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CHAPTER 2

Gartree, Wormwood Scrubs and the Blanket Protest in England

The Gartree Riot of 5–6 October 1978 was a non-political and essentially spontaneous upheaval in which IRA men played a part. As with Hull in 1976, the trigger for what mushroomed into a major protest was a belief amongst the prison population that one of their associates had been maltreated. In this instance, the bone of contention revolved around the alleged involuntary drugging or tranquilization of a black prisoner.1 Complaints on such practices had been smuggled out of Gartree to the prisoner’s organization PROP for two years before the matter sparked a riot.2 Martin Brady noted the general deterioration of conditions, with reductions in association time, during which ‘exercise yards only opened if the sun shone’. He identified the ‘abuse of drugs from the medical side’ as the primary cause of the violence which ensued. In Gartree, Brady claimed, ordinary prisoners received ‘whatever … [they] wanted – Mogadon, any kind of sleeping tablets … Nothing recorded’.3 Ronnie McCartney likened the surreal atmosphere at times to the disturbing chaos and alternating chemically induced conformity depicted in Stanley Kubrick’s feature film One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest.4

Allegations persisted that inappropriate dosages of dangerous drugs were being administered in English prisons in pursuit of an agenda to either conduct experiments in a controlled environment or simply render prisoners more subject to control. Establishing the truth proved extremely difficult in the face of the numerous defence mechanisms devised by the Home Office. The BBC was successfully sued in the High Court in July 1978 for alleging improper practices in Albany on the part of Dr. Brian Cooper and Dr. Andrew Todd.5 Dr. Cooper was a familiar name to IRA prisoners, and despite his public and private disavowals, was widely regarded as the man who force-fed Michael Gaughan to death in June 1974. His professional position had been consolidated in Parkhurst by the October 1969 riot from which he emerged with a modicum of credit. From 1970, he and Mr. Anthony Pearson supervised an experimental unit in Parkhurst’s C Wing for mentally disturbed prisoners. Inmates were given small financial inducements to work and to behave well during leisure periods. Payment was calculated on a sliding scale from zero to ninety pence a week and overall conduct was linked to other forms of amelioration. Cooper and Pearson administered a ‘progression’ path in C Wing ‘from the ground floor living area to a top floor pre-release area’. They were, in consequence, influential figures on the Isle of Wight in 1972 prior to the return of significant numbers of IRA men to the prison.6 The operation of C Wing in this mode ceased abruptly in March 1979 when the destruction of the roofs of two other wings by the IRA inspired the relocation of its inhabitants into the ill-appointed Hospital Wing.7

A BBC documentary entitled South Today alleged in February 1978 that men were being drugged in Albany to render them docile. This tangentially implicated Dr. Cooper and Dr. Todd, who both had overall responsibility for issuing prescriptions on the island. Cooper, moreover, was meaningfully described by the BBC as being ‘principal medical officer and psychiatrist to the prisons on the Isle of Wight’. Such charges were serious in that Dr. John Whitehead, consultant psychiatrist of the Brighton health district, and Peter McCann of the BBC, claimed that up to 70 per cent of Albany’s inmates were being dosed with drugs harmful to liver function. The High Court found on 28 July 1978 that this dire accusation could not be sustained in law while awarding damages to both practitioners. If the most actionable malpractice charges had been rejected amid the decorum and dignity of the elitist forum, both doctors admitted prescribing drugs for undefined ‘therapeutic reasons’. Details of exact dosages and prevalence of individual treatments remained unspecified in published trial press reports.8 Many English prisoners, nonetheless, genuinely feared ‘Dr. Cooper’s wing for dangerous and insane inmates … the “Psycho Wing”’.9 Sedated men were unflatteringly dubbed ‘Cooper’s Troopers’ by those who watched, transfixed, as they were obliged to bear witness. Scottish militant Jimmy McCaig claimed his instinctive wariness of ‘Doctor Death [Cooper] … nutting [him] off’ to the much - feared Rampton inspired the seizure of Parkhurst Assistant Governor Gerry Schofield as a hostage on 4–5 January 1983.10

Regardless of legal processes, a substantial element of the prison population believed that they were vulnerable to the consequences of irresponsible drug administration. A combination of unhealthy drug dosages and bad diet presumably lay at the heart of the Blood Transfusion Service policy of rejecting donations offered by inmates of Wormwood Scrubs.11 The Gartree allegation touched a raw nerve on 5 October 1978, and Dr. Whitehead restated his opinion that the prison was a location where Largactil and other powerful drugs were routinely used to pacify inmates. Former prisoner George Coggan of PROP averred that the concerns raised related to the ‘use [of drugs] that cannot be countenanced as medical’.12 Paul Hill was shocked at the sight of ‘mad’ prisoners under Dr. Cooper’s care in Parkhurst:

They can have Largactyl, Mogadon, Triptosal – as much of it as they want. The screws take a little plastic cup and mix up the drugs like a cocktail. They ask you if there is anything else you want. They will not let you have tobacco, fresh fruit, vegetables, but you can have as many of their drugs as you like. The men on F2 stagger about all day out of their heads. Cooper’s Troopers have knives and shifts [i.e. ‘chivs’] and there is violence. The screws are happy to let it continue – it gives them an excuse for the wing’s existence.13

The Home Office insisted that normal National Health Service ‘conditions’ pertained in all prisons, although the lack of independent oversight rendered this defence incredible to informed observers.14 Dr. C H McCleery, ex-Medical Officer in Parkhurst, created a sensation in October 1978 when his ‘Treatment of psychopaths with Dexipol’ appeared in the restricted publication Prison Medical Journal. Dr. McCleery admitted that persons ‘regarded purely as Albany discipline failures’ were given combinations of Mogadon, Tranxene, Lentizol and Valium. Numbers were transferred to the Parkhurst Prison Hospital where six medically fit persons were injected after ‘a lot of persuasion’ with the anti-schizophrenia drug Dexipol.15 The precise purpose of this procedure was open to question and it was noted that the Danish pharmaceutical was ‘not a tranquiliser’.16 The Home Office was exceptionally well situated to shield itself from unwanted investigation, it was not until October 1983 that Dr. John L Kilgour, formerly of the Royal Army Medical Corps, Parachute Field Ambulance and World Health Organization, became the first Director of Prison Medical Services appointed from outside the body.17

Although more general prisoner concerns were clearly in play, the Gartree riot was sparked by fears for the welfare of 22-year-old Michael Blake who, on 5 October 1978, was forcibly given tranquilizing drugs before being

taken to the prison infirmary. Three prisoners were granted access to check on his condition and it was later claimed that trouble flared ‘during or shortly after that visit’.18 When Martin Brady saw Blake: ‘He was bouncing off the walls … he was full of drugs and he was only a young kid – doing six years or something. That was what the riot was over – the abuse of drugs’.19 Ronnie McCartney concurred that Blake had been ‘drugged up by the doctor’.20 John McCluskey was approached just after being unlocked by a prisoner who claimed his friend had been ‘taken to the hospital and he’s been drugged’. Several concerned prisoners then congregated outside the ground floor office on A Wing to request a meeting with the Governor. The Principal Officer made repeated phone contact with the Governor at ten to fifteen minute intervals and inaccurately reported his imminent arrival at least twice. An exasperated black prisoner intervened with a threat: ‘We’ll give you another ten minutes and then if something doesn’t happen we’ve got to take some action’.21 Republicans regarded what happened next in hindsight as ‘a good bit of solidarity with the blacks’.22 McCluskey noted:

The ten minutes passed by and the riot just started and the prisoners started smashing up. Of course there was nothing else they could do. Everything was smashed up. The screws in the office ran out and left all their mates behind. So the screws on the landing were barricaded in. They were very frightened. Some time later we decided that as the protest wasn’t against the screws we’d have to take part of the barricade down and get the screws out, which we did. None of them were harmed in any way. The funny thing was that while the riot was going on they released Blake out of the hospital. If only the screws had done this at

6 p.m. or even at 7 p.m. there wouldn’t have been a riot. We held the wing and kept the screws out.23

Official accounts were less explicit. A and D wings were seized by prisoners at 7.30 p.m. who then blocked the entranceways to the sector with makeshift barricades to hinder their reoccupation by the staff. Rioters gained control of B wing where the audible commotion and word of its causation had been relayed. Heavy cell doors were levered off their hinges, plumbing mangled and the expensive heating system totally destroyed.24 By 9.25 only C Wing was under staff control and the future of Gartree within the Dispersal System was in doubt.25 Eddie O’Neill, heavily guarded due to his ‘E List’ classification, lamented: ‘We could only get five people that would do anything on that wing’.26 Records seized from offices, including the ‘Incident Book’, furnished prisoners with information that aggravated the situation. Notes regarding the importance of destroying his relationship with his fiancée incensed McCartney. He found it necessary to protect a Loyalist prisoner from retribution from Liverpool men who disapproved of incriminating details which came to light.27

Serious fighting between approximately eighty-six prisoners and a reinforced complement of staff were brought in. It proved impossible to access the roof where structural levels of damage could have been achieved. Yet, prison officers wearing protective riot gear were attacked with hot water and petrol bombs. Their visible garb probably encouraged attacks by volatile cliques who did not seriously intend to main or kill. Paul Hill recalled: ‘We toss the petrol bombs at them. Their shields catch fire and they flee in panic. They bring armed men into the prison. I see one of them carrying a pistol’.28 Staff claimed, in a bid to explain their embarrassingly unsuccessful counterattack, that ‘rioting prisoners fended off prison officers with the aid of homemade spears, cans of boiling water and hot-plates used as barriers’.29 IRA prisoners demonstrated how to make effective incendiaries using turpentine and showed the best techniques for prising heavy cell doors from their mountings.30

Surprisingly, given the potential lethality of such improvised defences, only one prison officer was hurt. His misfortune probably owed much to the actual failure of the specially trained and equipped counterattacking riot squad to penetrate the obstacles being fiercely defended by prisoners.31 In retrospect it was revealed that the men deployed comprised one of the new and still officially secret Prison Department ‘Minimum Use of Force Tactical Intervention’ (MUFTI) squads formed on 20 February 1978 to address problems of riot control exposed in Hull in August/ September 1976.32 Their performance in Gartree was less than impressive; a factor which may have had bearing on the extremity of their actions during the subsequent Wormwood Scrubs ‘riot’ in August 1979.33 The Home Office account of the ‘serious disturbance in Gartree’, published as required by statute in July 1979, omitted reference to the MUFTI and misleadingly attributed counter-riot efforts to ‘off duty staff’ being called in to augment those already at work.34 This account, although required by law in England and Wales, was patently untrue. McCluskey et al, however, were well aware that their opponents were strangers:

These weren’t just the Gartree screws. These were specially selected riot squads from other prisons. We didn’t recognise them because of the uniforms they were wearing. They had all the protective gear on worn by any riot squad, and over that they had brown overalls, and they carried long sticks which looked more than anything like a pickaxe handle. We could see them coming in, in bunches of ten or fifteen. They kept coming in. They would run from the gate to the back of the wing. This kept going for about an hour … From my experience at Albany I knew how serious this was … I told them that we had to defend the barricade because if these people came in on top of us they’d probably kill some of us. They tried twice to come through the barricade of tables, chairs, any furniture we could find. They couldn’t pass the barricade.35

