailed in Ireland and extradited from America to England in 1986.56

The task facing Sinn Féin and An Cumann Cabhrach was complicated by unanticipated developments in England and Ireland. The closure of Leicester Special Unit on 28 February 1978 created a new challenge in that two prominent Irish prisoners, Hugh ‘Hughie’ Doherty and Eddie Butler, were sent on a protracted tour of ‘local’ jails, where they were held in solitary confinement pending the refurbishment in Leicester. In February 1977 the men had received multiple life sentences with a thirty-year minimum, which the trial judge retrospectively wished to amend to ‘natural life’.57 Doherty ultimately spent two years in solitary confinement in Durham, where he was initially denied access to his personal books owing to the theoretically temporary nature of his stay.58 Leicester SSU did not reopen until 26 February 1980. Parkhurst Special Unit, the only other structure in England deemed suitable for the men, was not only full but contained Harry Duggan, Brendan Dowd and Joe O’Connell, all of whom the Home Office wished to separate from their former associates.59 The Clareman noted: ‘They obviously didn’t want the four of us [IRA co-defendants] together. It would be too political … too much of a statement’.60 Following a very rare escape, Parkhurst SSU had undergone a security upgrade between 26 November 1976 and 12 April 1977, which included the construction of an additional wall as well as an electrified inner fence. Whereas Harry Roberts had once planned an escape using bolt cutters smuggled into the prison by his Irish mother, a much greater degree of preparation was necessary following the additional security investment.61

Sinn Féin and the UTOM attempted to keep such matters in the news by picketing Winson Green (Birmingham), Leicester and Gartree in the months ahead, but made little headway in the context of other events.62 The POW Department of Sinn Féin claimed in 1980 that Doherty and Butler were ‘outstanding cases of victimisation’ in the English SSUs.63 Dowd was equally meritorious. Between August 1976 and June 1980 the Kerryman was in Bristol, Albany, Wandsworth, Armley, Strangeways, Parkhurst and Winchester for periods of two to three months. Frequent movement between solitary confinement cells induced disorientation, weight loss, hair loss and impaired vision. Republicans attributed the unusually harsh treatment to Dowd’s centrality to the appeals of the ‘Guildford Four’ and ‘Maguire Seven’, who were unjustly jailed for the actions of his London ASU. He was moved into the Leicester SSU in June 1980.64 Dowd was known to be a prominent IRA member, a former O/C in London and, from 1975, as ‘Dennis Power’, a disguise he used while living in Manchester.65

Prison Department scrutiny of Doherty and Butler in Leicester prior to its renovation probably derived from their knowledge that the men had explored various means of escape, which evidently inspired the improvement of the complex. The ‘Balcombe Street’ group, when on remand in Brixton following their televised arrest in December 1975, had been moved to Wandsworth when a criminal informer betrayed their plan to use smuggled explosives to blast through a toilet block wall to access a point where they could escape to freedom.66 Ironically, Brixton and Wormwood Scrubs were listed on targeting documentation found in a safe house used by the IRA and ASU at the time of their arrest.67 On arriving into Leicester’s cramped unit following sentencing and allocation, Butler, closely followed by Doherty, encountered tensions with several English occupants, and one in particular. High-profile prisoners such as John McVicar, Johnny Joyce and Freddie Sewell did not welcome the new arrivals, and Butler had ‘a bit of an altercation’ with an Englishman. This did not flare into a violent confrontation, however, a critical factor, as the IRA men had discussed ‘doing’ the main protagonist under such circumstances, regardless of consequences.68 The practise devised by Martin Coughlan, Martin Brady, Roy Walsh, Vince Donnelly, Billy Armstrong and other life-sentenced IRA men in 1970s’ England was to consistently retaliate with great force in order to deter opportunist attacks on isolated comrades.

On receiving an unsubtle warning from the two IRA men in the small TV room, the irritable Englishmen gradually adapted to their presence. Scope for assertion was boosted by the knowledge that their associates in Parkhurst were not facing significant threat and that the IRA throughout the Dispersal System were forming ad hoc alliances.69 Following McVicar’s release, two of the remaining Englishmen in the Leicester Unit were invited to participate in an escape for which one subsequently offered to furnish firearms. This was declined by Doherty, who knew that ‘dummy runs’ were being conducted nearby in preparation for moving a hoist adjacent to the wall. The specialised equipment was capable of lifting four men over an inner wall and the forty-foot perimeter boundary. There seemed to be no justification for intimidating unarmed staff with weaponry. However, the two Irishmen were ‘ghosted’ within days of involving others and they divined from the sudden decision to construct a roof over the small yard attached to the ‘Submarine’ that they had once again been thwarted by human agency.70

Doherty was held in a large but freezing cell in Durham where he jogged and slept in his clothes to keep warm during the cold Yorkshire winter. Beatings were common in the Segregation Block, and Doherty received his first of many in England when he refused to leave the yard when the stipulated daily period of one hour was abruptly cut short:

I seen the screw hitting the bell and I thought, “oh fuck, they’re going to come to get me”. I just grabbed the screw and let him have it and then he just collapsed. The next thing they just came in … all I could hear was Winney [McGee] shouting they’re killing me. No one seen it like, there were that many of them. I was down and they were all on top of me and they were punching and kicking each other but Winney got over the fence to help me. I got dragged into the strip cell and you’d be bollock naked for a few days and then up on adjudication and the usual … You’d be asked for your name and number. You’d just look at them. The Governor says, “I was in the RAF and I remember my number” and I says to him, “what is it?” He was absolutely rabid and then the penny dropped … I was dragged out again.71

After months of tedious application, Doherty was permitted access to the main prison library accompanied by eight staff and a guard dog. Deprived of any face-to-face contact with other prisoners, he snatched momentary shouted exchanges with Ray McLaughlin, Tony Clark and Stevie Blake whenever they appeared within earshot. Doherty had moved in different IRA circles in Ireland and Britain but shared bonds of republican politics. The Dispersal System also fostered a sense of comradeship. Occasional brief conversations were possible with Ann and Eileen Gillespie, who spent most of their sentence after 1 March 1975 in Durham’s H Wing. The all - female facility was located in the vicinity of the ‘cage’ compound where prisoners being held in solitary confinement received exercise and fresh air.72 Such modest and unguarded acts of solidarity were invariably seized: ‘They would shout to you … and you would shout back’.73 All three possessed strong County Donegal connections, as did Stevie Blake. Winnie Coyle, an Irish-Glaswegian who later married Hugh Doherty, travelled from Annagrey, Donegal to visit him in Durham on 28 August 1978. She found that her fiancée had ‘got thin and small but he was in good spirits’.74 Doherty had hitherto declined visits in Durham to spare his family hardship and was involved in an altercation during his reunion with Coyle arising from the oppressive conditions imposed on ostensible security grounds. Having made his point he promptly ‘disappeared’ on a lie-down to Winson Green, obliging Harry Duggan and Joe O’Connell to seek his whereabouts through the prison grapevine.75

Eddie Butler was moved via Strangeways in Manchester to Winson Green in Birmingham, where unsuitable security facilities entailed a protracted stay in solitary confinement. On being returned to Leicester SSU with Brendan Dowd, the IRA men were initially joined by just two other life sentenced prisoners: Harry Roberts and Donald ‘Black Panther’ Neilson. Roberts fatally shot two plainclothes detectives in August 1966; the detectives had incorrectly believed he and his associates may have been involved in an escape attempt from Wormwood Scrubs. The men in the van were actually professional criminals preparing to commit an armed robbery. Roberts used skills obtained in the British Army in Malaysia to avoid capture for three months and claimed at trial that the military had also taught him how to kill in the course of a brutal counterinsurgency. A third policeman was shot dead during the same incident by John Duddy. Whereas Roberts, who had an Irish mother, was well disposed towards republicans, Neilson was far more guarded.76 Neilson had also belonged to the British Military and did National Service in Aden, Kenya and Cyprus. He received four life sentences in 1976 for a lethal criminal rampage.77 Proximity to exceptionally violent men, however, was not a bone of contention for IRA members, many of whom were viewed with equal opprobrium and accepted the reality of their imprisonment in England. Friction was inevitable in the close confines of a sealed area within an otherwise non-maximum security complex.78

It was immediately suspected that the Prison Department were testing tolerances of newly restrictive administration under which hobbies and facilities were withdrawn. All four promptly cooperated in ‘decorating’ the main office with several days’ worth of human waste for which they were locked down. The next step was a planned assault on the Governor and Chief Security Officer during their daily inspection. Neilson declined to take part and physically removed himself from the equation by using the Rule 43 ‘own protection’ protocol to ‘go behind the door’. The remaining three were surprised to be unlocked the following morning as it was patently obvious they intended to escalate their protest, even if Neilson had maintained silence. Instead, the Principal Officer approached them in the kitchenette and requested a one-hour postponement of any action to which they assented. Ultimately, the Governor and Chief Security Officer arrived with a reinforced but non-threatening complement of staff and offered to meet most of the demands which had been previously presented in the form of a list petition. Mutual self-interest enabled such acts of compromise and accommodation in SSUs, which would have been all but impossible on standard prison wings where numbers, crowd dynamics and regulations impinged.79

Ennui was a major threat to the psychological health of O’Connell, Duggan, et al in Parkhurst SSU, a detached two-storey building developed from the former ‘punishment block’.80 Irregular communications with republicans in England and Ireland were generally possible over time but insufficiently frequent to counteract the limitations stemming from spatial isolation. Maintaining morale was a constant battle at times when the ‘Long War’, as reported in the mass media, was failing to deliver the strategic dividends hoped for by armed republicans: ‘What kept you going was what was happening on the outside. For the first few years it was very quiet. It looked like the IRA campaign had been driven into the dust. The Roy Mason [‘conveyor belt’] situation and all that – that the IRA were being defeated. Then gradually the IRA reorganised, especially in the North leading up to Warrenpoint [in August 1979]’.81 By the early 1980s the IRA in English prisons had perfected local organization and communications to the point that they were formulating policy documents for consideration by the Army Council and Ard Comhairle.