Believing that the protest had ‘achieved our objective’, prisoners told staff via a cell window that they would dismantle the barrier at 10.00 a.m. on 6 October 1978. This was achieved by 11.00 a.m. Armed police were sighted moving inside the prison buildings and in the garden outside, but no attempt was made to overpower the prisoners.36 They did not resist the re-entry of prison officers. Bob Booth, Deputy Regional Director of the Prison Service, claimed that no concessions had been made, but his insistence that nothing improper had occurred with Blake was simply discounted.37 Hill, a veteran of the brutal post riot assaults in Hull, had an unnerving ‘sense of déjà vu’. Letters of assured good conduct distributed by the Assistant Governor were on this occasion honoured in full.38 Although the Board of Visitors gave promises that personal possessions would be forwarded to those moved to other locations, it transpired that many, including McCluskey, did not receive belongings listed in Gartree.39

The direct agency of Dr. Peter Smith in treating Blake troubled ordinary prisoners in Gartree. Smith was an ex-employee of Broadmoor and was reputed to have ‘sectioned’ or ‘nutted-off’ more inmates than any other to secure psychiatric institutions.40 The term derived from the authority of Section 72 of the Mental Health Act (1959), which enabled doctors to commit persons they regarded as violent or potentially so to a mental institution such as Rampton Special Hospital.41 Prisoners referred to Smith as ‘Doctor Death’, as was highlighted in a Leveller special, although the alliterative sobriquet was otherwise used in relation to Dr. Cooper on the Isle of Wight. According to Ray McLaughlin, ‘the prisoners felt they had to make a protest to protect themselves from being subjected to a similar fate’ to that of Blake in Gartree. It was alleged that militant prisoners had been drugged against their will in Gartree to demonstrate the capacity of the medical staff to apply pressure.42 The Home Office insisted that drugs were ‘only’ administered on the basis of ‘clinical judgement’ by qualified persons ‘for the restoration of health or the relief of symptoms’.43 Largactil, one of the most potent and feared pharmaceuticals dispensed in England, had been widely consumed in the prisons since 1958.44 Prisoners placed no reliance in official statements averring appropriate dispensation. The concern of Gartree’s wider jail population was by no means allayed by the refusal of Rees to publish the relevant report furnished to the Home Office by the governor.45

Dr. Smith went on record in May 1979 in opposition to the key strategic Dispersal System concept of ‘human containment within secure perimeters’. He severely criticized the supposedly liberal approach, delineated by Tory icon Lord Mountbatten in 1966, as lacking ‘commonsense’. When recalling events of Gartree’s ‘long night’, a term redolent of deep negative subjectivity, Dr. Smith deflected plausible accusations of administrative culpability within his office for what had transpired with references to prison staff grappling with ‘the explosive psychopathic mixture which we have watched and listened to’. His trenchant views elicited praise from the POA and their leader, Bob Brown, who claimed during their annual conference in Margate on 24 May 1979 that ‘the people who are being punished are the staff and their families’. Brown, following Dr. Smith, implied that the psychiatric rehabilitative function of the English prisons, insofar as it really existed, was unimportant. He claimed, in order to counter allegations of inappropriate dosages being supplied to prisoners, that many fellow officers were taking proscribed medication ‘simply to get them into work the next day’.46 Access to subsidized alcohol by staff was a perk of the prison service noted by their singularly deprived captives. Owing to denial of eyewitness status, they could form no cogent opinion as to whether the palpable frisson within their locked-down wing community, arising from heavy drug utilization, was in any way mirrored in the ranks of those paid to keep them under lock and key.

On 1 November 1978 the POA branch in Gartree circulated its own fifteen-page document which, in addition to promoting service demands, ‘urged the removal of mentally ill prisoners’.47 They were reported as claiming that at least twenty of seventy-five disturbed and psychopathic prisoners in Gartree at the time of the riot ‘should have been in Rampton or Broadmoor’.48 Inmate behaviour and treatment were clearly major issues for staff in the Leicestershire prison, although Home Office Minister Lord Harris had declared himself to be ‘totally satisfied with the medical regime at Gartree and throughout the prison service’ on 6 October. This indicated confidence in the colourful Dr. Smith, who when questioned that day by journalists as he left the prison held aloft a green customs sticker while saying ‘nothing to declare’.49 Requests from Birmingham - based psychiatrist Dr. Maire ‘Betty’ O’Shea to examine Blake were reputedly ignored. Leftist Dr. O’Shea had been prominent in the campaign against the force-feeding of IRA prisoners in 1974–5 and a vocal supporter of prisoners’ rights to humane treatment and, in the case of the republicans, political status. She was acting in 1978 on behalf of the Medical Committee against the Abuse of Prisoners by Drugging.50

The Board of Visitors imposed punishments on those deemed to be culpable, and did so with the confidence imbued by the recent High Court judgement that they had full legal authority, albeit subject to legal review. In October 1978 the Court of Appeal accepted that a prisoner had ‘residuary rights appertaining to the nature and conduct of his imprisonment’ and that decisions taken by a Board of Visitors were subject to re-examination. Outside courts had hitherto declined to rule on internal prison procedures on the grounds of jurisdiction.51 Those accused of rioting in Gartree, moreover, had communicated with London-based solicitors who would have been in a position to assist with their defence had the option of hearing criminal cases in an outside court been green lighted. PROP had welcomed this prospect as the ‘first test case’ of the post-Appeal Court decision, although the Board of Visitor process was followed in the event.52 Gartree rioters were ultimately sentenced to eighty-six days in solitary confinement, and those not serving life sentences forfeited a year’s remission of sentence. Time spent awaiting adjudication was not deducted and the net effect of the Board’s deliberations was that Jerry Mealy lost 440 days remission.53 Republicans alleged that IRA members, British anarchists and other political prisoners were singled out from the main body of those responsible. It could not be denied, however, that the IRA had been deeply involved in the disturbances, and their agency was noted in the Times.54 Many life-sentenced prisoners were moved due to the loss of accommodation which compounded the reduction in places occasioned by the Chelmsford prison fire in March.55 Being shifted after a hiatus in receiving visits ensured that the families of those ‘ghosted’ around England were uncertain where to re-establish contact.56

Paul Holmes was one of the few IRA men initially retained in Gartree where he received a sentence of 186 days in solitary despite having played no part in the riot due to his enforced isolation from events.57 He was then moved to Long Lartin where he served the additional sentence. Brian McLaughlin, who had only just been returned to Gartree from a ‘lie-down’ in Bristol, was also retained in the prison. After repeated requests for medical examination in the aftermath of the riot, McLaughlin was diagnosed with TB.58 Martin Brady was regarded as a ‘ringleader’ and was sent to Wakefield where he was promised a ‘hard time’ from staff. This threat was easily delivered within the hermetic confines of F-Wing.59 Paul Hill and Phil Sheridan arrived into Exeter, a local jail rarely used to hold IRA prisoners. Hill was quickly moved on to Winchester and Wakefield while Sheridan endured nine months in the ‘awful’, ill-appointed Exeter where the Segregation Block resembled ‘a subterranean dungeon’.60 Sheehan was dispatched via Wormwood Scrubs to Parkhurst. McCluskey and McCartney were shifted to Winchester and very quickly into the punishment block for protesting the local conditions. Whereas McCluskey was shortly afterwards moved on to Wormwood Scrubs for an extended bout of solitary confinement, McCartney’s refusal to co-operate with the staff and rejection of ‘closed’ visits resulted in his being detained in a ‘strong box’ cell in the Segregation Unit.61

Ronnie McCartney spent December 1978 and January 1979 in the ‘strong box’, during which time he was refused permission to attend religious services or use personal cash to buy Christmas cards for his family.62 The adapted cell was soundproofed by reinforced doors and walls: a combination of solitary confinement and sensory deprivation which, prisoners claimed, facilitated physical attacks by staff. The Winchester variant was painted in brilliant white, which accentuated the impact of the overhead light being left on constantly, and resulted in the lasting impairment of McCartney’s vision.63 While the hardships endured by all IRA prisoners in England featured in republican organs, the perception that McCartney had been particularly maltreated resonated in political prints for several months. His progress was reported following transfer to Hull in February 1979.64 His defiance in Hull, where he was held on ‘E-List’ in the Punishment Block, led to beatings and confinement in the ‘strong-box’. The special cell consisted of a concrete bed behind a heavy double door which ensured ‘no one could hear what was happening to you’.65

The highly visible and media-covered Gartree protest exposed the potential for violence within an overstressed penal environment. Overcrowding exerted strain across the network and ensured that prisoner pacification was a pressing matter in 1978 in the aftermath of expensive and embarrassing riots in the Dispersal System.66 Brixton staff, as part of an ambitious POA strategy involving forty of Britain’s 120 prisons, voted on 19 October to refuse admittance to an average of twenty-five remand prisoners per day from 5 November.67 Such threats, in the context of prisoner restiveness, obliged Home Secretary Merlyn Rees to seek ‘urgent’ Cabinet approval for an inquiry into the grievances of Prison Service employees. This was granted on 2 November.68 The POA were unequivocal in citing the Irish political dimension to the cusp of exaggeration, although many members would have realised that IRA personnel were due to give evidence in York Crown Court from 2 November when proceedings commenced against staff accused of offences committed during and after the Hull riot.69 It was significant that warders did not overreact in terms of physical assaults when their ascendancy in Gartree was restored.70

In the advent of the Home Secretary’s review, David Heywood, Assistant Secretary of the Society of Civil and Public Servants, pressed the case in a naked reference to the danger posed by IRA prisoners: ‘Riots on the scale of the recent Gartree disturbances might break out at several prisons at the same time. Violent prisoners and IRA extremists would be delighted to exploit the situation’.71 A joint letter to the Home Secretary from prison governors was similarly themed: ‘If the present trend continues there will be a serious loss of control, which has to be quelled by armed intervention, with the probability of both staff and prisoners being killed’.72 The allusion to an Attica - style massacre, if extreme and unprecedented in Britain, did not appear entirely unreasonable in the last years of the most violent decade of the century inside the country’s prisons. PROP had predicted a major incident for years and was unsurprised by the near manifestation of armed intervention in Albany in May 1983.73

Questions of control lay at the heart of most serious controversies of the late 1970s and early 1980s. Inmates were conventionally punished for dissent and violation of regulations by temporary loss of privileges and remission of sentence. Punishments included imprisonment in detached or small spaces engineered to promote desocialization, discomfort, tedium and under stimulation. If mentally and often physically debilitating, the additional prospect of being ‘sectioned’ to ‘hospitals’ for long term and potentially even more severe maltreatment was omnipresent. PROP and other prisoner advocates alleged that ‘kicking squads’ and a psychotic element within the penal establishment abused and even staged ‘suicides’ of vulnerable and selected uncooperative prisoners. Psychotropic medicine, administered in either inappropriate dosages or forcibly by injection, was a widespread concern which went far beyond traditional jailhouse suspicions that the sedative Bromide was routinely added to liquids.74 Dr. McCleery’s admission, following relocation to southern Sudan, that ‘problems of containment of psychopaths’ led to the drugging of men showing ‘no evidence of formal illness’ on the Isle of Wight were publicised by the Sunday Times on 22 October 1978. Persistent allegations of untoward ‘staff violence’ towards prisoners and unsatisfactory inquests were not entertained by the insulated Home Office.75

Guardian correspondent David Beresford highlighted the retention of twenty-five Gartree rioters in a ‘new unit’ commissioned in 1975. ‘Mystery’ surrounded the function of the two - storey building which housed ‘Twenty-five cells with a direct link to the prison hospital’.76 Prisoners were convinced it had been conceived as a ‘Control Unit’ along the lines of that temporarily operated in Wakefield and that constructed but used in an alternate manner in Wormwood Scrubs. Official claims that the detached Gartree block was merely a high security ‘segregation unit’ did not mollify those familiar with the rebranded F Wing in Wakefield, where a regime of sensory deprivation operated, albeit without the strict schedule of modular progression which the formerly secret annexe had trialled.77