Parkhurst escape attempt, 24 February 1978

An IRA escape attempt from Parkhurst’s A Wing at 7.15 p.m. on 24 February 1978 revealed the strengths and weaknesses of the grouping at the time. In this instance, friendly relations built up over time between the republicans and black prisoners proved instrumental. Whereas the IRA cells were searched once or twice daily, Category B prisoners received far fewer checks for contraband.82 Compton Finnlader, a black South African, allowed the Irishmen to cut a hole through the planking of his cell floor and then breach the outer wall over a period of almost six months.83 While the IRA and Sinn Féin had close connections to the armed MK (Umkhonto we Sizwe) established by Nelson Mandela and the broader African National Congress to the extent of providing weapons training, direct assistance and specialist equipment, Finnlader was not imprisoned for political offences in England.84 Stanley knives were used to cut through the wooden floor of Finnlader’s cell, A4/ 30, where a cavity separated the bottom of the top-landing tier from the arched ceiling of the accommodation below. Andy Mulryan and Noel Gibson then worked on dislodging the brickwork of the wall. This painstaking methodology ensured that much less effort had to be made to conceal the progressive damage once the floor entryway was adequately disguised.85

Gibson was an exceptionally militant prisoner from the outset. Following arrest after the shooting of a plain-clothed policeman in Manchester on 1 July 1975, he was plunged into what he recalled as a ‘very emotive and charged atmosphere’, during which ‘everyone got a hiding. It was all part of the hysteria and excitement, and probably fear on their part as well’. His detention was not without incident: ‘When I was arrested I had two teeth knocked out, my nose was broken, I was hospitalized afterwards’.86 Walsh had been punished for attacking a staff member in Wormwood Scrubs on 26 June 1975, and then for joining two other IRA prisoners, Martin Coughlan and Stevie Blake, in a highly destructive roof-top protest on 14–15 November 1975. His BOV adjudication recorded the men had damaged ‘90 per cent of the roof tile on the east side of ‘D’ Hall and 100 per cent of the glass in the roof of the same wall’, in addition to considerable ancillary acts of sabotage. This entailed contravention of Rule 47 (11) as well as Rule 47 (7), (18) and (20).87 The London incidents pertained to the assertion of political status, whereas Walsh and his comrades intended to escape from Parkhurst.

Andy Mulryan, Sean Kinsella, Noel Gibson, John Higgins, Gerry Small and Roy Walsh were aided by Tony Madigan prior to his move to Albany.88 Madigan never set foot in Finnlader’s cell but assisted in the sewing of small bags from curtain material which were used to distribute the ‘rubbish and the rubble’.89 Other discrete preparations went undetected. Walsh persuaded an unconvinced UVF prisoner of the merits of doing him a ‘right favour’ by exchanging his A Wing cell for that of his own on B Wing.90 He otherwise could not participate. Gibson and Mulyran did much of the physical work on the basis that their known friendships with black prisoners provided cover for an otherwise suspicious presence on the top landing. Mulryan was compromised one day when an unexpected check of ‘bars, bolts and locks’ by prison staff trapped him in the cell. Although shirtless and sweating profusely from the labour, no comment was made.91 Gibson recalled: ‘Every night I went up there and chiselled out, worked on the things. Played music [to cover the noise]. After about two months, I got through to the last brick and we could see a little chink out. That was it’.92 Dirt and minor debris was scattered in the yard from the workshop-produced bags and the damage covered nightly by Finnlader’s numerous reggae music posters.93

The IRA men gathered in Finnlader’s cell on the evening of the bid with parts to assemble a twenty-foot ladder made from bolted Formica tabletops. It had been donated by a respected English gangster formerly associated with the Kray twins.94 The men also possessed ropes made from sheets and various items of useful paraphernalia. When the last few bricks were prised away, Walsh and Gibson descended the precarious thirty-foot drop to the ground. They were in the act of receiving the equipment needed to scale the walls from Mulryan when they were noticed by two alert warders who had braved heavy rain to mount a night patrol.95 A prisoner lookout positioned at the far end of the wing had not seen the staff members return towards the busy exit point.96 Walsh, a renowned fighter, spotted the prison officers radioing for assistance while staring transfixed at the extended knotted sheet rope, realised that physical resistance was futile. Within seconds ‘alarms [were] ringing everywhere. We were outside the building and the [inner] fence was about twenty yards away’. The plan had been to climb the two fences, and lacking outside harbourers and transport away from the island, to simply ‘hope for the best’. The men believed the fence line was not properly alarmed and that external help could have made the high-risk effort a viable prospect. As matters stood, ‘bad luck’ doomed it to failure.97

All aspirant escapers still inside the building managed to get away from the scene of the wall breach and avoided detection. They were surprised to be neither punished nor moved, a strong indication that informers on the wing had remained silent if not oblivious. Speculation that men were waiting to assist the group if they got over the exterior wall was not confirmed.98 Walsh and Gibson were seized in the open and punished with eighty-six days in solitary and were placed on the ‘E[scape] List’. Finnlader’s selfless aid to the republicans resulted in fifty-six days in solitary confinement and the loss of six months, remission.99 The Prison Department was undoubtedly relieved that the IRA men had been contained, not least in that it maintained its impressive record of just three Category A absconders between 1975 and 1978.100 Walsh was held in Wormwood Scrubs until 6 September 1979, followed by a month in solitary in Wandsworth before being shifted to Hull where deleterious ‘conditions’ induced him to refuse family visitors.101

Shane Paul O’Doherty

Shane Paul O’Doherty had been regarded as vulnerable prior to his transfer until he ended his blanket protest in solitary and was moved into D Wing of Wormwood Scrubs in November 1977. D Wing was the maximum-security part of the large London complex, parts of which dated from 1874. By February 1978, the Derryman, a close friend of Martin McGuinness, was a potentially problematic prisoner due to his public distancing from the Republican Movement. His refusal to wear prison uniform had been intended to secure repatriation to the Six Counties and succeeded in attracting the notice of concerned liberals.102 This evinced militancy. Contact with John Hume, MP for Derry and a leader of the SDLP, proved encouraging, although he was one of very few Irish politicians closely involved in backing O’Doherty. Bishop Edward Daly of Derry and Lord Longford supported his position, as did British Labour MPs Andrew Bennett and Philip Whitehead.103 He was persuaded that the Home Office would not relent on repatriation if it appeared that they had acceded to pressure exerted by the ‘blanket’ protest. Accordingly, O’Doherty abandoned his campaign in November 1977 ‘after fourteen months naked in solitary’ to give his influential supporters room to manoeuvre.104 This resulted in his relocation to D Wing of Wormwood Scrubs where, for the first time, he was in a position to interact regularly with other IRA prisoners such as Belfast gunrunner Jimmy Kelly.105

O’Doherty’s major break from the IRA ranks dated from 17 February 1978 when a letter originally intended for Republican News appeared on the front page of the Derry Journal. The smuggled communication had been passed by a family member to a senior republican in Derry and elicited a message that the Belfast-produced republican organ required deletions. The prospect of censorship aggrieved O’Doherty, who turned to Derry’s main newspaper in the hope that an unexpurgated version would be published in the letters column. He was taken aback when it received the prominence of a lead story, although he must have realized that life-sentenced IRA prisoners in any jurisdiction rarely aired such controversial issues in public.106 The letter caused a minor sensation and its contents were widely reported in the Irish and British media.107 His basic argument was that revolutionary socialism was incompatible with Christian morality on the grounds that it tended to create a totalitarian political environment. This view would have been contested by contemporary republicans, but any critical analysis attributed to an IRA ‘lifer’ could not be dismissed out of hand. Editorial comment added by the Derry Journal presented the communication as a repudiation of the argument that the conflict was a ‘just war’ under theological definitions devised by the Christian and specifically Catholic tradition. O’Doherty’s experience was cited in order to assert that political violence was ‘not justifiable’.108 As an avowedly pluralist and secular organization with numerous non-Catholic members, the IRA was uninterested in the moral status of its campaign within the Vatican, but published commentaries, which strengthened the analysis of the SDLP at the expense of Sinn Féin, were clearly unwelcome. The Derryman would have been viewed in some quarters as undermining comrades by disseminating such an important unilateral statement. This would have been a more daunting prospect in Portlaoise and the H-Blocks, where republican command structures would have militated against a solo run.