It was significant that the prisoners retained in what was described as simply ‘temporary accommodation’ in Gartree were inside another newly designated ‘F Wing’ which staffing problems had hitherto kept closed.78 They were not, however, physically mistreated, and the contrast with Hull in 1976 was obvious. Labour MP John Prescott provided a direct connection given his role in negotiations, which resulted in the termination of the earlier protest in his Hull East constituency. His accurate prediction of unrest in Gartree, however, drew the ire of John Farr, Conservative MP for Harborough, who told his fellow Yorkshire man to keep ‘his long nose’ out of the affair.79 By 1980 it was evident that the Prison Department, stymied in its sinister ‘Control Unit’ strategy, adapted the basic concept and infrastructure to regularize the de facto practise of prolonged solitary confinement. Harsh segregation was viewed as a vital tool in the arsenal of prisoner management and popular within the POA. The persistence of legal actions arising from the Wakefield prototype, however, sensitized its proponents to the importance of discretion, media - friendly terminology and institutional secrecy.80 A case brought by Mickey Williams obliged the Home Office to release five hitherto secret documents on the Wakefield Control Unit despite claims by Home Secretary William Whitelaw that disclosure was ‘injurious to the public interest’. Williams was ultimately unsuccessful as it was found that the Prison Rules he alleged to have been infringed were ‘regulatory, not mandatory’.81

The Conservative orientated Times published an important feature by Home Affairs correspondent Peter Evans on 3 November 1978 which assessed the Home Secretary’s announcement of the independent inquiry into Gartree. Evans noted that the penal system was in dire need of reform:

For too long, prisons have been too low on the political agenda. Prisoners and prison officers have tended to feel that behind prison walls they are out of sight and out of mind. Part of the reason is the obsessive secrecy which has until recently surrounded the prison system. That has been broken by the increasingly articulate organisations representing prisoners’ rights and more platforms on which to pursue them. Muffled by the Official Secrets Act, the prison staffs have lost a battle for public attention.82

Evans cited Martin Luther King’s observation that ‘riots are the voice of the unheard’ in relation to the restive prison population, while warning of the danger of dismissing POA allegations regarding poor working conditions. The POA had threatened massive industrial action if their demands on back-pay and salary increases in lieu of their loss of lucrative overtime rates were not met. If, as Evans noted, penologists and psychiatrists increasingly dismissed the once inspirational mission of prisoner rehabilitation, the crude question of mere containment of supposed criminal contagion gained in importance. Evans averred that ‘in overcrowded prisons, there is little chance of doing more than trying to make the system work’. Although avoiding discussion of the punishment and deterrent functions of incarceration, by the late 1970s, years of under-funding of the Prison Department ensured that loss of income for employees imposed additional hardships on persons deprived of liberty and quality of life. This diminution of experience was adjudged permissible, and the High Court endorsement of the Home Office definition of ‘privilege’ in March 1978 lessened the unwelcome prospect of the pace and extent of penal reform being driven by the domestic legal profession.83

Prisoners’ advocates, including PROP, PAC and Sinn Féin, fully appreciated the utility of driving the agenda from within, even as international courts turned their attention to the Dispersal System. What the PAC had dramatically termed ‘a wall of silence around Irish prisoners’ was smashed by direct action in the form of hunger strikes, riots, roof occupations, passive ‘sit-downs’ and external pro-prisoner demonstrations.84 IRA and Category A prisoners were central to this ominous evolution, as evidenced by the press and media attention devoted to such egregious incidents as the Albany and Hull ‘riots’ of 1976, and the persistent unrest in Gartree in 1978. As expressly intended, visible modes of prisoner protest projected from England’s maximum-security institutions until 1980 could not be readily concealed. By November 1978 the men and women tasked with containing the once inviolate Prison Department domain, from which the glare of the popular media was hitherto excluded, had their own pressing concerns. The POA was motivated as never before to maximize its negotiating capital by stressing the widely appreciable dangers posed by the minor yet vibrant and menacing IRA cohort.85

Wormwood Scrubs, 7 October 1978

The arrest of Kenneth Gillespie of Oldcroft Road, London, on 7 October 1978 illustrated the multi-faceted nature of the IRA threat. Gillespie, a long term sentenced prisoner in Wormwood Scrubs, was on a week long pre-release parole ahead of planned emancipation in November when arrested in the vicinity of D Wing. On leaving the prison on 4 October, Gillespie was found to be in possession of addresses written on ‘scraps of paper’. These were clandestinely photocopied and replaced by staff who quickly ascertained that they related to the premises of licensed arms dealers. A surveillance operation was mounted on 7 October when, the Old Bailey heard, Gillespie drove a Ford Escort to the vicinity of D Wing and flashed his car lights. He was immediately arrested by police, who found a 130-foot rope inside the vehicle, which had been blackened with polish.86 Angela Williams of Bollo Bridge Road, Acton, was questioned shortly afterwards following the discovery of a telegram she had sent to Gillespie in his lodgings. Williams, whose brother Nicholas Smith was another long term prisoner in D Wing, admitted handing over a ‘heavy parcel’ which had arrived in her Acton home from Dublin to a man she met in a local train station. The delivery had been arranged by phone and the man she encountered claimed to have been ‘sent by her brother’. It was not proven that this was Gillespie. She gave him one of two Giro cheques which had arrived in the post from Dublin along with a registered letter containing £100. At trial in January 1980, prosecutor David Paget claimed that the sealed parcel delivered by Williams in Acton contained the modified rope, a detail of which she disclaimed all knowledge.87

Information on the incident emerged on 7 January 1980 when Gillespie was prosecuted. He pleaded guilty to conspiracy to aid the escape of four men from Wormwood Scrubs. The four were named in evidence as Nicholas Smith and IRA prisoners Paddy Mulryan, James ‘Punter’ Bennett and Stevie Nordone, who were all serving sentences of twenty years and over. Following Gillespie’s conviction it was claimed that Wesley Dick had originated a plot which would have freed ‘some of the most dangerous criminals in Britain’, although the West Indian was not charged with any offence.88 Dick, a politically motivated armed robber who had adopted the name Shujaa Moshesh in prison, had also been on good terms with Ray McLaughlin, who also encountered his co-defendants in the Category A circuits.89 John McCluskey described him as ‘the most politicized black prisoner that I’ve ever met in prison. He was constantly working to politicize other black prisoners and not only black. He worked with all the white prisoners he possibly could’.90

Dick was one of the three black radicals sentenced on 30 June 1976 for a misfired armed robbery attempt in London which precipitated the five day ‘Spaghetti House’ hostage - taking siege in Knightsbridge on 28 September 1975. Dick, Frank Davies and Anthony ‘Bonsu’ Monroe claimed membership of the socialist Black Liberation Army, an independent offshoot of the USA Black Panther movement, and insisted on political motivation when in custody. While the depth of this sensational identification was debated, the men consciously emulated the contemporary IRA by refusing to recognize the court and turning their backs on Justice Griffith-Jones in the Old Bailey. Advised by ex-Army major Sir Robert Mark and Commander Ernest Bond, Griffith-Jones rejected the defendants’ assertion of political and racial inspiration and imposed terms of seventeen to twenty-one years.91 Dick had met the IRA ‘Balcombe Street’ group and ‘some’ of the Guildford Four when on remand in Brixton in 1975. On entering the Dispersal System, he had political discussions with Shane Paul O’Doherty and other assertive republicans. He acknowledged that there was ‘a whole heap I learned when I was in prison, especially from people who were more conscious than me, mainly the Irish guys’.92 According to the West Indian:

In prison I was meeting people who were giving me the Irish liberation point of view. The first thing I noticed which impressed me was their commitment to the Irish struggle. They’re not half way guys … Any kind of English hostility against black and Irish prisoners the screws will support because it’s in their interest to keep prisoners divided as well as matching their own racism. We had a lot of political discussions, were involved in protests and strikes. They proved the level of their commitment. It was a learning process; I’m sure I learned more from them than they learned from me. They used to ask me questions about aspects of the black struggle.93

Such deep foundations underlay the spirit of cooperation divined in the attempted Wormwood Scrubs breakout of 7 October 1978. A search of Mulyran’s cell on the night of the planned escape uncovered incriminating contraband. A manuscript map of D Wing, scale drawings of keys, pages extracted from a street directory showing the Wormwood Scrubs neighbourhood and a stolen driving license were found inside his record player.94 The London court clearly accepted that Smith and the three IRA men had received the assistance of Gillespie in planning to escape. However, no ‘proceedings’ were initiated against the group in view of the ‘length of the sentences they are serving’.95 It emerged that a person acting on Mulryan’s behalf had sent a telegram to Gillespie urging postponement of the bid, although this was evidently not received. Judge Michael Argyle sentenced him to four years’ imprisonment on 11 January 1980 despite his unverified claim to have been subjected to ‘veiled threats’ from the republicans.96 The trial occurred after a long interval and the time lag, coupled with the minimal attempt to bring charges, facilitated the Prison Department by downplaying the seriousness of an escape conspiracy of potentially major repercussions. Any successful collaboration between IRA Category A prisoners, politicized black prisoners and resourceful British organized criminals was a dire prospect vis à vis the efficacy of the Dispersal System and anti-republican propaganda. The Home Office must have noted that October 1978 was a month in which the IRA prisoners under their control were deeply implicated in rioting and viable escape plans. This was not the full extent of the republican challenge.

The Blanket Protest in England

The drama in Gartree prison temporarily overshadowed an historic development in Albany, Isle of Wight, where five IRA men commenced a blanket protest on 8 October 1978.97 If the first major effort of its kind by the IRA in England since the 1940s, the methodology, mentality and stated objectives were exactly the same as its precursors. Refusal to wear prison uniform was the standard republican demonstration against criminal categorization. The death in Ireland of Tommy Mullins on 2 November 1978 served to remind the general public of the centrality of such modes of protest within the IRA. Mullins had undertaken a fifteen-day hunger strike and blanket protest when he was a republican prisoner in Wormwood Scrubs during the War of Independence, 1919–21. He went on to become a founder member of Fianna Fáil and retired as General Secretary of the party as recently as 1973.98 In 1978 neither Fianna Fáil nor Fine Gael, the two largest political parties in Ireland, wished to be reminded of their shared armed republican heritage, despite separate annual political pilgrimages to Bodenstown, Kildare, the home of the grave of Wolfe Tone, ‘father’ of the ideology.99

In the course of a ‘valedictory visit’ by Irish Embassy First Secretary Richard ‘Dick’ O’Brien, David Blunt of the Republic of Ireland Department (RID) of the FCO was alerted to his concern ‘with developments during the past few months in certain British prisons, especially HM Prison, Albany’. O’Brien demonstrated awareness that the ‘unrest’ on the Isle of Wight had been ‘simmering for a while before being escalated by the July demonstrations’. In October 1978 the main fear expressed by the First Secretary was ‘that we may be approaching an “H-Block” situation in this country’. A restricted digest of the meetings was passed to the Prison Department which rejected any justification of discrimination claims made by Irish prisoners in terms of either treatment or punishment.100

Albany had been at the centre of IRA complaints since April 1978 when visiting, and general penal conditions had deteriorated.101 In a statement worthy of greater import than was granted, republicans claimed that matters in the complex were ‘fast approaching those of the H-Blocks of Long Kesh’.102 Irish Category A men received half-hour visits in tiny rooms attended by four prison officers and a policewoman if female visitors or children were present. Liam Baker took exception to a particularly obnoxious policewoman and lost all remission in consequence of his engagement in protests.103 Britons, including Category A men, simultaneously enjoyed two-hour visits in a large hall with fifty tables and low-key staff supervision.104 The contrast was by no means academic. Ray McLaughlin was fined for kissing his wife Mary goodbye in June 1978 and Eddie O’Neill was docked forty-nine days remission for claiming that a dog handler had called him an ‘Irish bastard’ in the exercise yard. Most of the IRA prisoners and one Loyalist were sent to the Punishment Block, after which the much-persecuted McLaughlin was shifted to Wakefield and O’Neill to Gartree.105 ‘Ghostings’ were not isolated phenomena, and the universal withdrawal of facilities in Parkhurst due to industrial action by staff heightened tensions. The temporary closure of the prison’s once heavily protected workshops exacerbated an already fraught situation. By early December over 200 men in three of the four wings felt obliged to boycott the extremely poor quality sustenance on offer.106

In the aftermath of the July cell - smashing protest, the remaining IRA men in Albany were deprived of chamber pots in their cells and did not receive replacement furniture.107 Most declined to shave their beards from 18 July when informed that they would only be permitted to bathe only once per week.108 They were denied permission to attend weekly Mass on Sundays to limit communication with other prisoners, but were granted access to religious services on other days.109 This was ordinarily the responsibility of the Governor who under Prison Standing Orders was required to invoke Order 7A 3 (4) to disbar attendance. Circumstances determined that the option of rioting was impractical and a full-blown hunger strike was not warranted. Recourse to a protracted blanket-style protest on the core issue of repatriation was relatively appealing under the circumstances. Non-co-operation was the central concept. Strategic interests were addressed by IRA demands to be repatriated to their native country, while the initial cause of complaint against ‘forms of discrimination’ remained in focus.110

On 8 October 1978 Busty Cunningham, Tipp Guilfoyle, Tony Cunningham and Liam Baker demanded repatriation to Irish prisons where, despite the gruelling protest in the H-Blocks, their status as political prisoners would be much more defined. Family visits were generally less fraught in either of the two Irish jurisdictions than in England for prisoners who were not on protest. That fact that Baker had settled in Southampton and was married to a devoted Englishwoman was regarded as immaterial in view of the political context.111 Ray McLaughlin had only just emerged from a unilateral blanket protest in Wakefield’s F Wing and was incapable of resuming the tactic in support of Albany comrades, owing to what the PAC described as ‘severe psychological disorientation’.112 The Leeds branch of UTOM protested on his behalf outside the prison every Sunday. McLaughlin grew ill in Wakefield and had trouble with balance and speech when released to the wings.113 In retrospect, the militant Irishman highlighted the typically ‘bad communications’ on the planning stages of the blanket protest, which may have altered the situation in Albany had he been in full health.114

It was pertinent that the trial of twelve prison officers who had savagely beaten McLaughlin and others in Hull was then underway.115 Wakefield’s IRA PRO contended that the Donegal man had been ‘singled out by the prison staff for special treatment because of his participation in the Hull prison riot, and because he was one of the key witnesses’.116 Tyrone’s Gerry Cunningham, similarly, was also moved from London’s tough Wandsworth prison to Wakefield ahead of the trial. He received ‘plenty of verbal’ in F Wing on arrival but was not physically assaulted.117 The rare participation of IRA witnesses in a civil trial was cited as an explanation of the exceptional heavy security surrounding the sessions in York.118 The stakes were high for all concerned. Mary McLaughlin, in a November 1978 interview recorded in Birmingham, claimed that the failure to convict staff for their actions following the Hull riot ‘might lead to another’.119

Numerous Prison Officers were committed for trial at York Crown Court on 31 August 1978 to answer charges arising from one of the most important and destructive riots in modern British history.120 Ray McLaughlin gave evidence on 25 January 1979, an ideologically challenging task for an Irish republican, who tended and were at times required under pain of Óglaigh na hÉireann sanction, to withhold personal recognition of the judicial competency of such forums.121 Solidarity was expressed by other IRA men in Albany who, when ‘on the blanket’, withdrew their ‘co-operation’ from attending prison staff.122 This oppositional stance placed an onus on their jailers to mediate the permanently unequal relationship vis à vis captors and captives, either within their own immediate terms, or those they deemed permissible by superiors. A robust equilibrium was thus established by the IRA in Albany whereby public and politically essential compromises in York were not only justified by the objective of achieving a higher objective, but were materially counterbalanced by harmful sacrifice within the intensely private Segregation ‘Punishment’ Block.

Whereas Shane Paul O’Doherty and a small number of IRA men had resorted to the blanket in England in previous years, the concerted co-operation of the Albany group marked a departure in scale and policy.123 For pragmatic reasons, not least for clarity of key issues and the efficacy of republican propaganda, a blanket protest in Wormwood Scrubs was presented as an escalation of that underway in Albany. Mick Murray, who had just completed two weeks in solitary, joined Punter Bennett in refusing to wear prison clothes on 13 October.124 He was held in solitary for twenty-four hours a day in a cell painted completely white.125 The IRA in Wormwood Scrubs were irritated in the early part of the month when Paddy Mulryan was ghosted to Long Lartin and Eddie Byrne to Walton for alleged complicity in an escape attempt.126 Newry man Byrne had been sent to Wormwood Scrubs in late 1978 from which he had come very close to liberating himself from two years earlier. He was placed in segregation and had his arm in a sling arising from an assault. Byrne was reputed to be ‘refusing visits because of conditions there and threats against him and his wife by screws’.127 An American Congressman who made overtures to the Home Office regarding Byrne’s treatment was informed that the Irishman’s ‘behaviour since conviction has been poor … [and involved] many offences against prison discipline’.128

The PAC offered direct support while campaigning politically at a strategic level. The 26 November 1978 commemoration of the Manchester Martyrs in London was identified as an opportunity to reiterate public backing for the interlinked demands of political status, amnesty and a British military withdrawal from Ireland.129 An impressive turn out of 5,000 was achieved as most of the main leftist and union groups who had supported the July demonstration once again took to the streets. Chairman Peter Turton of the PAC called for a minute’s silence ‘for all the Irish political prisoners who have died in British jails’. Kevin Colfer of Sinn Féin (Britain) read a message from the Albany IRA men.130 Ironically, the three ‘martyrs’ executed in Manchester in November 1867 had been convicted of taking part in the successful springing of two high-ranking Fenians from a prison van. The memorial in Moston Cemetery was the heart of republican events in Manchester in the 1970s and 1980s.131 Marx, in fact, had organized a major public meeting in London seeking a stay in the execution of the doomed Fenians.132 Among those who attended Moston every Easter were leftists who appreciated that an Irish Fenian living in Britain, John Connell, had written the words to the socialist anthem ‘The Red Flag’.133

Baker, Guilfoyle and the two Cunninghams in Albany were kept in bare cells for twenty-three to twenty-four hours a day. Refusal to ‘slop out’ ensured that the staff regularly hosed them and their cells down in an ostensible and certainly robust attempt to improve sanitation. Infrequent escorts to the toilet obliged the men to dispose of human waste through the windows and, even if demeaning, the spreading of disinfectant in their cells was probably beneficial.134 Normal bedding was withdrawn and replaced with hard boards, provided only at night, covering a concrete base. Deprived of blankets during the day, the men had to wrap themselves in prison towels. Protesting prisoners were generally entitled to attend the chapel, but this fleeting relief from a tedious, fetid and claustrophobic routine was prevented by the authorities who alleged they had been disruptive. The repudiation of this allegation by chaplain Fr. Parry proved insufficient to secure the restoration of access. Although offered alternate religious services in a specially designated cell, the four avoided setting a precedent that was tantamount to a major compromise of principle.135 The Home Office, for its part, repeated in November 1978 that restrictions on attending Mass arose ‘because their behaviour has threatened the good order of the establishment’.136

A Home Office briefing document prepared ahead of the 27 November 1978 visit of Taoiseach Lynch to London misrepresented England’s ‘blanket protest’ situation as if it had arisen from a minor grievance by men with no political formation or aspirations:

Albany prison, on the Isle of Wight, has been particularly troubled in recent months by protests from Irish Republican prisoners. The point of contention has been the specially supervised visiting conditions applied in the interests of security to certain prisoners who present very high security risks. Not all Republican prisoners are subject to such visiting procedures, nor are all prisoners to whom the procedures apply Irish Republican prisoners. Certain Republican prisoners in Albany, however, have been protesting actively against the visiting arrangements since [25] April.

The protest started with a refusal by those concerned to work. Since then, they have also refused to go into the normal living accommodation in the prison, and, for certain periods, refused to collect their food, refused to use the normal sanitary facilities (a number of them have thrown the contents of their chamber pots at prison staff and over the floor of their cells) and, on occasions, refused to wear prison clothing. Where this behaviour has constituted offences against prison discipline, the offenders have been dealt with by the normal disciplinary procedures as any other prisoner behaving similarly would have been.137

Further discretionary pressure on the protesters was applied by means of restricting access to a newspaper to just one copy every two weeks. No personal property was allowed in the cells and mail deliveries were restricted to family members. Letters were removed by staff once they had been read and a single book a week was permitted on loan from the prison library.138 The authorities appeared confident of breaking the resolve of the Albany men to persevere and elected not to separate them by transfers or short-term lie-downs, an arguably justifiable invocation of Rule 43.

Relocating militants was not invariably without repercussions. Punter Bennett, however, was sent from Wormwood Scrubs to Strangeways to separate him from the inflexible Mick Murray. This shift had the knock on effect of prompting the transfer of Eddie Butler from Strangeways to Winson Green. The Castleconnell, County Limerick man had been held in solitary confinement since the temporary closure of Leicester Special Unit in February 1978, and it appeared as if greater utilization of the local jails under Rule 43 was increasingly common.139 In practical terms this ensured that Butler was held in isolation and subject to oppressive visiting conditions. Two ‘closed’ visits in the summer of 1978 and 1979 upset his family and matters only marginally improved from 8 May 1980 following the re-opening of Leicester SSU.140 Murray was isolated in Wormwood Scrubs by virtue of being segregated when on his personal protest. He was by no means the only IRA man capable or willing to act. Jerry Mealy was also held in the London jail’s solitary cells following transfer from Gartree in the aftermath of the October 1978 riot. In early December 1978 Mealy succeeded in entering a prison office with an iron bar and ‘completely demolished everything possible within reach before voluntarily handing the iron bar back to his guards’. Sinn Féin reported that Mealy ‘informed his guards that his action (demolition job) was his way of demonstrating his ‘solidarity’ with those picketing outside on behalf of all Irish POWs’.141 The unwritten IRA policy of avoiding direct physical attacks on prison staff in England was then observed. Mealy had no qualms about utilizing force if necessary. He had violently resisted arrest when grappled by police in 1973 and managed to punch the then Conservative Home Secretary Robert Carr during a prison visit.142

The IRA men in Wakefield wished to express support for Martin Brady, who was also languishing in segregation arising from the Gartree riot. As intended, the bizarre environment inherited from the F Wing’s days as England’s most infamous ‘Control Unit’ disconcerted the Belfastman:

You couldn’t walk over that white line [in the yard]. If you walked over the line, you were sent in. ‘Right, Brady, away you go’. That happened me many a time … You were walking in a circle, not thinking, you walked into someone else’s exercise yard. They think you are trying to do something. ‘Right, let’s go here’. It was a strict regime there. They came down heavy … You weren’t allowed cigarettes, you weren’t allowed read magazines and you weren’t allowed to get anything in. You were only allowed one letter a week … they took the bed off you at 8 a.m. until

7 p.m. at night. So you had nothing in your cell except a chair … When you got up you had your breakfast. Slopped out and did your exercises – press-ups etc. In the morning – the pipe was along the wall – in the winter it was freezing, in the summer it was boiling, but we got through that all right.143