In the short term, O’Doherty faced the possibility of a backlash from fellow IRA prisoners in England. He claimed that some ostracized and ‘verged on wanting to beat me up for speaking my mind’, although other ‘more broadminded’ individuals offered unconditional support.109 The unsympathetic Prisoners Aid Committee (PAC) speculated that O’Doherty acted when ‘suffering from the psychological effects which inevitably follow upon prolonged isolation’ and had been adversely influenced by ‘pacifist Lord Longford’.110 In retrospect, the Derryman believed that the negative response from Irish comrades was a by-product of the enhanced importance and perception of ‘solidarity’ among the political prisoners in England.111 When moved to Maghaberry, County Antrim, in September 1985, he perceived a greater degree of tolerance for his perspective, albeit within a prison regime designed to undermine paramilitary authority. However, it is extremely unlikely that he would have been allowed to remain on a republican landing of Portlaoise or an IRA-controlled prison environment in Crumlin Road and Long Kesh in 1978. Prisoners in England generally had far more freedom of association and routine than under the formal O/C arrangements maintained in Ireland. Among those he may have presumed to be hostile were men who believed that he had refused to enter into dialogue.112

The ‘Blanket Protest’

The shifting context of the Irish situation changed the relative significance of the prison struggle in England. The mounting severity of the Blanket Protest in the H-Blocks in the early months of 1978 competed for the limited resources available to pro-republican advocates in Ireland and Britain. A case in point was the London meeting convened in Conway Hall on 3 March 1978 which highlighted the demand for ‘Prisoner of War Status’. The focus was very much on Belfast as opposed to Parkhurst, and the gathering was similar to those held by the new Relatives Action Committee in Limerick and elsewhere. The Irish bias was logical given that ‘special category’ had been expressly removed to undermine republican cohesion in the Six Counties. This had resulted in a gruelling, widespread protest. Prisoner groups organized by Sinn Féin Headquarters in Dublin, not least the RAC of Belfast, sought publicity in England for the parallel protests in the North of Ireland.113 Belfast RAC drew strength from precursor and kindred groupings, and Andersonstown founding member Leo Wilson had belonged at various times to the Citizen Defence Committees, the Association for Legal Justice and later the National H-Block/ Armagh Committee.114 Linked events included the picketing of newspaper offices on Fleet Street, London, by twelve blanket-clad women on 1 March and a public meeting in the House of Commons. Many London-based personalities of the prisoner campaign participated in the Conway Hall evening, including Sr. Sarah Clarke, Jim Reilly, Jackie Kaye and progressive Labour politician Ken Livingstone.115 The International Marxist Group and Socialist Workers Party were prominent in the London gathering yet were criticized by Kaye and Reilly for their ‘failure … to support Republican prisoners in England’.116 Generally, the strategy of the PAC Central Committee was to ‘maintain friendly relations with all anti-imperialist groups and to co-operate with them wherever possible in the mutual struggle against repression’.117 The lack of rigid alliances provided room for criticism of policies and tactics within the groupings.

Tensions between the PAC and elements of Sinn Féin in London, partly due to uncoordinated fundraising arrangements, had calmed since a flare up in the early months of 1977. ‘Official’ Sinn Féin, which had recently added the suffix ‘The Workers’ Party’ to its title as part of an ambitious process of reinvention, commented on the matter in their Eolas newsletter. The Official Republican Movement had a vestigial interest in the fortunes of the PAC given that the group had emerged from its Clann na hÉireann affiliate in England. ‘Official’ Sinn Féin claimed that An Cumann Cabhrach in London had complained that An Phoblacht editor Gerry O’Hare and ‘Provisional’ Sinn Féin in general was overly supportive of Kaye and the PAC.118 O’Hare, a man with a Peoples Democracy background, was described as an ‘ultra-left’ activist in the same edition of Eolas, which promoted the impression that the Provisionals were politically incoherent and riven with dissension.119 While there were indeed divergences on strategic direction between the PAC and Sinn Féin in England, the key bone of contention in London in 1977–78 centred on money-raising for prisoners in a small pool of city locations. An Cumann Cabhrach relied upon such venues to fulfil its obligations of providing welfare support to the families of imprisoned republicans. The Official Republican Movement, which retained an armed existence for fundraising and feuding into the 1980s despite its nominal 1972 ‘ceasefire’, underplayed its commitment to imprisoned adherents compared to Sinn Féin and the IRSP.120

Sinn Féin in England was increasingly preoccupied with the political status campaign in Ireland. A planning meeting in London on 19 February 1978 preceded the 26 March Easter Sunday parade from Marble Arch to Kilburn Square. Advance publicity stated: ‘This year … the commemoration will have added significance. There is a growing campaign in Ireland demanding Prisoner of War status for all Republican prisoners and an end to the torture of prisoners in Long Kesh, Crumlin Road and Armagh prisons’.121 Sinn Féin (Britain) recognized that it would have to take the lead and that its role in the UK was to harness, as far as possible, ‘the revolutionary left and Irish prisoners groups’.122 Given the fractured nature of UK jurisdictions and its weak constitutional framework, Sinn Féin was essentially lobbying for reforms which, if granted by Westminster, would not automatically apply to imprisoned IRA personnel in England and Scotland.

There were limits to what could be achieved by an overstretched Sinn Féin, and the party’s efforts to build support in Britain were subject to well-orchestrated state obstruction. On 5 April republican strategist Jim Gibney was held in Manchester for the full seven days permitted by the PTA on travelling to address a National Union of Students conference. He was duly issued with an Exclusion Order which effectively nullified his contribution to any England-centred campaign.123 When the United Troops Out Movement conference met in Leeds on 22 April, Kaye’s speech on Irish prisoners in England competed for attention with an ultimately successful attempt to move a resolution pledging support for ‘the Republican Movement in the Irish Freedom Struggle’.124 UTOM comprised a breakaway from the original TOM with whom it differed in July 1977 on the primacy of ‘armed struggle’ vis à vis mobilizing the British public on the Irish question. British radicals in the late 1970s were stressed by the dilemma of urging an immediate, unilateral military withdrawal rather than pressing first for a Bill of Rights and other forms of legislation designed to promote parity between the two political traditions in the Six Counties.125 TOM had raised consciousness in Britain regarding the human price being paid by the military in the early-to-mid 1970s. Founder member Aly Renwick believed this informed the ‘Ulsterization’ strategy: ‘There was a period when they were at their wits end about what they were going to do about the North. They were quite close to going for withdrawal’.126

The 1978 Easter Sunday rally in Kilburn had created a platform for the PAC and Sinn Féin to canvas allied left wing groups. This was followed up by a 5 May PAC meeting in the NUFTO Hall, London, to address a two point agenda: ‘Prisoner of War status for all Irish political prisoners within the terms of the Geneva Convention and amnesty within the context of British withdrawal from Ireland’. Kaye chaired on behalf of the PAC and Jim Reilly of Sinn Féin (Britain) gave the main oration. The date selected for the event, the birthday of Karl Marx, was intended to honour his role, along with Friedrich Engels, in campaigning on behalf of Fenian prisoners imprisoned in Britain from the 1860s. The PAC had previously commemorated Marx, and the gesture was an example of the anti-imperialist dimension of the prisoner controversy in England.127 Dozens of organizations and individuals had been invited to send messages of support and the meeting received statements from the IRA PROs of Parkhurst, Long Lartin, Gartree and Albany.128 The message from Albany had been smuggled out of the Punishment Block where several IRA prisoners had been confined since 25 April 1978 when, according to the Prison Department, ‘a group of Republican prisoners refused to go to work when ordered to do so’ in order to protest visiting arrangements.129 The statement, with input from Eddie O’Neill and Ray McLaughlin, was substantial and militant in its rhetoric:

Revolutionary greeting to all Comrades gathered here to expose the crimes of British imperialism in Ireland. We urge all socialist comrades in Britain to show solidarity with the Irish revolution and to wake up to the fact that a victory for socialism in Ireland is a victory for socialism everywhere ... From our attempts to politicize British prisoners we realise the difficulty of your task. We have made progress through our examples of solidarity and undying hatred of the prison system. The prison regime attempts to make psychological cabbages out of Republican and socialist prisoners but it will never succeed. The carrot of parole holds no attractions for Republican socialists. They cannot buy us so they will never control us. This message comes from the block in Albany prison. We are down here as a protest over the apartheid-style visits given to Republican socialists and to innocent Irish framed for Republican operations. We are not only [Category] ‘A’ prisoners but we are segregated from other prisoners. We are unable to embrace our wives or girlfriends, our mothers and fathers … Victory will come through solidarity combined with positive action.130

While Amnesty International did not regard the IRA as ‘prisoners of conscience’, the organization had been critical of Britain for its harsh interrogation of prisoners in the Castlereagh Centre, and this lent credence to similar and well-founded allegations in respect of the H-Blocks and England.131 The 5 May event in London, and another in Manchester on 26 May, fostered common ground between the Revolutionary Communist Group (RCG) and PAC on the wider question of political status.132 From December 1976, the RCG paper Hands off Ireland! was one of the most focused publications emanating from the British left on the conflict and a strong proponent of the contentious ‘troops out now’ position.133 TOM was divided on absolute demands for an immediate British military withdrawal from Ireland for fear of unleashing uncontrollable forces, a proposal vigorously opposed by Gerry Fitt of the SDLP, Garret FitzGerald of Fine Gael, and other anti-republican moderates.134 Two promising joint meetings held in May 1978 were interspersed by a third in London in which the Roger Casement Cumann of Sinn Féin unfurled its ‘first H-Block banner’. This debut, and the significance ascribed to it by its creators, illustrated the mounting preoccupation of the party structures in England with Long Kesh.135 In a telling development, the numerically small PAC formed a ‘Prisoners in Ireland’ sub-committee to concentrate on campaigning for republicans in the two Irish jurisdictions.136

As before, the most powerful and well-resourced organization of the British Left, the CPGB, refused to be drawn into a declaration of solidarity. The Stalinist CPGB remained wedded to a de facto policy of following the lead of communist affiliates in the North of Ireland, a body with disproportionate input from persons drawn from the Unionist as well as sectarian Loyalist community. This produced a glaring paradox whereby the CPGB voiced support for international leftist revolutionary organizations in Continental Europe, Africa and Asia, while condemning the closest equivalent within the UK and Ireland. Moreover, the stance of British communists necessitated ignoring Moscow’s general opposition to allied front groups backing sub-national elements. Irish communists were by no means immune to such tensions, and the far left was badly factionalised in the 1970s, not least by the ‘Two Nations’ tendency promoted by British Irish Communist Organization (BICO), which critics contended had conferred a degree of political legitimacy on a hardline Unionist position.137 Individual communists and far left trade unionists, however, were sympathetic towards Irish republicans. Although a well-known Spanish Civil War veteran turned his back on Eddie Caughey at a funeral in Burton-On-Trent, he obtained legal assistance for his imprisoned republican son from a CPGB union official.138

The studied and damaging detachment of the CPGB from the ‘Irish Question’ resulted in the PAC picketing their offices in King Street, London, on 16 June 1978.139 The SWP, NCCL and Connolly Association were also criticized for their perceived failure to rally behind the PAC/ Sinn Féin driven campaign on political status and amnesty.140 The Labour Party, similarly, was generally indisposed to back radical proposals from its TOM membership. This reflected sensitivity on the block votes cast by several craft and engineering unions which supported the minority opinion of their Unionist membership in Ireland. This position shifted towards a more pro-Irish Labour Party stance in late 1981 in the aftermath of the H-Block hunger strike.141 Amnesty International, frequently criticized by Irish republicans for their silence on the maltreatment of political prisoners in England, published findings on torture in the North of Ireland in June 1978 after a seven-month investigation.142 Shocking reports of the ‘blanket protest’ in the H-Blocks, and the severity of interrogations in Castlereagh distracted English radicals from the local brutalities of the Dispersal System, but even this sense of exigency failed to stimulate left wing unity in Ireland. New ‘H-Block Committees’ in Oxford and elsewhere in Britain, and a dedicated TOM demonstration in London against the Castlereagh abuses represented further, if logical, redirection of English political energy towards problems in Ireland.143

British counter-insurgents, meanwhile, gradually substituted the crude psychological and physical methods used in Castlereagh to extract ‘confessions’ with ‘supergrasses’ whose unsupported testimony was used to convict scores in the juryless Diplock Courts.144 The Brehon Law Society of New York, an organization comprising Irish-American and humanitarian practitioners of the legal profession on the East Coast of the USA, described the new Diplock proceedings that matured in the early 1980s as ‘show trials’.145 The allusion to Stalinist-era extremity in the Soviet Union’s legal system was intentional and geared towards aggravating socially conservative Irish-Americans. The tactical use of informers and agents in court, surprisingly, was never utilized against the IRA in Britain, possibly owing to attention it would have brought to bear on the conduct of certain jury trials and the statutory requirement to air ‘accomplice evidence’ in front of a civilian panel. Commitment to the jury tradition, as the numerous miscarriage of justice cases affirmed in the 1990s, provided no guarantee of fair or appropriate verdicts in trials where forensic evidence was vitiated. There were, moreover, no IRA prisoners in England willing to compromise in such a manner in the 1980s.146

The Campbell case at Strasbourg

The European Commission of Human Rights on 9 May 1978 decided to admit the test case taken by Sean Campbell alleging breaches of the European Convention by the British authorities in relation to Irish prisoners in England. The breakthrough signalled that the Commission in Strasbourg believed there was a prima facie breach of Article Six arising from the refusal of the Home Office to permit Campbell to consult with his lawyers between October 1976 and March 1977. This essentially reasserted the Golder v UK (1975: 1 ECHR, 524) judgement of February 1975. Another element of the complaint focused on the conduct of the Board of Visitors who had punished the Tyrone man with solitary confinement and loss of remission. However, this potentially significant advance was tempered by the failure of the Commission to accept claims from Campbell and others that Article Three had been breached by the violence inflicted by staff on the Albany prisoners.147 The case was still under consideration in March 1982 when Campbell was released and deported, having served all but a few months of his full sentence.148 Prisoners could petition the Home Secretary for restoration of forfeited remission under Prison Rule 56 (2), but IRA members rarely pursued this theoretical option. Campbell evidently did not elicit the support of the various adjudicating bodies who had imposed sanctions and who enjoyed in doing so the capacity to make restoration under Order 42 (a) of Prison Standing Orders (1977). This directed: ‘Where a prisoner’s institutional behaviour has shown a significant improvement, indicative of a genuine change of attitude (as opposed to staying out of trouble), and the improvement is likely to be maintained, a governor or Board of Visitors, depending upon which adjudicating authority originally awarded the forfeiture of remission, may restore part of the remission a prisoner is forfeited if restoration will bring forward the earliest date of release’.149

Movement in Strasbourg revived the waning issue of Irish prisoners in England. The Times of London observed that the presence of over 100 persons regarded as IRA personnel in the Dispersal System had exacerbated pressures arising from overcrowding.150 In January 1978, the official tally of those ‘connected with the IRA’ was ninety, of whom seventy-eight were Category A. There were fifteen Loyalists of whom six were Category A.151 The Home Office acknowledged the general problem when pressed by the Irish Times, and a spokesman honestly conceded that the IRA ‘obviously caused additional strain on prisons and prison officers’.152 Given the comparatively small numbers involved, the real difficulty was posed by the perceived necessity of applying labour intensive restrictions which collaterally stressed long-term prisoners accommodated in England’s maximum security wings by virtue of disproportionate resource allocation. Such men were on occasion discommoded by being obliged to share the lot of the Irish militants in their midst or, more typically, granted more consideration than IRA members sharing the Category A designation. The presence of republican women in H-Wing, Durham, warped the experience of all those contained in the annexe and it could not be concealed from informed parties that the administration of IRA prisoners had displaced many of the most dangerous men in Britain from the SSUs. This unusual admission of Irish exceptionalism in London came very close to conceding the consistently denied existence of political prisoners. Relating republican ‘behaviour’ to their typically long sentences, and supposed enmity with other prisoners, obscured the characteristic dynamic of political assertion and culture of resistance fostered in the IRA cadres. The airing of such matters, however guardedly, coincided with a bid by Hull prison officers, articulated by Kenneth Daniel of the POA, to register their objection with the Home Office to suspension of members due for trial arising from the 1976 riot.153

An Anti-Repression Conference convened by Capuchin Fr. Piaras Ó Duill in Dublin on 19–21 May 1978 attracted numerous activists engaged with the political prisoner question in Ireland. Belgian, French and Basque legal experts formed part of a panel of inquiry which convened in Liberty Hall, Dublin.154 They received reports from various expert contributors, including solicitor Alastair Logan and Jackie Kaye of the PAC, who addressed the situation in England. It was claimed that the panel ‘found the plight of Irish political prisoners in England most disturbing … they are discriminated against in a racist fashion, beatings and solitary confinement being the usual punitive measures’.155 Young Derry republican Micheal MacLochlainn, who had been held in four English prisons prior to 23 December 1977, contributed a statement in which he described the collusion between criminals and Brixton staff in the potentially fatal attack on Eddie O’Neill with boiling water in November 1974.156 The conference was informed that there were eighty-five such prisoners, of whom all but three were classified as Category A. This number compared to the 300 republicans involved in protests in Crumlin Road, Armagh and Long Kesh.157

Government-level interest in the management of imprisonment in the EEC was manifested by the publication in 1978 of Treatment of Long Term Prisoners by the European Committee on Crime Problems. Penological research commissioned by a subcommittee of the Council of Europe examined six countries. The study incorporated Home Office-aided research on 215 inmates within English prisons and included a seminar hosted in Wakefield. When reviewing the publication for the Prison Service Journal, J Williams, Governor of Long Lartin, concluded that it contained ‘no startling new theories or propositions’.158 Project psychiatrist, Dr. Sluga, concluded that men who had served four to six years of long sentences under conditions of isolation were prone to ‘functional psycho-syndrome’. Symptoms included emotional and cognitive disturbance, infantile regression and difficulties in social interaction. Williams, however, noted the findings of psychologist Professor Smith in the English Dispersal System, where ‘general deterioration’ was not as strongly in evidence as might have been expected, although hostility towards the self was a major issue. The reviewer emphasised the positive conclusion that severe mental health threats were neither inevitable nor irreversible. Williams, moreover, stressed that ‘Resolution 76 (2) on the treatment of long term prisoners’, endorsed by the Council of Ministers in February 1976, recognized the practical difficulties of implementing certain reforms and the rights of individual prison regimes to reject recommendations they deemed inappropriate. The tone and content of the Williams review would have reassured his Home Office employers in that it downplayed the relevance of many potentially disturbing factors. It also indicated that the Dispersal System was in no danger of being exposed to serious criticism.159 Other international physiatrists differed on this key mental health point and reiterated contrary findings well into the 1980s and 1990s.160