The decision was taken that the republicans on the wings would engineer the means to join Brady in the block. On Christmas Day, 25 December 1978, Tony Clarke and Ray McLaughlin threatened to smash the windows of a staff office in C Wing before their unconventional wish was entertained. Similarly, Vince Donnelly, pulled the tie from a warder’s uniform in D Wing to provide a minimal pretext for joining his comrades. The largely peaceful demonstration had an unexpected sequel in that the strange behaviour of the IRA prisoners sparked a security operation in the Wakefield vicinity.144

The experience of most Irish republicans in English jails continued to be anomalous. In late 1978 a petition was handed into the British Embassy in Dublin calling for the release of Fr. Pat Fell on the grounds that he had been eligible for parole in April 1977. Signatories included Rev. Michael Diden, President of St. Patrick’s College, Maynooth, forty staff members and 500 students. Fr. Fell had been assistant priest at the All Souls’ Church in Coventry and was sentenced to twelve years for his activities as a senior IRA member in the sector. His more junior co-defendant, Frank Stagg, had died on hunger strike in Wakefield in February 1976.145 The FCO monitored the situation and offered to assist the British Embassy in Dublin ‘on how to react to enquiries about the petition’.146

Fr. Fell was ultimately freed in July 1981, by which time his case at Strasbourg was progressing slowly towards the victory achieved three years later.147 His profile had been relatively high in pro-republican sectors due to his clerical background and the incorrect acceptance by many that he was innocent. In New York, Michael Sheehan, columnist in the Clan na Gael paper Irish World, referenced his personal involvement in the campaign to emancipate IRA prisoners held in England in the mid-1940s. From September 1976, he interested himself in the fate of Fr. Fell and the privations endured by his English family. The story was subsequently front-page news.148 Action had been required in London when Frank Maguire MP lobbied the Home Office on behalf of Bishop Thomas Joseph Drury of Corpus Christi, Texas who wished to visit Fr. Fell on 25 August 1978. Drury was en route to Rome and staying with Sr. Clarke whom, it was noted, was ‘well known to P3 for her attempts to communicate with and visit IRA prisoners’. While Albany’s Catholic Chaplain, Fr. Parry, raised no objection, his colleague, Fr. Masterson, an acquaintance of the bishop, advised ‘he should not be permitted to visit Fell. He was apparently very pro-IRA, belonged to an American organization known as the [Ancient Order of] Hibernians, and had made some dangerous statements about the IRA in the American press’.149 Rev. Cosmas Korb, OFM, a New York associate of Sr. Clarke, had launched a letter-writing campaign on behalf of the priest in December 1979.150 Fr. Fell already had in excess of 300 contacts listed in his prison ‘letter-sheets’.151

The visit of Taoiseach Lynch to Prime Minister Callaghan in London on 27 November 1978 inspired a round of consultations between the Republic of Ireland Department of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and the Prison Department of the Home Office. Although occasioned by the necessity of face-to-face dialogue on the European Monetary System, it was appreciated that Lynch intended to ‘bring up’ the ‘treatment of Irish prisoners in Great Britain’.152 The British Embassy in Dublin had advised on 9 November that Ireland’s Minister for Foreign Affairs had been challenged by Neil Blaney TD if he was ‘aware that Irish political prisoners in British jails are still being held in solitary confinement under conditions which are an infringement of the Convention on Human Rights’. Swift of the DFA advised British diplomats that the question would be addressed in the Dáil on 15 November. This, coupled with ongoing queries emanating from the Irish Embassy in London, all but ensured Lynch was bound to request information in London.153 A briefing document was compiled in part from correspondence sent by Lord Harris to Joan Maynard in July, supplemented by a Prison Department document of 21 November attributing much of the underlying problems to ‘continuing claims made by their supporters outside prison that Irish Republicans convicted of criminal offences are “political” prisoners who should not be subject to the normal rules and regulations of prison life’.154

While the meeting of Lynch and Callaghan passed off without public discord, the Irish Embassy felt an obligation on 14 December 1978 to raise the treatment of Tyrone IRA prisoner Sean Campbell with the Republic of Ireland Department in Downing Street, London. David Blunt was informed that Campbell had cancelled a visit from his wife and three children in August 1978 when the Governor of Wandsworth refused to exercise his discretion to permit an extended time slot. Campbell regarded a counteroffer of an additional fifteen minutes for the reunion of a family separated for three years as unacceptable. The Embassy’s Administrative Attaché related the Irishman’s additional claim to have been denied permission to meet the Visiting Committee on 29 November 1978 where he intended to assert that ‘letters he had sent to his mother and brother had not been received by them’.155 Handwritten notes by Blunt acknowledged further serious allegations of impropriety, not least Campbell’s accusation that a letter posted to the Irish Embassy on 7 March 1978 was among the correspondence ‘destroyed by the Prison’.156 While awaiting comment from the Prison Department on a possible diplomatic incident, Blunt responded to the Embassy query by posting a photocopy of the Visiting Wandsworth Prison leaflet to their nearby Grosvenor Place address.157 The FCO and Irish Embassy omitted reference in their basic written exchanges to the highly germane fact that Campbell was party to a major ECHR case in Strasbourg and very much a ‘special’ Category A prisoner.158

By January 1979 the situation in Albany had gone from bad to worse. The republican magazine IRIS reported that the ‘barbaric treatment’ continued: ‘Screws are still hosing out the cells, the POWs and their bedding with hot water, depriving them of their chamber-pots, and causing undue delays in permitting toilet usage’. The four faced mail restrictions, twenty-three hour lock up and remained barred from attending Mass in the main chapel’.159 IRIS was edited by Fr. Parais O Duill, who had - first hand knowledge of the English prison system, arising from his efforts to save Frank Stagg’s life in 1976.160 He was also prominent in addressing injustice in Ireland. In March 1978 O Duill was denounced in the Special Criminal Court, Dublin, for his efforts to defend the four IRSP defendants framed by Irish authorities for the Sallins train robbery. His associate, Joe Stagg, brother of Frank, was also censured in the juryless court which had wrongly convicted the ‘IRSP 4’.161 O Duill’s organizational ability and experience of prison issues made him the ideal chair of the influential National H-Blocks/ Armagh Committee, which acted as the key co-ordinating body for protests inspired by the blanket protests and 1980–81 hunger strikes.162 His former IRA credentials lessened fears within the Republican Movement that persons interested primarily in opportunist ‘anti-imperialist’ politics lacking commitment to the Armed Struggle would dilute the campaign. Advocacy of ‘regard for human rights’ by O Duill in March 1980 posed no threat to concurrent republican efforts.163

Prisoners and Armed Struggle

‘The “Special Prisoners” in England’ feature was carried by Republican News in January 1979 and concentrated on the harshness endured by Martin Brady in Wakefield. Two significant points were made by ‘Oscair’, which effectively signalled the leadership’s policy towards the prisoners in England. Brady was cited as opining: ‘Conditions will not improve much until a victory has been achieved over the H-Block issue at home in Ireland’. This addressed the uncomfortable but obvious fact that the Long Kesh campaign was being prioritized over a potential drive to highlight the injustices of the Dispersal System. It was important, however, to stress that the prisoners in England were not seeking pre-eminence and, in fact, were fully behind the grim struggles in Long Kesh and Armagh. ‘Oscair’ balanced the de facto downgrading of the England campaign with a declaration that ‘The POWs in England must not be allowed to become the forgotten prisoners … they are in need of support and solidarity’.164 In Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Mike Duffy of Irish Northern Aid compensated by organizing a ‘Prisoners Writing Campaign’ which annually channelled thousands of letters and cards to IRA members imprisoned in Ireland and England.165 Quantities of Irish People and other Irish-American titles arrived into the English prisons where they were widely distributed, despite carrying detailed, uncensored ‘war news’ columns of a type eschewed by mainstream media.166 From a British perspective, the Irish People newspaper was regarded as: ‘Essentially Sinn Féin’s An Phoblacht with any left wing comment laundered out so not to alarm more conservative Irish-Americans’.167

Statements from the PAC and RCG were increasingly uncompromising with respect to other groupings with whom they cooperated from time to time on the Irish question. The extremity of Long Kesh and ‘similar conditions’ in Albany increased their opposition to the perceived ‘bourgeois’ equivocation and moderation of the International Tribunal organization in particular.168 The numerically small and avowedly ‘independent’ PAC was also concerned with ensuring it was not perceived as having a ‘special relationship’ with the more resourced RCG, despite close collaboration on several demonstrations and newspaper distribution arrangements prior to June 1979.169 In restating the clear political agenda of the PAC, Kaye commented on 14 November 1978 that: ‘The campaign of Irish prisoners for Prisoner of War Status in both England and Ireland is a crucial issue. Prisoners in this country have never had political status, yet they have never accepted criminalisation. The campaign of the prisoners in the H Block and the campaign of the women prisoners in Armagh have brought that central issue to a climax and to a crisis. There can be no standing on the sidelines, no impartiality’.170

The prospect of generating political pressure on the ground in England by uniting a spectrum of left wing organizations on the prisons theme ran into more serious difficulties in December 1978. Bomb attacks on commercial premises in Liverpool, Bristol, Coventry, Southampton and London on 17 and 18 December injured several civilians and fuelled a backlash against IRA tactics by groups which had hitherto offered conditional support. The blasts followed a lull in IRA actions and there had been no sustained series of major incidents since January/ February 1976.171 Criticism from Socialist Worker and pro-People’s Democracy Socialist Challenge was not unexpected, but the contention by the Worker’s Revolutionary Party that the bombings were counterproductive struck a raw nerve. WRP organ The Newsline called on 19 December 1978 for ‘IRA militants to immediately and unconditionally reject these terror tactics and those who advocate them’. This not only distanced the formerly staunch WRP from the IRA but encouraged activists to breach the constitution of Óglaigh na hÉireann.172 Clann na hÉireann, representing the Official Republican Movement in Britain, sensed the discomfort of Sinn Féin in England and criticized the party’s efforts, in what they described as ‘frantically looking to the growing rag bag of Irish ultra-left organizations without finding the answers they seek’.173 As with the CPGB, individual CNH members who did not migrate into the IRSP in the late 1970s were far more sympathetic towards those waging the ‘armed struggle’.

The stance of the WRP contrasted with the unambiguous support offered by the PAC which, in a Republican News notice advertising the Bloody Sunday commemoration, declared its view that ‘only an unremitting struggle against British Imperialism will bring Peace and Justice for the Irish people’.174 The PAC message was printed directly above one placed by the IRA in Wakefield which expressed gratitude to those who participated in the commemoration and called for ‘all organizations to unite on the issue of supporting the war for national liberation in Ireland’.175 Inserts from the Irelande Libre group in Paris and the French Friends of Ireland could not cancel out the reverses sustained in relation to the English radicals. A subsequent assessment theorized that the PTA had minimized Irish engagement in political campaigns in England and ‘left the field clear for the representatives of small groups who had no base in the Irish population’.176 Certain ‘far left’ elements, it was claimed, retained an ‘anti-Republican prejudice’, which complicated the task of building support for the ‘troops out now’ position advocated by Sinn Féin.177

The National Joint Unit at New Scotland Yard, comprising detectives of the Metropolitan and detached provincial police Special Branches, coordinated ‘enquiries and applications from police forces in Great Britain concerning people held under prevention of terrorism legislation’.178 Liaisons with the Heathrow Airport - based National Ports Office, Home Office, MI5 and individuals within Ireland’s Special Branch provided scope for comprehensive surveillance, tracking and interdiction of known suspects. However, Irish communities in Britain believed that the danger of unjust convictions remained acute. This was illustrated on 26 January 1979 when thirteen Irish citizens were seized under the PTA in Braintree, Essex and remanded to Brixton. Those detained were members of the local ‘Irish Society’ whom the prompt combined efforts of lawyers Mike Fisher and Michael Mansfield ultimately kept out of prison. Fr. Brian Brady and Sr. Sarah Clarke responded with urgency to the situation while providing humanitarian assistance.179

Sr. Clarke mobilized many of her overseas contacts to intervene on behalf of those detained. A link provided by Fr. Faul in Paris alerted Rita Mullen of the Irish National Caucus in Washington DC. The INC was headed by Fr. Sean McManus, brother of Fermanagh ex-Republican MP Frank McManus. Such proactivity was not universally appreciated. Brixton’s security vetted Catholic Chaplain, Fr. Evans, accused the nun of ‘bringing the Catholic Church into disrepute’.180 It transpired that the arrests had been sparked by the hunt for Gerry Tuite, a leading IRA activist from Cavan held responsible for several major incidents in 1978. He had stayed with one of those arrested in Braintree and was linked to a car hired in the area which was later found laden with explosives. Two small explosions had damaged police property in Braintree on 11 May 1977, but none of those detained faced charges in this respect.181 Lack of physical evidence and confessions, as well as innocence of illegality, ensured that the Old Bailey jury rejected allegations that the thirteen were engaged in a conspiracy. Numerous persons charged in connection with IRA activities in England spent up to a year in maximum-security prisons prior to being tried and acquitted.182

Although less contentious in terms of media reportage in England, a wave of IRA attacks on prison officers in the North of Ireland was a major concern for imprisoned republicans and those by whom they were guarded. Ray McLaughlin was questioned about the IRA strategy in January 1979 in York Crown Court when giving evidence against Hull staff who had assaulted Irish and British prisoners. His argument that those working in the Six Counties were acceptable targets by virtue of being armed ‘mercenaries who had chosen to take part in the attempted criminalization of Irish political prisoners’ only marginally differentiated them from their colleagues in the Dispersal System.183 Ultimately, the IRA decided that killing prison staff in England was an inappropriate use of resources and would probably lead to the deaths of imprisoned comrades. The organization was certainly capable of taking such severe action at will. On 3 February 1979 the Belfast Brigade shot Patrick Mackin, a Liverpool-Irish former head of the prison officers training school in Millisle, County Down.184 There were then 350 IRA prisoners ‘on the blanket’ in Long Kesh enduring horrendous conditions of confinement, with many being routinely assaulted by staff.185

The IRA demonstrated that it had the personnel and ability in England to stage attacks of much greater complexity than close-quarter assassinations in early 1979. On the night of 17–18 January 1979, a bomb detonated at the Texas Oil terminal at Canvey Island, Essex, ruptured a tank containing 750,000 gallons of highly inflammable aviation fuel. Another bomb blasted a gasholder close to the Blackwall Tunnel, Greenwich, sending 300-foot flames into the sky. Secondary fires and explosions in the complex caused further damage; massive destruction was probably only averted at Canvey Island by the failure of the blasts to ignite the large quantity of aviation fuel which had flooded into a safety moat. Another bomb was found partly concealed on the M6 in Leicestershire, evidence of a considerable and diverse IRA offensive reach. A hoax warning, delivered with formal IRA credentials, threatened the Kennington Oval gasholder.186 Paul Holmes was among the IRA prison population who had persistently advocated such tactics: ‘They were an imperial power, and the only way that you could ever begin to rock them was to take the war to them’.187

The surge of attacks was featured on the front page of the launch copy of An Phoblacht/ Republican News, a weekly Sinn Féin newspaper which had just amalgamated the two main publications of the Provisionals.188 Clann na hÉireann in Britain condemned the bombings and claimed: ‘The strategic placing … show that they are quite prepared to wipe out hundreds, and even thousands of British workers at one fell swoop’.189 This negative analysis, derived from often lethal factional hostility, was belied by the IRA’s selection of high value, comparatively remote economic and communications targets, and their demonstrable ability to detonate substantial devices in virtually any location. Warnings had been phoned to the Press Association ahead of attacks, which cost in excess of one million pounds’ worth of destruction. However, no casualties were inflicted. The Metropolitan Police, who defused one of the three London carbombs emplaced in December 1978, incurred additional costs by deploying ‘hundreds of extra officers’ in central London.190

Ray McLaughlin attended trial from Wakefield where the atmosphere remained particularly tense after months of direct and indirect clashes with staff. By January 1979 the immediate demands of the IRA group had narrowed to four points: normal visiting conditions, removal of four men from the E-List, access to educational programmes and use of the gym.191 Agitation took many forms in the early months of the year, including the use of incendiaries. This also occurred in Parkhurst where the IRA were suspected without being directly credited of carrying out a series of destructive attacks. On 1 March a fire was started in the pantry, followed by another more serious blaze ten days later which ‘swept through the library’. Newport firemen responded and contained the conflagration within forty minutes, although its occurrence three hours after lock up suggested the use of timed incendiaries, an IRA hallmark.192

Physical fitness emerged as a major preoccupation of republican prisoners, primarily for the inherent aerobic and anaerobic benefits of maintaining health. Training was also used to foster discipline, self-regulated routine and bodily strength, qualities which imprisoned republicans wished to display to their captors. When McLaughlin returned from a month long ‘lie down’ in Armley in May 1979, his comrades pressed him to take a ‘strenuous’ one-hour run around the small prison yard with the ultra-fit Belfastman Tony ‘Red Flash’ Clarke. He recalled that the IRA wanted to establish that ‘irrespective of whether they excluded us from the gymnasium or sent us on coolers, we intended to stay in top shape’.193 Clarke was regarded as one of the best long - distance runners in the English prisons, while McLaughlin and Jimmy Ashe were also very athletic. Other Wakefield prisoners, not least Vince Donnelly and Paul Norney, were physically powerful and utilized their prowess when necessary.194

Brian Keenan

The IRA suffered a blow on 20 March 1979 when a car carrying GHQ member Brian Keenan was intercepted by the RUC near Banbridge, County Down, on the Dublin to Belfast road. Although reported in terms of a chance occurrence, it was actually a planned operation under the remit of ‘Operation Hawk’, a major RUC Special Branch drive against the upper tier of the IRA.195 It was claimed that seventy members of the Special Branch and Special Patrol Group were involved, not counting British Intelligence resources.196 Martin McGuinness was travelling south in the car behind Keenan and was detained for several days along with two companions. It has been claimed that Keenan had come into focus due to the heavy surveillance on McGuinness, and that the decision to spring the trap in Down arose from the availability of a warrant under the Explosives Substances Act, which had been secretly processed by the police in England.197 Writers Liam Clarke and Kathryn Johnston noted the improbable theory that Keenan had been set up for arrest by associates and that his detention paved the way for Martin McGuinness and Gerry Adams to overcome internal opposition to the winding down of the Armed Struggle.198

Keenan had a markedly different interpretation of what occurred outside Banbridge and believed that he had survived an assassination attempt: ‘They tried to write me off with a truck’. He averred that supporting police vehicles only deployed to pull his car over when an emergency defensive driving manoeuvre avoided a potentially deadly collision.199 It was subsequently reported that Keenan’s fingerprints had been found in a London safe house used by Brendan Dowd’s ASU in 1974–5 and he was regarded as the director of the intense IRA offensive then underway in England. Following fruitless questioning in Castlereagh Interrogation Centre by the notorious Harry Taylor of the RUC Special Branch, Keenan was flown in a military helicopter to London on 23 March.200 The flight to a Battersea landing pad was not without incident, and Keenan was amused when two RAF fighter jets buzzed the helicopter as it crossed the Irish Sea at low altitude.201 Interrogation in Paddington Green, during which he remained silent, took an unusual turn when he was questioned about links to Russian Special Forces, Libya and the Algerian air force. This proved to be a line of argument advanced by the prosecution at trial to present him as a highly dangerous man connected to an ‘axis of terror’. Brian Rose Smith and Michael Mansfield acted for his defense.202 Bow Street Magistrates Court remanded him in custody on 26 March to answer charges of ‘conspiracy to cause explosions’ in England, and he was sent to Brixton to await trial in June 1980.203 Keenan was posthumously described as being ‘the principal organizer of the bombing campaign that rocked London in the mid-1970s’.204

Other factors connecting Keenan to the 1970s’ England campaign were explicitly commented on following his death in May 2008. In 2010, retired RUC Detective Superintendent Alan Simpson elaborated on his previously more guarded published references to Keenan by naming him in relation to the December 1973 abduction of prominent West-German industrialist and consul Thomas Niedermayer from his Belfast residence. Niedermayer was seized by the IRA to increase pressure on the British Government to repatriate the ‘Belfast Ten’ group, several of whom were on hunger strike in the Dispersal System following sentencing for the March 1973 car-bomb attacks in London. In an unexpected and drastic turn of events, the unfortunate German perished from natural causes when in IRA captivity and was secretly buried.205 Simpson’s RUC and British Intelligence sources underpinned an additional claim that Keenan had in 1973 travelled to ‘Libya, Lebanon, Syria and East Germany in a quest for arms. He spoke with Colonel Gaddafi’.206 Similar points were made at his London trial seven years later, although nothing of substance was then established, and the well-travelled Keenan regarded the more fanciful assertions as ‘crazy stuff’.207 Former IRA Chief of Staff Eamon Doherty and Denis McInerney had carried out many of the international activities solely attributed to Brian Keenan.

Rise of the Conservative Party

The IRA had spent much of the 1970s waging a violent campaign against unstable Labour governments. Few within the leadership of the Labour Party dared to grapple with the Irish crisis and Tony Benn, one of the most outspoken figureheads, created some disquiet in early 1979 when he privately raised the prospect of a ‘fundamental review’ of British strategy in a letter to the Prime Minister. Callaghan’s advisors suggested

that a public debate of a ‘Troops Out option’ was highly dangerous in an election year and might invite an escalation of IRA attacks in England.208 The discussion demonstrated the continuing concern in British government circles regarding local aspects of the conflict in Ireland. In this instance, the lexicon of debate was that formulated by British-based allies of Irish republicans.