Re-organization and resistance, February-July 1978

IRA prisoners in England appreciated in 1978 that their perspective on the armed struggle and specific interests were in danger of being occluded by the extremity of the conflict in Ireland and the mounting seriousness of the crisis in Long Kesh. Many had friends, associates and relatives enduring the grim and deteriorating ‘blanket protest’.161 April had witnessed the escalation to a ‘no wash’ protest in Long Kesh, during which prisoners incapable of removing bodily waste from their cells in the conventional manner of ‘slopping out’ began spreading it on the walls.162 Billy Armstrong communicated from Wakefield: ‘All my comrades both in this prison and the other prisons [in England] … are right behind them all the way, no matter what the consequences that might befall us’. This hinted that actions would follow, a threat which the IRA were more capable of delivering in 1978 than at any time since 1969.163 Martin Brady claimed:

We worked as a group – if one went down to the block we all went down to the block. We made sure they had company … They wouldn’t drive you crazy in solitary when you were downstairs … As our prisoners were coming in they were becoming more educated. Looking at our rights in jail, our human rights, fellows sat down over the years, passed tests … They seen we were educated and we were using the system for our own advantage … So we started building friendships with the gangsters and the robbers. We got on with them. Ninety per cent of them got on with us. They were good towards us … You got the odd screws that upped the tempo, to stir up trouble.164

His co-accused, Armstrong, noted: ‘There were two sorts of screws: the ones who were frightened of you, and the ones that pretended to like you. But at the end of the day they bottled out from fear that you would kill one of them before they got to you. The screws often set us up for other prisoners, but at the end of the day they hadn’t really the bottle for it’.165 Leading IRA member Brian Keenan reflected:

The screws were in no doubt that the IRA people, if it was necessary, wouldn’t hesitate to kill them, and I think that that type of common position had been created over a long period of time with IRA prisoners. And the screws knew how far they could go with this and by and large we just got on with our time and the only priorities we ever had were our families and escape attempts. Outside of that you just done time in the best you could.’166

Increasingly, prisoners utilized their growing numbers in English jails to form loose groupings represented by a PRO. Isolation in the Dispersal System, a comparatively minor numerical presence on the wings, and detachment from command structures in Ireland negated the functionality of an appointed O/C. Moreover, the very factors that militated against the selection of O/Cs ensured that the Governors could readily deny prospective leaders the mobility they needed to adequately function. Republicans in English prisons devised more reliable means of communication between each other and the outside world. This enabled the men to marshal their new strengths and experience towards significant, co-ordinated action.

The first major statement highlighted by the Republican Movement in 1978 originated in Wakefield in February. Irish prisoners alleged a ‘high level conspiracy by the Governor and his goons to ill-treat and intimidate the POWs’ and named ‘Big’ Mick Murray, Jimmy Ashe, Paul Norney and Billy Armstrong as having been ‘placed in the control unit for various periods of time’. The claim that the Control Unit remained in operation contradicted Government assertions that it had been closed in 1974. The IRA insisted ‘the only thing that had changed was its name, as they use the control unit as the [punishment] block and it is regarded by the screws as a place in which prisoners are broken … using sensory deprivation methods’.167 Immediate concerns were expressed for Norney who was then spending twenty-three hours a day in his cell and isolated during the remaining hour from other prisoners.168 His stay in the wing was extended by seven days when he defied his captors by running rather than walking around the small outside enclosure where he was permitted fresh air for up to one hour a day.169 The message contained an allusion to what had happened in Albany in 1976 and communicated the view that ‘all this harassment is to provoke us into taking some form of action’. Needling by the authorities placed the IRA in a quandary in that a mistimed unilateral protest could incite further repression and demoralization. Failing to act, however, risked giving the impression of conformity and weakness. Consequently, the February statement insisted: ‘We will take our stand when we are ready, not when the screws want to set us up’.170 Having outlined the short term issues in play at Wakefield, the prisoners solicited support for the ‘war for national liberation’ as ‘the best way’ to support political prisoners.171

The IRA PRO in Parkhurst published a greeting in Republican News in March 1978 which praised ‘revolutionary … and all those other prisoners at Parkhurst … without whose wonderful help the recent escape attempt would not have been possible’.172 This sincere, if somewhat inflammatory, statement testified to the existence of a small political cadre in the prison which claimed a role for itself within and without the Dispersal System. The propaganda potential of reaching a republican readership was clearly evident. Similarly, the Albany PRO drafted a letter in April which analysed the recent Workers’ Party/ Republican Clubs Ard Fheis. The ‘Officials’ were taken to task for claiming the mantle of 1916 Irish Citizen Army icon James Connolly whilst ‘feuding with progressive socialist groups and taking part in colonial run elections’.173 This referenced the violent struggle between the Official IRA and emergent INLA and IRSP which had claimed the life of Seamus Costello on 5 October 1977.174 Costello had been shot dead in Dublin by ex-England Official IRA prisoner Jim Flynn. Collective action permitted individual assertion and Fr. Pat Fell published a personal tribute to the assassinated Marie Drumm, shot in the Mater Hospital, Belfast by British-backed Loyalists on 28 October 1976.175 Criticizing opponents and praising comrades was very much the standard discourse of Sinn Féin cummain in Britain and Ireland. While such communications regularly emerged from Long Kesh, Portlaoise and Armagh, the input from England represented a bid for inclusion in the totality of prisoner affairs. Politically minded IRA men such as Eddie O’Neill, Ray McLaughlin, Gerry Cunningham, Paul Holmes, Ronnie McCartney, Joe O’Connell, Vince Donnelly, Tony Cunningham, Sean Campbell, Kevin Dunphy, Tony Madigan and Busty Cunningham were not easily excluded.176

Visits to Albany were disrupted in February 1978 when staff contacted Irish families at short notice to cancel their pre-booked Visiting Orders. Only two Irish prisoners were permitted to have simultaneous visits, and staff employed what Sr. Clarke termed ‘a new trick’ in which they interrupted sessions, claiming that the space was required for another family who would otherwise forfeit their slot.177 The IRA men conferred in mid-February when the Board of Visitors refused to compromise on the running of ‘closed’ visits, but could not decide on a specific plan of action. Three voted for a roof top occupation and four for non-cooperation. IRA prisoners in Ireland generally followed the direction of an O/C who was advised by an Adjutant and Intelligence Officer and, at times, the external leadership. Republicans in Albany commenced a policy of ‘non-cooperation’ with prison staff in early April when ‘visiting and other conditions seriously worsened’.178 This was unusual in that April 1978 witnessed the announcement of a Civil Service Pay Settlement that ended staff protests.179

Recourse to a more concerted protest followed the failure of a formal overture by Ray McLaughlin, via his solicitor Alastair Logan and Joan Maynard MP, to the House of Commons. Maynard’s question on visits at Albany and the Dispersal System elicited the disingenuous claim from the Home Office that the IRA were not subject to discrimination. Home Office denials and Board of Visitor intransigence set the scene for a confrontation.180 Indeed, Maynard’s methodical probing of the Home Office in June 1978 had revealed that Category A IRA prisoners were obliged to accept untypical visiting conditions explained in vague terms of ‘security reasons’.181 Logan revealed that the main proposal by Governor Lister to defuse the situation in April was to remove one of the two wall-to-wall tables from the unsuitable space provided to enable visitors to embrace their relatives. The result was the repositioning of two staff members who usually sat in the corridor inside the small room when in use.182 McLaughlin apprised Logan that in addition to a loitering female ‘matron’ or WPC, ‘there are still at least four security employees listening in on every visit, two of these sit about three feet behind the prisoner and the other two behind the visitor’.183

This supposedly irenic-minded adjustment was deemed unsatisfactory by prisoners, especially when it was balanced by a new policy of strip-searching before and after sessions. According to Logan:

It is making it impossible for visits to take place. The Governor knows full well that the individuals concerned will not voluntarily submit to a strip search. Strip searching is normally only carried out accompanied by what is known as a “spin” when the prisoner’s cell is thoroughly searched by a team of Officers to find out if he have any unlawful material … If he is right and the prisoners decide not to accept visits under these conditions, he will have got over the problem which the visits have been causing by constant complaints.184

Lord Harris insisted on 11 July 1978 that this reform was ‘purely a security precaution and not, as the [George E Baker & Co] solicitors appear to be suggesting, a control or punishment measure’. Harris rejected calls to investigate what he believed to be baseless ‘allegations … that Irish Republican prisoners are discriminated against’.185 The FCO, which preferred questions on prison policy originating in the Irish Embassy to be redirected to the Home Office, viewed Maynard as ‘an active supporter of the “Troops Out Movement”’ and Logan as a solicitor who had ‘close connections with IRA prisoners in this country, and an active propagandist for them’.186