James Callaghan’s government fell on a vote of no confidence on 28 March 1979, heralding a General Election which Labour had little chance of winning. While the tide of support was inexorably running out for the Labour administration, the trigger for its dramatic fall was centred on the maltreatment of Irish prisoners. The appearance of the Bennett Report in March 1979 discomforted the generally amenable Gerry Fitt MP who cited its findings on the systematic brutalization of suspected republicans by the RUC as the reason for his abstaining during the crucial vote.209 Frank Maguire also abstained on 28 March, as he had long threatened, in order to protest the manner in which IRA prisoners were being treated by the British authorities in England and Ireland.210 The net result was that the Labour Government collapsed in 1979 on its handing of Irish political prisoners less than two years after an Irish Labour/ Fine Gael Coalition had been rejected by the Twenty-Six County electorate due to similar grounds.211 Although only one of several factors in play, the formerly automatic pro-Labour votes of the Irish MPs for all intents and purposes equated to the balance of power.212 Election events organised by the British Labour Party were disrupted across England by the RCG, for which they were lambasted by former TD Conor Cruise O’Brien in The Observer. In Croydon, Seamus O Mathuna received a cold reception from Merlyn Rees upon raising the subject of the H-Block crisis.213

The political landscape changed on 4 May 1979 with the resounding victory of the Conservative Party, which brought Margaret Thatcher to power as Prime Minister. The prospects of republicans making significant political headway with the most right wing British government in decades appeared remote. Thatcher’s ascent had shortly followed a major personal setback when Irish socialist republicans blew up Airey Neave on 30 March 1979. Neave was not only her closest mentor during her ousting of previous party leader Edward Heath, but was intended to become Secretary for State for Northern Ireland. The sense of outrage within the establishment was sharpened by the fact that Neave had been killed by the INLA within the precincts of the House of Commons. Soviet - manufactured plastic explosives were detonated by a sophisticated mercury tilt switch which activated as Neave’s car ascended the exit ramp of Westminster’s underground carpark.214 The INLA had originally targeted the incumbent Northern Secretary Roy Mason in his Yorkshire Labour constituency but switched their focus to his equally virulent Conservative counterpart during the election the which Tories appeared poised to win.215 The organization had been in existence under various flags of convenience from 8 December 1974, but was only proscribed in Britain on 3 July 1979 under Section 1 (3) of the PTA (Temporary Provisions) Act 1976.216 Neave was one of the most vocal Conservatives to publicly oppose British military withdrawal from Ireland and evidently believed that the IRA could be defeated.217 Thatcher recalled his sudden loss in 1983, having survived an IRA attempt on her own life when in Downing Street: ‘For some reason the death of a friend or family member by violence leaves an even deeper scar’.218 In hindsight, moderate Tory John Wells told Thatcherite MP Alan Clark that ‘the historic consequences of Airey’s assassination could never be fully assessed’ and had resulted in ‘errors of judgment’ in appointments to her first Cabinet in 1979.219

The killing shocked outgoing Prime Minister Jim Callaghan, who, on 2 April 1979 addressed his National Executive Council to warn that arising from ‘the political assassinations that have taken place, particularly Airey Neave’s, there is a risk to NEC members’. Yet Mason, openly despised by dangerous enemies in Ireland, had been spared by the INLA and no Labour Party politician was ever shot or bombed to death by the IRA. Callaghan’s spiel digressed into the ‘issue of Northern Ireland and terrorism’, resulting in an extraordinary late office - declaration that opened blue water between the stated views of a man facing enforced retirement and the numerous courageous initiatives taken by his predecessor Harold Wilson: ‘We should have as little difference as possible between ourselves and the Tories. I think there should be talks with both parties to discuss’. Tony Benn MP, a genial and perceptive diarist, was perturbed by this improbable conflation of incident and arguably pusillanimous bipartisanship on a matter of principle and practicality.220

Extensive use was made of the PTA to question, often harshly in respect to Paddington Green, IRSP members living in England. Deirdre O’Shea, a left wing political activist with IRSP connections, lost several teeth when assaulted in the London police base. In December 1984 she was deeply engaged in efforts to protect her veteran activist mother, Dr. Maire ‘Betty’ O’Shea, from prosecution in an INLA - linked operation in England.221 Nick Mullen, student radical and a significant figure in IRA logistics in England in the late 1980s, was also detained for two days in Paddington Green in 1979 arising from the Neave assassination. Mullen was then involved with the IRSP, in which he encountered leading socialist republican personalities Naomi Brennan and Gerry Roche.222 Personal connections heightened the sense of grievance for IRA prisoners in England. Billy Armstrong knew and respected the IRSP/ INLA leader Ronnie Bunting, who was killed by a pro-British death squad on 15 October 1980.223 Bunting was one of a number of prominent IRSP and H-Block campaigners shot in 1979–1981, not least Noel Lyttle, Miriam Daly, John Turnly and Bernadette McAliskey. The involvement of British military personnel in collusion with embedded Loyalist auxiliaries was widely suspected, particularly when the integral involvement of UDA commander John McMichael was revealed.224 Another leading UDA member and British agent, Robert McConnell, claimed SAS assistance in the assassination of Turnly.225

Suspicions of such illicit co-operation were raised by Billy Armstrong and others in England regarding the fatal shooting of National H-Block Committee member and QUB lecturer Miriam Daly on 26 June 1980.226 Daly had cogently presented both academic and personal analyses of the Irish crisis in Newfoundland, Massachusetts and elsewhere to an extent that her advocacy induced concern from well wishers. If locating her home address did not present a major intelligence - gathering challenge for resourced opponents, the selection of a time when she could be accessed, interrogated and fatally shot without incurring reaction from locally positioned official combatants paid to spy on such prominent IRSP personalities indicated, at best, that uncommon luck had coincided with gross incompetence. The unusually professional modus operandi of Loyalists in such attacks struck imprisoned IRA men as demonstrative of direct British assistance. Co-operation between Loyalists and members of the British Army, UDR and RUC was evident in numerous other instances during the course of the Troubles.227 When considering frequently random killings of Ulster Nationalists, Armstrong noted in March 1980: ‘I think the B[ritish] A[rmy] and RUC have an agreement with the Loyalists to stay out of a certain area for a certain period of time’.228 Self-confessed counter-insurgent, Albert ‘Ginger’ Baker, confirmed the reality of this scenario to several IRA prisoners whom he encountered in jail in England in the 1980s.229

The resurgent Conservative administration, acclaimed by Unionist MPs, was not diverted from its rigid Irish policy following the death of Neave. In July 1980 Thatcher described as ‘disgraceful’ a proposal of the Labour Party’s NEC to investigate allegations of maltreatment in Six County prisons. Although criticized by ex-Prime Minister James Callaghan on the grounds that an enquiry could be misinterpreted as Labour acceptance of republican claims, Kevin McNamara, MP for Kingston upon Hull, Central, and John Maynard, MP for Sheffield, Brightside, urged support. The issue was raised in the context of an imminent Commons debate on a White Paper on devolving power in the North of Ireland. Within months the studied failure in London to address the crisis in Long Kesh, Armagh and Crumlin Road prisons had dire consequences for Anglo-Irish history.230

Confronting the reinvigorated IRA inside Britain’s prisons and cities fell to William Whitelaw who, against expectations, was appointed by the Conservatives as Home Secretary on 15 May 1979.231 Given his background as Secretary of State for Northern Ireland in the most violent years of the Troubles, 1972–73, Whitelaw was well versed for a politician on the nature of the IRA threat in its totality. In July 1972 he had met much of the republican leadership in London alongside Martin McGuinness and Gerry Adams who, by 1979, were both influential in such circles.232 Humphrey Atkins assumed the challenging post of heading the NIO at a time when the implications of the IRA’s ‘Long War’ strategy for the ‘Ulsterisation’ policy were becoming apparent in both Britain and Ireland.233 With over 350 republican prisoners on protest in Long Kesh in the spring of 1979, the priority of Sinn Féin’s ‘Smash H-Block’ campaign in Ireland was clearly determined. In an inversion of standard perspective, the party held out the example of England as a warning of how the situation might unfold in the Six Counties: ‘Remember the lingering deaths in English dungeons of Frank Stagg, Michael Gaughan, Noel Jenkinson and Sean O’Connell? Do not let the British kill any of the heroic “blanket men”’.234

Thatcher’s administration attempted to establish common economic and political ground with the conservative Republican presidency of Ronald Reagan in the United States. Yet, ironically, the administration was eventually pressurised by the Irish American into addressing the situation in the Six Counties. The Irish question perennially troubled progressive forces across the Atlantic. Several key legal test cases taken in the USA during Thatcher’s Downing Street years were impacted by the IRA campaign in England. In August 1978, Pete ‘The Para’ McMullen, an ex-British Army paratrooper from Derry who was wanted in England in connection with the IRA incendiary bombing of Claro Barracks, Ripon, Yorkshire on 26 March 1974, defeated efforts to extradite him to Britain from San Francisco, California. He had entered the country on a false passport in April 1978 following a stint in Portloaise for IRA membership. His lawyers asserted that there was a precedent for rejecting extradition on the grounds that his offence was political in character. The Californian court concurred, noting Britain’s derogation from international conventions arising from the situation in Ireland.235 Any such case in North America, however, distracted attention from the main ‘secondary’ zone of IRA related prison battles: England. By the early 1980s, a wide range of international jurisdictional concerns competed for the finite resources of the non-violent annexes of the Republican Movement worldwide.236

Among the details supplied to defence lawyers in the McMullen case was material collated by Paul O’Dwyer highlighting the ‘brutal assault’ on Fr. Pat Fell and hunger strike deaths of Michael Gaughan and Frank Stagg in English prisons in 1974–76.237 When the definitive ruling on McMullen was given by the District Court of San Francisco on 9 May 1979, it was reported that the case was ‘the first time that evidence has been admitted in an American Court concerning the jail conditions and the brutal treatment inflicted on the eighty-odd Irish prisoners in British jails’. O’Dwyer persuasively argued that extradition to Great Britain would be ‘in contravention of the “cruel and inhuman” provisions of the United States Constitution’.238 American focus on England competed with news from the much more violent Six Counties, yet was stimulated by such events as the annual National Graves Association Field Day at Gaelic Park in the Bronx, New York. Manager J.K. O’Donnell had hosted fundraisers for supporters of IRA prisoners in Ireland and England since the early 1950s in which the Irish Freedom Committee, Irish Republican Aid Committee, Irish Northern Aid and other bodies had generated substantial income. The 24 June 1979 gathering in the south Bronx was dedicated to fundraising for a memorial to the ‘trinity of Mayo martyrs – Sean McNeela, Michael Gaughan and Frank Stagg, who died on hunger strike in Irish and English jails to secure political treatment and a measure of human dignity’.239 Their deaths were annually observed, due in no small part to the common Mayo origins of leading New York lawyers Paul O’Dwyer and Frank Durkan, as well as their occasional client, IRA gunrunner George Harrison.240 Tom Regan of the Clan na Gael descended Terence MacSwiney Club in Jenkintown, Philadelphia, was also a veteran of the War of Independence-era Mayo IRA.241 In Cleveland, Ohio, another major Mayo emigrant destination, left wing INA leader Jack Kilroy hailed from a family which numbered 1940s IRA hunger striker Sean McNeela.242

Parkhurst, 22–24 March 1979

The Parkhurst protest began on the evening of 22 March 1979 when Sean Kinsella, Martin Coughlan, Gerry Small and Eddie Byrne got onto the roof of D Wing along with one non-political prisoner. Expert roof saboteur Roy Walsh, a tiler by trade, could not participate by virtue of being closely confined in the Punishment Block, although the attack by breaking through a skylight had been carefully planned. The men used a purpose-built ladder to get into position and caused extensive damage by stripping off tiles and hurling them to the ground.243 Walsh had advised on an efficient methodology of loosening entire rows of tiles which had not been properly nailed in position and drilling holes in those that were well embedded to maximize the cost and effort of replacement.244 Mick Sheehan had helped construct the ladder in the prison’s engineering workshop and reported sick on the morning of the protest in order to be in position to provide those heading for the roof with blankets and food.245 They acted to raise publicity on the conditions in H-Blocks, as well as the use of long-term solitary confinement against comrades in England.246 Mainstream news reports covered a secondary purpose of highlighting ongoing frustration at the poor quality of meals supplied in Parkhurst, an issue which had led to periodic bouts of fasting by hundreds of men since December 1978. The IRA contingent in Parkhurst were aware that this aspect of the protest ‘went down, very, very well with the other prisoners’, some of whom they assisted with private and legal correspondence.247 The republicans had also mounted seven-day fasts in support of repatriation and political status in February and November 1978.248