Refusing work in Albany entailed confinement in the Segregation Block for terms of fourteen to fifty-six days. All the republicans, baring the abstaining Fr. Pat Fell, and innocent ex-Official IRA man Sean Smyth, were confined in the Block by 25 April. On rejecting an invitation from the Governor to resume their ‘duties’ as normal after a twenty-four hour period of enforced reflection, the recalcitrant men were returned to cells set aside for the obdurate and disobedient.187 Tony Madigan favoured the option of taking to the roof, but the discovery of rope ladders in his cell, along with paint he intended to use to daub slogans once in situ, negated the plan: ‘The visits again were a bone of contention. The lads then said we’d all refuse work and again I disagreed … I thought you caused them more problems being up in the general population than you can be isolated in the Block. If you let them isolate you, you are not threatening them … We were down there for ten months’.188 Every effort was made to frustrate the efficient running of the unit by such means as banging doors, shouting, singing and making noise in contravention of regulations. This inspired English prisoners to join in and offer a united front of defiance to staff.189

Two focused bouts of agitation won a Derry criminal a light bulb in his cell and Busty Cunningham access to the weekly bath he was nominally permitted. Success, however, entailed repercussions from an establishment that could not be seen to weaken in the face of protesting prisoners. Beatings during future ‘lie downs’ were promised, and the core of the IRA group was disrupted by swopping Eddie O’Neill for Tipp Guilfoyle in Gartree, and Ray McLaughlin for Stephen Blake in Wakefield.190 Once delivered, Guilfoyle declined to wear prison uniform in Albany and spent fifteen months in segregation in consequence.191 Blake was initially located on a standard wing but became embroiled in a ‘fracas’ when he refused the demeaning job of sewing uniforms.192 Madigan did not believe much had been achieved in the Block by what he termed the ‘Terence MacSwiney Syndrome’, whereby republicans sought moral victory by endurance and self-sacrifice rather than mere infliction. The question of stepping up resistance by means of sabotage, however, had been raised as an alternate strategy.193

The May 1978 statement released by the Albany men to the Sinn Féin/ PAC Karl Marx commemoration in London evidenced their appreciation of the utility of political propaganda. A constant stream of publicity from the jails was necessary to ensure the refreshment and wide dissemination of the republican message. Rallies, commemorations and marches organized by their allies in England created regular audiences for communications addressing a wide range of topics. Latitude from Headquarters was in evidence given that General Order No 2 (c) of the IRA Constitution prohibited Volunteers from ‘promoting communist or capitalist literature’, and open identification with Marxist figureheads met with disapproval in traditional republican heartlands.194 GHQ and Sinn Féin Head Office understood that the political dynamic in England warranted a more ecumenical approach to republican assertion. Accordingly, ‘comrades’ at liberty in Britain were exhorted by the Albany prisoners to combine street agitation with educational work in order to advance the universal socialist agenda. Contemporary matters of specific and urgent concern within the Dispersal System were generally raised in such expansive addresses.195

Gartree’s IRA PRO published a notice in June 1978 which alleged that privileges were being extended to Loyalist prisoners beyond those normally available to Category A men. The Leicestershire prison had a strong cohort of republicans in the summer of 1978 which included Phil Sheridan, Eddie O’Neill, Martin Brady, Peter Short, Brian (aka Donal) McLaughlin, Paul Holmes, Jerry Mealy, Ronnie McCartney, John McCluskey and Paul Hill. Whereas the innocent Hill was included in the ‘Republican POW’ company due to his many acts of solidarity, IRA member Michael Sheehan was listed as simply an ‘other Irish political prisoner’ along with the wrongly convicted Pat Maguire and Gerry Hunter.196 Rolls were often inaccurate due to the constant shifting of Category A men and were open to misinterpretation. Although present in the jail, Brady had spent virtually all his time in segregation due to punishments imposed for the Hull Riot.197 Hill had also been subjected to lie-downs in Armley and a fractious induction to Gartree, where he spent three days in the ‘strong box’ for insisting that a razor found in his cell was not his own property.198

Brian McLaughlin hailed from the Claudy area of north County Derry and was jailed in October 1976 for conspiracy to cause explosions in Birmingham with the Pat Christie-led grouping of Peter Toal, David Owen and Mick Reilly.199 The men were among those who assumed prime responsibility for the Midlands sector following the arrest of the experienced IRA cluster headed by Dublin’s Martin Coughlan in November 1974. Republicans were reserved in detailing McLaughlin’s political background, which, according to printed sources after his release on 7 July 1982, stemmed from the experience of being attacked by the Parachute Regiment in Derry city on 30 January 1972. He had ran past Rossville flats on ‘Bloody Sunday’ when an unarmed man at his side was one of fourteen mortally wounded by British soldiers. According to McLaughlin: ‘That was the turning point for me … From that moment on I realised there was only one answer to British violence and occupation-unconditional British withdrawal’. A year on remand in Winson Green, Birmingham, was followed by temporary incarceration in Liverpool ahead of allocation to Gartree where other Irish republicans were held.200

The Gartree spokesman highlighted the fact that two of the four Loyalists were given assignments as trustees despite being Category A prisoners. One, John Gadd, worked as an assistant to a Church of England chaplain and was accused of having viewed files pertaining to the IRA prisoners. Another, Harry James, cleaned the special visiting area set aside for the republicans and was deemed to pose a risk to the well-being of their relatives by virtue of being present when they arrived. Sammy Carson, serving fifteen years for attempting a no - warning bomb attack on ‘Biddy Mulligan’s’ pub in Kilburn on 20 December 1975 received the prized job of wing orderly and, according to the PRO, was permitted to take Open University classes and receive normal ‘open’ visits. The fourth Loyalist, Norman Skinner, was evidently not as well situated as his comrades but his relative lack of patronage, consideration or progression within the complex was typical of all republicans.201

The thrust of the republican argument was that Loyalists were treated as if they were classified as Category B and by virtue of receiving enviable conditions of employment in the jail, were seen as gifted opportunities to jeopardize the personal security of the IRA prisoners and their families. The IRA did not, however, advance specific allegations, and relations with Loyalists were far better than would have been the case in contemporary Crumlin Road prison. The disparity of work allocation substantiated republican allegations of being persecuted. The PRO was highly explicit when citing unfavourable comparisons between the privileges bestowed on Loyalists and their concurrent denial to republicans serving similar sentences for similar offences. Sheridan and Short were named as men who had been, for all intents and purposes, wronged by the Governor for failing to take account of their relatively short sentences.202 For most prisoners, the ongoing IRA campaigns in Ireland and England ensured that they were unlikely to be reclassified as Category B in the foreseeable future. The process of re-categorization, moreover, was secret, as a test case taken against the Home Office confirmed in May 1977.203 Justice Cantley, who presided at several major IRA trials, including that of Brendan Dowd, had made the negative ruling arising from a challenge by a man classified as Category A in 1968. Cantley upheld the right of the Home Office to prevent prisoners making ‘representations against their classification’ and the authority of staff to withhold pertinent information on file. The general lack of standardized policy regarding security classification was tackled by a Prison Department working party in 1981 without immediate impact.204

Questions posed by Joan Maynard in the Commons on 21 June 1978 revealed that two unidentified Loyalist prisoners had benefited from special, temporary and permanent transfer arrangements between 1974 and 1976.205 Home Secretary Merlyn Rees also divulged an extraordinary statistic when he confirmed that of eighty-four prisoners in England subject to having ‘visits in closely supervised conditions in the interests of security’, no less than seventy-one were ‘thought to have Republican links’. This represented a vast over-representation of IRA prisoners within the population, a fact played down by referencing ‘security’ fears to mask outright discrimination.206 Rees also detailed the manner in which furniture, partitions and staff positioning was used to create a ‘closely supervised’ visit in Wakefield. In June 1978, a mere thirteen non-IRA Category A prisoners were obliged to endure ‘closed’ visits in the entire maximum security network. This offered strong evidence that republicans were genuine in describing their real position in the Dispersal System as ‘Special Category A’, a term with no official Home Office recognition.207

It was also clearly relevant that no IRA prisoner qualified for short-term relocation in order to receive accumulated visits. The criteria for temporary transfers within the UK consisted of the agreement of the Home Secretary and Secretary of State for Northern Ireland. In Whitehall, the NIO assumed full responsibility for ‘permanent’ transfers.208 Only those born in the Six Counties or those who had spent ‘a very long time’ living there could be considered, and only then if the authorities were satisfied that suitable and secure accommodation was available. Those regarded as ‘badly behaved’ by a prison governor or persons deemed ‘likely’ to misbehave during transfer were ineligible. All applicants had to have served two years since allocation following sentence.209 The case of Billy Armstrong was specifically considered following private high-level representations from Joan Maynard and Martin Wright, who had attempted to enlist the aid of veteran progressive Lord Fenner Brockway. Lord Harris was ‘not persuaded’ that the Belfastman should be facilitated, ‘having regard to all the factors’.210 Wright’s commendation of the ‘adoption of Christian pacifism’ by Shane Paul O’Doherty, which he evidently interpreted as a positive sign of personal reformation, did not alter the equation.211 Wright, Director of the Howard League for Penal Reform, acknowledged the multiple negative provisos, as well as NIO claims of overcrowding, in his 16 May 1978 overture to Brockway. Wright assured Brockway that the ‘Howard League has no wish to become involved in the complexities of the Northern Ireland situation’ while urging that the five remaining ‘Belfast Ten’ prisoners in England should be repatriated. Sensing official objections, Wright argued that ‘humanitarian grounds’ pertained and implied the Home Office was being ‘unfair’.212 He later advised Sr. Clarke to consider legal proceedings in cases where IRA prisoners in England were being held ‘for long periods in special “cooling off” local cells’ for more than the maximum twenty-eight days.213