On 11 March 1979, the Republican Movement cited British Government statistics to claim 360 adherents were ‘on the blanket’ in Long Kesh while thirty-eight female members participated in Armagh Jail. Six prisoners in England were explicitly identified: Tony Cunningham, Liam Baker, Busty Cunningham and Tipp Guilfoyle in Albany, Mick Murray in Wormwood Scrubs and Punter Bennett in Strangeways, Manchester.249 Tony Cunningham had lost close to 50 per cent of his bodyweight since being imprisoned for IRA activities in the Greater London area.250 If the Parkhurst solidarity stunt was not as well noted as the ‘token protest’ of remand prisoners in Crumlin Road Prison, the incident, nonetheless, received press coverage.251 In a gesture not calculated to assuage the concerns of the Home Office, Sr. Sarah Clarke, banned from entering the Dispersal System, was observed outside the complex ‘waving up’ at the IRA men.252

In keeping with past rooftop occupations, the Parkhurst IRA men unfurled banners referencing the major issues they wished to publicize. Two adjacent wings were immediately evacuated, giving lie to an unconvincing staff statement which claimed that the general body of the prisoners were unsympathetic.253 In fact, approximately 100 prisoners refused meals in order to peaceably convey their support.254 Walsh was adept at traversing and deconstructing slated rooftops. His advice and rudimentary training in sabotage techniques increased the efficacy of IRA roof invasions. The protesters ceased hurling slates to the ground at midnight but resumed their systematic destruction at 8.00 a.m. on 23 March. Power hoses were used in an ineffectual bid to dislodge or inhibit the men. When the group believed they had taken the action as far as practicable they surrendered on 24 March.255 A stark official digest published in July 1980 purposefully concealed the agency of the IRA, if not the seriousness of the episode: ‘One major demonstration at Parkhurst prison lasted three days and involved five prisoners who caused £50,000 worth of damage and rendered two wings of the prison unfit for habitation’.256 The intact C Wing, hitherto used for Dr. Cooper’s controversial experimental programme for prisoners with psychiatric issues, had to be pressed into service to house the maximum-security population. Improved sanitary facilities, not least showers, were acquired in consequence by those relocated from the antiquated and partially destroyed wings. Former occupants of C Wing selected for retention in Parkhurst were transferred into the Hospital Wing where no structured research could be undertaken. Ronnie McCartney, shifted from the Strong Box of Hull Prison, had threatened to resist incarceration in C Wing until its new role was explained.257

This level of impact, and its Irish political origination, probably explained why the punishments meted out to the five men in 1979 were unusual in character. Although legally entitled to impose terms of cellular or ‘solitary’ confinement, the Board of Visitors elected to instead nominate periods of ‘loss of privileges’ and ‘non-associative labour’. This was tantamount to solitary confinement given that the 120 days spent in the Punishment Block did not technically constitute the traditional sanction. It was assumed by republicans that this represented a new degree of guile in the administration of punishment. Tellingly, the only non-political prisoner involved received just twenty-eight days, whereas the IRA men each lost 112 days’ remission.258 Boards retained much discretion and the Home Office claimed to have ‘urged’ rather than instructed compliance with revised regulations in 1977.259 Sheehan’s role was not exposed but he was quickly shifted to Wormwood Scrubs to spend seven and a half months in solitary.260

Reception staff at Parkhurst exacted a minor measure of revenge on Walsh on 3 April 1979 by seizing the vast majority of his record collection during his transfer into Wormwood Scrubs. He repaid their malign attention by initiating a further set of official correspondence with the Home Office which had to be processed by the Under Secretary of State. Using a ‘Petition Form’ that made no reference to the extraordinary context in which his move occurred, Walsh noted: ‘I was transferred on Home Office instruction … On passing through Reception at Parkhurst, the Reception Officer removed from my possession 34 LP (long-playing) records’ on the technical grounds that only nine had been listed on his property sheet and they could, therefore, be confiscated.261 The response of 11 May 1979 confirmed that the Secretary of State was ‘not prepared’ to return his albums.262 Walsh learned on 29 May 1979 that while solicitors Woodford & Ackroyd of Southampton were unable to pursue his mooted case with the European Court, Alastair Logan of George E Baker & Co, Guildford, had consented to add his complaint to those already in preparation at his office.263

Hull convictions

The 1976 Hull riot created English legal history in York Crown Court on 15 January 1979 when Justice Boreham conceded that police background checks could be conducted to ensure that no juror had a criminal record. Sixty potential jurors had their names submitted to Central Criminal Records delaying the start to proceedings for over two hours.264 Prosecutor Peter Taylor QC claimed that the thirteen defendants had assaulted prisoners in a ‘deliberate exercise in retribution’.265 Evidence on 17 January from one former Hull staff member then working in Wakefield claimed that the IRA had been ‘in the forefront of the riot’ and ‘still had channels of communication from prison to the outside world … IRA prisoners regarded themselves as prisoners of war’.266 This apparent bid to highlight the extenuating circumstances in play revealed something of the perceived role of the state employees, eight of whom were found guilty on 4 April 1979 of ‘conspiracy to assault’ prisoners after the riot. All received token suspended sentences from Judge Boreham. Four co-defendants and Assistant Governor Douglas McCombe were acquitted in rulings which lessened the impression that the violence of prison staff at Hull had been co-ordinated from the top. Brian Cooke, a Principal Officer and chair of Hull branch of the POA, expressed disappointment at the outcome and predicted that the ‘attitude’ of his members towards prisoners ‘would harden’.267 Dick Pooley of PROP, by contrast, welcomed the unusual convictions which he believed to be historic in their implications.268 The PAC were less enthusiastic and commented that a small number of those responsible for beating prisoners had received suspended sentences of ‘derisory’ proportions. If, as the PROP enquiry in London alleged, Irish and black prisoners had suffered disproportionate injury, the precedent of moderate punishment established in York did not auger well.269 The Observer queried in relation to those convicted: ‘Can the Prison Department claim to have any disciplinary standards at all if the men remain prison officers?’270

Gerry Cunningham, who had for tactical reasons set aside IRA reticence regarding court environs to give evidence at the trial, felt vindicated despite the partial nature of the legal victory. He had contacted his solicitor, Alastair Logan, and said ‘Right, ok, take the case to court. These people were effectively criminals at large at the time they made their statements against me and I want my thirteen months [loss of] remission back’. Eventually, in the face of obstruction from the Board of Visitors, Cunningham was apprised that he was entitled to make periodic requests for the restoration of remission. Whereas the Tyrone man was willing to demand the lost time, he refused to seek it by the demeaning avenue of repeated BOV applications. This principled and politically informed stance ensured that Cunningham spent thirteen months longer in jail than was necessary.271 He was ultimately and politely urged to exit Long Lartin in November 1988, a jail where he gained considerable influence among the prisoner population.272

The verdicts in York followed closely on the re-opening of Hull after a long period of renovation necessitated by the riot. Governor Parr was reinstated in what was interpreted by prisoners as a provocative move on the part of the Home Office. This view gained credence when the PAC ascertained, on the basis of reports from IRA prisoners transferred into Hull, that the stringent policies which had helped spark the riot were still extant. In the context of the minimal chastisement of men found guilty of assaulting inmates, republicans anticipated further grievances. Andy Mulryan, Ronnie McCartney and James ‘Punter’ Bennett were in Hull by May 1979, along with the innocent Dick McIlkenny of the Birmingham Six.273 A minor fracas in C Wing over recreational facilities had already occurred without detriment to the administrators. McCartney followed a stay in the Punishment Block with a twenty-eight day ‘lie down’ in Armley and it was reported that the slightest infringement in Hull resulted in fourteen days’ solitary confinement. With the doubling of staff on the wings from two to four, the risk of detection was raised in what remained a cloistered community.274 When, in July 1979, Joan Maynard MP sought statistical information on breaches of Prison Rules at Hull in 1978, Whitelaw responded with an unconvincing claim that such data was ‘not readily available’.275 Minute details regarding Category A prisoners were, in fact, meticulously logged by dedicated staff members and available to members of the Home Office ‘Category A Committee’.

Martin Brady, O/C of the IRA prisoners in Hull at the time of the riot, was returned to A Wing of the Yorkshire prison. His first impression was that the wing was being used as a ‘punishment’ area for ‘anyone that was unruly’ and that the prison as a whole was ‘worse’ than before.276 Paul Hill was also transferred back to Hull and was in Brady’s company when a very serious assault occurred in the TV room. An Australian prisoner reputed to have killed another inmate in Wakefield was badly burned when a man he had angered threw a pot of boiling water mixed with sugar over his body. The rudimentary facilities of the infirmary proved insufficient to treat the wounds inflicted and the Australian was quickly taken by ambulance to an outside hospital. Hill had noticed the attacker preparing the infusion in the kitchen but heeded Brady’s warning to ‘stay away from this’.277

Jackie Kaye addressed a Conference on European Political Prisoners hosted by Sinn Féin in Liberty Hall, Dublin, on 21–23 April 1979. Attention was drawn to the PTA, which had already resulted in the deportation of around 200 Irish people from Britain and 4,000 temporarily detained.278 Pat McCarthy of the National Council for Civil Liberties in Britain appeared in a private capacity and explained how the PTA was being used to process exclusion orders against defence witnesses in political trials and increasingly targeted Britons who had protested Westminster’s policy in Ireland. Des Warren, a communist trade unionist whose activism had resulted in prosecution for illegal picketing, addressed the theme. Warren was one of the ‘Shrewsbury Three’ jailed in 1973 and was widely regarded in consequence as a former political prisoner.279 Fellow ‘Shrewsbury Three’ member, trade unionist turned actor Ricky Tomlinson, was less tolerant of mixing with IRA Volunteers in prison.280

Maintaining a physical presence in locations where IRA prisoners were held was an ongoing problem. Despite the best efforts of the small Tyneside Irish Solidarity Campaign, it required the input from Birmingham Sinn Féin’s Pearse/ McDaid cumann to bring the numbers protesting outside Durham on 27 May up to a modest fifty. The Midlands delegation, aided by members of the city’s UTOM group, traversed 430 miles to attend. Anne and Eileen Gillespie were in Durham, as was Hugh Doherty. Similar protests took place outside Wormwood Scrubs on 2 June, Wakefield on 24 June and Hull on 29 July 1979.281 British-based supporters of the Gillespies realised that if spared the constant stress of being ‘ghosted’, the sisters were far from their parents in Gweedore, Donegal, and the only republicans in the all female H-Wing.282 Unsympathetic authorities regarded them as having formed part of a Manchester ‘sub group’ of the major IRA network in Birmingham. It was noted that their brother, former resident of Manchester, was ‘wanted in the UK’ in relation to political offences but was living in the Twenty-Six Counties in 1978.283 The FCO was, nonetheless, sensitive to public claims that the Irishwomen were either innocent or worthy objects of interest by Irish politicians. On 26 May 1978 HAJ Staples of the FCO reported that he had taken Donegal Fine Gael TD Paddy Harte ‘mildly to task for having referred to the Gillespie case by name at last week’s Ard Fheis’. According to Staples: ‘He took this quietly and almost looked abash. He implied that he had let the name slip out unintentionally, and he had subsequently ensured that it did not appear in the written record’.284

The sisters improvised day-to-day strategies to preserve their personal security, composure, dignity and identity. To avoid seeking favour from a position of permanent disadvantage, both stopped smoking and never requested mail that they had reason to believe was arriving into Durham. Both took pains to dress and groom themselves as well as circumstances permitted. They guarded each other during alternate bathing sessions and countered the affront of strip-searching by nonchalantly discarding clothing before being ordered to disrobe. They only spoke Irish during exercise time on the yard and insisted on getting outside for the allotted time in virtually all weather conditions. Such stratagems irritated and confused staff, who at times encouraged disturbed prisoners to create trouble with the duo as a means of being shifted off a secure wing where the Irishwomen were required to remain. Friendly and fair-minded staff were either reprimanded or reassigned. Other factors were totally beyond the control of the Gillespies, not least disruptive cell shifts every month for eight years.285