The Gartree statement also referenced the halt in the repatriation of IRA prisoners following the April 1975 movement of Hugh Feeney and Gerry Kelly and, in the context of more frequent facilitation of Loyalist prisoners, suggested that the special negotiated circumstances arising from the 1973–4 hunger strike had lapsed.214 It appeared as if the renewed fight for political status in Long Kesh encouraged pro-activity in England where, despite William Whitelaw’s misleading statement on ‘special category’ in the Commons in 1972, no comparable privileges had ever existed. The Home Office could be forgiven for viewing the airing of such points in Gartree as the mere reflexive and obvious declamations of Irish republicans. However, the newly assertive and aggressive tone of the message was soon manifested in terms that demanded attention, if not also redress. Those monitoring expressions of discontent by the IRA in Gartree knew that Tipp Guilfoyle and Martin Coughlan had been at the centre of controversies in 1977–8.215

Significantly, the Gartree protest was the most dramatic manifestation of an unprecedented and concerted effort to highlight grievances in English prisons. IRA prisoners in Albany, Long Lartin, Parkhurst, Wormwood Scrubs and Wakefield all participated in planned actions on 5–7 July 1978.216 Ironically, prison shifts authorised by the Home Office and implemented in the name of security assisted IRA strategizing in the advent of the protests. While no great motivation was required to spur the active engagement of republicans, the ghosting of particular prisoners spread and accentuated their sense of persecution. Lifer Vince Donnelly had been fasting in Long Lartin from 19 May to press his claim a line of work pursued by a number of his Tyrone-born siblings. His move to Wakefield on 4 June, however, reprised a trajectory which had fatal consequences for Frank Stagg in February 1976. This was viewed as a virtual death threat and served to harden rather than weaken resolve in the spatially fractured republican jail complement.217

The timing of the new strategy placed the Wakefield IRA men in a quandary as they were assembling a cache of escape equipment that was neither readily utilisable nor, in all probability, securable from discovery if major protests commenced. IRA comrades asked Donnelly upon arrival to abandon his hunger strike owing to such ‘other developments’. The jail contained Ray McLaughlin, Tony Clarke, Michael Reilly, Sean Hayes and the innocent Paddy Armstrong on C Wing. Paul Norney, Jimmy Ashe and Mick Murray were on D Wing while Joe Duffy (aka Michael/ Joe Mooney) and Billy Armstrong were on A Wing. Murray had just emerged from sixty days in F Wing for allegedly assaulting a prison officer whom he deemed had been unacceptably confrontational. The Dubliner had difficulty speaking after spending two months in silence.218 F Wing windows comprised eighteen three-inch square blocks of semi-opaque glass set two feet into the wall at a height of seven feet. Two sets of bars covered the interior of the window and a wire mesh its exterior.219

Much of the escape kit, including two ‘shank’ knives and lengths of roping made from cloth material, was discovered in the jail on 2 July. Six of the ten IRA prisoners were punished with one month’s loss of privileges and loss of pay. The search was inspired by the discovery of wax traces on a ‘pass key’ belonging to a Prison Officer who had been on holiday, a find of enormous significance in that the bearer of a complete key could move between different parts of the complex.220 On 3 July, Armstrong and Donnelly were ghosted to Strangeways and Reilly and Hayes to Armley, Leeds. Reilly’s wife and family had travelled that day from Birmingham to see him in Wakefield. Donnelly had recently been prevented from receiving a visit from Frank Maguire MP and thereby lost an opportunity to confer on the wider situation.221 McLaughlin and Clarke were sent to Durham. The other IRA men did what they could to participate in events they knew to be imminent, but their contribution was necessarily minimal due to close confinement. Murray was returned to F Wing where, despite an initial sentence of fifty-six days’ segregation, he was still held seventeen months later.222 Ashe and Norney, who was already in ‘patches’ due to his escape attempt from Wormwood Scrubs, remained in solitary.223 Donnelly, Hayes and Armstrong received their own E List designations arising from the incident.224 Visitors to republican prisoners in several jails on 5 July were informed that a co-ordinated protest was planned in support of political status, repatriation and improved visiting conditions. The demands were restated in a statement from the Gartree PRO in the aftermath of the protest.225 News from the prisons prompted the creation of an ad hoc Irish Political Prisoners Support Group to spearhead demonstrations in London. The anticipated incidents commenced that night in Albany when republicans vandalized cell furniture.226

On 6 July, IRA prisoners in Long Lartin, Wakefield, Wormwood Scrubs and Parkhurst refused meals, although it was evident despite this impressive co-ordination that no major hunger strike had been initiated.227 Seven prisoners in Albany, who were already being held in the Segregation Unit, aka ‘Punishment Block’, were charged with ‘smashing their cells’.228 This entailed throwing chamber pots into the corridor, breaking furniture and, in some cases, gouging plaster from the walls. Loyalist Alex Brown, one of the group who attempted to bomb ‘Biddy Mulligan’s’ pub, joined the IRA - led strike and was beaten by staff for this courageous act of identification.229 Subjected to further restrictions on access to sanitation, attendance at religious services and visits, the republicans progressed along a path of confrontation that resulted in a full blown ‘blanket protest’ in October.230 The Prison Department disdained the ‘demonstration’, which was officially regarded in a cold, decontextualized manner as a refusal ‘to use the normal sanitary facilities’ resulting in the fouling of the landing floor and several staff members. Those responsible were reported as ‘choosing not to wear prison clothes for part of the time’.231

While there was ongoing concern for those subjected to the F Wing regime, it was the ‘no wash’ of Long Kesh which inspired the selected mode and rhetoric of the 6 July fracas in the House of Commons. Two Socialist Worker’s Party activists threw bags of horse manure from the public gallery onto the MPs sitting below whilst shouting questions about conditions in Long Kesh. The business of Parliament halted while the benches were hastily cleaned and the splattered MPs refreshed.232 One of the protesters was Yana Mintoff, daughter of Maltese Prime Minister Dom Mintoff. The second was Irishman John MacSherry, who lived in London.233 Long Kesh and ‘solidarity with the H-Blocks’ was also the declared primary spur of IRA prisoner action in Gartee the following day.234

Gartree, 7 July 1978

The most serious Dispersal System incident occurred in Gartree where, on the morning of 7 July, Eddie O’Neill, Paul Holmes, Jerry Mealy, Ronnie McCartney, Phil Sheridan, Martin Brady, Brian McLaughlin and Paul Hill made it to the rooftop by the unconventional means of using John McCluskey as a human ladder.235 Aware that the staff expected something to occur, the chance to congregate in the yard and seize the initiative was not passed up. McCartney recalled: ‘We thought about the boys on the blanket and the women in Armagh … So the next day out on the yard we said: “Right, let’s hit the roof”’.236 Brady recalled: ‘McCluskey, a big giant … says, “I’ll push you up”’ and shoved the impressed Belfastman upwards ‘about twelve feet’.237 McCluskey, tall and powerfully built, boosted the others onto a low roof but could not follow before guard dogs approached at speed. O’Neill regretted that his ‘Uxbridge Eight’ co-accused had been ‘sacrificed’, but realised there was no other way of getting so many IRA men into position in the time available. McCluskey knew in theory how to neutralize trained guard dogs and was aware that a minor error in his unpractised technique would lead to a savaging. However, against all expectations, the trained dogs loosed on him were wary of approaching aggressively and he was not seriously hurt before being hauled off to segregation.238 Access to the upper roof of the prison services block was quickly gained from the lower level reached from the yard. Loyalist prisoner Sammy Carson, another ‘Mulligan’s Bar’ attempted pub bomber, tossed the republicans useful materials from his cell window.239 Banners and painted graffiti were displayed which referenced IRA demands for repatriation and political status, as well as affinity with the H-Block campaign.240 Slogans visible from the street stated ‘End H-BLOCK TORTURE’, ‘P.O.W. STATUS’, ‘SOLIDARITY’, ‘REPATRIATION’ and ‘H-BLOCK’.241 O’Neill had stitched a large Irish Tricolour together from three pieces of sheeting. This was held aloft by one of the protesters whilst showing the leftist revolutionary clenched fist. It was intended, from the outset, to remain on the roof until the London rally planned for 9 July had taken place. Two of the men donned blankets to visually bolster the connection with Long Kesh.242

Improved communications between the prisons and supporters ensured that the protests were backed up by the largest pro-Irish street demonstrations in several years. A sit down by a small group outside Buckingham Palace on 6 July led to four arrests when the women involved disrupted the ceremonies of the Household Cavalry.243 Other actions briefly impeded the first day of the hyped summer sales in Oxford Street, London while students protested in Edinburgh. The appearance of the four women in Bow Street Court on 7 July on charges relating to the Household Cavalry incident preceded an evening press conference in the House of Commons, convened by the new Irish Political Prisoners Support Group. Joan Maynard MP explained that the men were protesting their right to humane visiting conditions, political status and repatriation. She was assisted by Tom Litterick, MP for Birmingham (Selly Oak), one of several British parliamentarians refused permission to visit the H-Blocks.244 Alastair Logan supported Maynard’s accusation of the ill-treatment of Irish prisoners by reminding the audience that forty cases were pending at the European Commission on Human Rights. He specified the harassment endured by relatives of prisoners who travelled to England.245 Pro-Irish republicans in the US avidly followed such developments.246

The Gartree incident and subsequent discussion in the Commons attracted rare front page coverage from the Times. It was accepted that the complaints of the ‘Irish republican prisoners’ extended to ‘assault and prolonged solitary confinement’, although the published account did not allude to the MPs who had advocated redress. Instead, the conservative orientated daily restated the position Home Secretary Rees had outlined the previous year which they summarized as meaning: ‘There would be neither an amnesty nor the granting of political status for Irish prisoners’.247 Rees was in much closer contact with republicans than was desirable for a prime IRA target, and on one occasion unwittingly procured the plastering services of Cork man Tom Goodchild, mainstay of Harrow Sinn Féin and An Cumann Cabhrach.248

When a major PAC - sponsored rally met at Marble Arch on 9 July, it did so under the banner of ‘End silence on torture of Irish Prisoners of War’. This was boosted in terms of credibility by an Amnesty International report which accused the British authorities of standing over numerous acts of maltreatment in the North of Ireland. The damning text was read in its entirety into the Congressional Record in Washington DC.249 The PAC echoed what Maynard and Logan had asserted in the House of Commons in relation to excesses taking place within England’s Dispersal System.250 Around 5,000 marched in London, including contingents of the RCG, IMG, Big Flame, Workers Revolutionary Party, UTOM and IRSP, as well as leading elements of Sinn Féin and the PAC. Several trade unions were represented, notably branches of the ASTMS and TGWU.251 Deep ideological divisions within various far left organizations remained, but the display of unity on the prison question produced the largest republican march in London since 1972.252

Most of the Hyde Park speakers addressed the deepening H-Block crisis, although the English dimension to the wider prison struggle was well noted, and many of the placards listed the names of those held in the Dispersal System.253 Kaye claimed in an interview with Republican News that the ‘courageous stand taken by the prisoners’ in Ireland had been critical to the success of the London rally.254 Sinn Féin (Britain) was represented by Jim Reilly, who addressed the crowd.255 Vanessa Redgrave, a famous actress and leading WRP member, was widely quoted as saying on the occasion: ‘victory for the IRA in their struggle against imperialism’.256 Her comments exemplified the type of vigorous left cooperation sought by many inside Sinn Féin and the PAC in England. However, no platform was extended to the SWP in Hyde Park, owing to their visceral protest in the Commons three days earlier, which was regarded as undignified and potentially harmful.257 Despite the minor factional quibbling, Kaye was credited by sympathetic republicans with ‘unifying the fragmented left on this issue’.258 Orchestration favoured the requirements of republican propaganda. Photographers got within sufficient range of Gartree to acquire dramatic images of the prisoners on the roof. The ephemeral SWP sponsored Irish Political Prisoner Support Group noted that they had ‘cut through the media censorship for the first time since the Price Sisters nearly died’ in June 1974.259 The general public outside Gartree were sufficiently close to hear the shouted comments and rebel songs from the men on the roof. They were not well provisioned, however, and were unfortunate to be exposed to unseasonable high winds and heavy rainfall.260

Rainwater, at least, provided essential liquid which had been lightly contaminated by lead cladding. A more serious concern arose from news that the staff had acquired additional ‘E-List’ uniforms for the protesters, which indicated that those involved were to be regarded as attempted escapers with resultant diminution of privileges. It was negotiated that Ronnie McCartney, already ‘in patches’, would climb down and meet as planned with visitor Una Caughey, to whom this message could be relayed. This duly occurred, and having registered their position in very clear terms, the IRA men descended around 3.30 p.m. on 9 July.261 Numerous prisoners on exercise refused to return to their cells ‘until they knew the Irish prisoners were safe and well’.262 All eight received forty-two days solitary confinement from the Board of Visitors on 21 July. John McCluskey was given fourteen days solitary for his less obvious but still critical role in getting them into position.263 Jerry Mealy, who was moved to Wormwood Scrubs, lost thirteen months of remission, which was subsequently restored by legal action.264 The IRA in Parkhurst was reported to have continued their hunger strike until 9 July.265

Armstrong was returned to Wakefield when his punishment elapsed and found that Ray McLaughlin, who had been teaching him Irish, was ‘on the blanket’ after his stint in Durham.266 McLaughlin had started a unilateral protest in early August to strengthen his demand for repatriation and was immediately sent to F Wing.267 His refusal to wear prison uniform led to the withdrawal of exercise time and incarceration for twenty-four hours a day in a barren, drab cell.268 Albany prisoners were deprived of cell furniture following their recent destruction of prison property, and Tipp Guilfoyle invited extra punishment under Rule 43 by throwing the contents of his chamber pot over a warder. Strangely, no immediate repercussions were imposed in Long Lartin following the forty-eight hour fast of IRA prisoners.269

All such incidents were scrutinised by the Prison Department. Recommendations advanced by Chief Inspector of Prisons Gordon Fowler in the wake of the Hull Riot were addressed in July 1978 by the creation of a Dispersal Prisons Steering Committee, chaired by the Controller (Operational Administration). This restructuring was designed to extend scrutiny of the network by a Prison Department tasked with additional responsibilities for lower grade institutions without interposing itself between Headquarters and the Regional Offices. The Controller (OA), M Gale MC, convened monthly meetings to make ‘joint oversight more effective’ in the sector in which Category A prisoners were routinely held. It was acknowledged by the Home Office in July 1979 that the body was provided with information from the Adult Offender Psychology Unit, which monitored the Dispersal System population ‘as a whole and in relation to particular establishments’.270 By then it was reported that: ‘Attempts are also being made to devise a system for forecasting the growth of a dangerous climate in an establishment by recording in detail certain aspects of prisoner behaviour thought to act as indicators of tension and alienation in the prison’.271

The annual anti-interment rally in London attracted approximately 2,000 to Hyde Park on 13 August. Niall O’hAogan of Sinn Féin’s Ard Comhairle in Dublin joined the familiar voices of Jackie Kaye, Michael Holden, Jim Reilly and Kevin Colfer, Chair of London Sinn Féin. Support from Scottish republican bands, UTOM and An Cumann Cabhrach was in evidence, although the leftist organizations were not as well represented in what was viewed as an inherently Irish republican occasion.272 Brendan Gallagher of Strabane, Tyrone, was held for several days in Lancashire under the PTA when he travelled to preview a BBC TV play regarding the case of his son in the H-Blocks. William Gallagher was then nearing the end of a forty-eight day hunger strike to protest what he claimed was a wrongly imposed conviction for an IRA bomb attack in the west Tyrone town.273 The tenth anniversary of the historic Dungannon to Coalisland Civil Rights march was marked in Tyrone on 27 August 1978 by a major demonstration against the Blanket Protest in the H-Blocks. The original Coalisland march had united politically assertive Nationalists, radical students and republicans in a publicity seeking venture intended to highlight institutionalized discrimination by Stormont towards non-Unionists. The commemoration, however, was organized under the auspices of the RAC and drew in supporters of Sinn Féin and the IRSP, as well as the allied PAC and many others. This reflected the significant change in political emphasis in the course of the proceeding decade during which the more moderate Nationalists had combined within and around the non-violent SDLP. With the focus firmly on the prison struggle in the North of Ireland in 1978, Kaye stressed the PAC view that ‘the political status issue is to do with the struggle going on outside the goal’. Only concerted action in the form of ‘revolutionary struggle’, she averred, would resolve the anomalies of the Irish prisoners in England and the North of Ireland.274

From 8 August 1978, Sinn Féin was engaged with applications from four H-Block prisoners at the European Commission on Human Rights, claiming ‘multiple breaches’ of the European Convention.275 This initiative followed the damning indictment of Long Kesh by Archbishop Tomas O Fiaich who famously described the cell conditions he observed on 1 August 1978 as being reminiscent of ‘the sewer pipes in [the] slums of Calcutta’.276 The high-profile denunciation and the imbalance of prisoner numbers ensured that significant legal developments in Strasbourg on the English dimension were overshadowed by the Long Kesh controversy.277 Among the main public responses of English Catholics to O Fiaich’s comments were criticism of his viewpoint in the Tablet, which allegedly complimented private overtures by the British Delegation to the Holy See to oppose his meteoric advancement from Archbishop to Cardinal.278 Sr. Clarke defended O Fiaich, and implicitly, the validity of his stinging ‘Calcutta’ allusion in the letters page of the Catholic Herald.279 Roy Mason, one of the most fervent political promoters of the H-Block regime, rejected the Cardinal’s pronouncement as ‘a disaster’.280 The NIO claimed ‘these criminals are totally responsible for the situation in which they find themselves … These facilities are better than those available in most prisons in the rest of the United Kingdom’.281 In hindsight, it became clear that mutually destabilizing prison issues on both sides of the Irish Sea were teetering on the precipice of intensifying the Long War.