Read Voices from the Grave: Two Men's War in Ireland Online
Authors: Ed Moloney
What happened in the Maze prison between 1976 and the winter of 1981 was much more than a battle of wills between the IRA inmates and the prison authorities. It was a struggle about the meaning of Irish history and an attempt to redefine the narrative of the Troubles. By saying that the Provos were mere criminals, devoid of any political motive, the British were implicitly placing previous Republican struggles in the same category. If Brendan Hughes and his comrades were common criminals, then what did that make Terence MacSwiney, or the 1916 rebels, Robert Emmet, Wolfe Tone and the United Irishmen? That question resonated throughout Nationalist Ireland, way beyond the narrow confines of Long Kesh and in a way the British had failed to anticipate. It struck a sympathetic chord even among Nationalists who otherwise abhorred IRA violence. And for the Provos, it helped make the struggle in the H-blocks what Gerry Adams’s skilled propagandist, Danny Morrison, would call ‘Our 1916’.
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The battle in the H-blocks grew more violent and dirtier with the passage of time. When prisoners refused to take orders from the warders, they were beaten and such clashes often ended with serious injuries, mostly on the prisoners’ side. When they smashed their cell furniture in response, their cells were stripped of all but a mattress and a blanket. Since virtually all the IRA inmates were Catholic and Nationalist and most of the warders were Protestant and Unionist, that gave the confrontations a sharper, sectarian edge. There were, however, some Catholic prison officers in the Maze and they invariably fell into two categories: those who were as violent and hostile as their most Loyalist colleagues, and were thus hated by the prisoners with a special intensity, or those who treated them decently, and these the prisoners would leave alone. As the violence intensified, the IRA outside intervened and began shooting prison staff dead. Those warders regarded as the most violent and bigoted were targeted and Brendan Hughes helped choose them. As the prisoners became better organised, the confrontations with prison staff intensified. The prisoners began a ‘no-wash protest’ when bathroom visits became an occasion for violence and humiliation. The prisoners’ refusal to shower or determination to wash only infrequently meant that they soon stank; their hair became manky, long and tangled and they grew wild straggly beards. Because they refused to leave their cells they had to use the chamber pots in their cells as toilets and confrontations over that led to a new and unprecedented escalation of the protest, one that would define events in the H-blocks during these years almost as much as the later deaths on hunger strike. The decision to begin smearing their cell walls and ceilings with their own excreta was something that had never happened before in the long history of Irish Republican prison protests and it was a disturbing, if stomach-turning harbinger of what was to come.
Nationalist Ireland knew instinctively where this was heading if a resolution was not found. It would conclude in a hunger strike and if any IRA hunger-striker died, the consequences would be evident, very quickly and bloodily, on the streets of Belfast and
Derry and the country roads of Armagh and Tyrone. Hunger striking against a wrongdoer has cultural roots in Irish society that go back to the pre-Christian era but during the Anglo-Irish War of 1919–21 it was made into a political weapon. In 1917, Thomas Ashe, a 1916 veteran, refused to wear a prison uniform or do prison work and died while being force-fed. The Lord Mayor of Cork, Terence MacSwiney, died on hunger strike in Brixton jail in 1920 and, like Ashe’s, his death became a rallying call for Republican Ireland. There were more IRA deaths by hunger strike for political status during and after the civil war and again during the Second World War, all of them south of the border where now the jailers wore Irish not British uniforms. In 1972, Billy McKee had fasted for political status and helped win it. If the H-block protesters went on hunger strike they would be following in a long and respected tradition whose impact on Nationalist sentiment throughout the island was bound to be significant.
As the prison protest entered its fourth year, Brendan Hughes and his colleagues began threatening to use this ultimate weapon. Alarmed at what could come next, the Catholic Primate of Ireland, Cardinal Tomas O Fiaich, and the Bishop of Derry, Dr Edward Daly, intervened in the hope of settling the dispute. O Fiaich was from Crossmaglen in South Armagh and like so many in that area he was a Republican – although he opposed the IRA’s violence. He had already interceded once before, in July 1978, when he had visited and talked to prisoners in the worst-affected H-blocks. Afterwards he angrily compared what he had seen in the Maze to ‘the spectacle of hundreds of homeless people living in the sewer pipes in the slums of Calcutta’ and he voiced another heresy which particularly irritated the British and the Unionists: those on the protest were not ordinary prisoners, were not criminals, he declared. O Fiaich’s intervention made him an acceptable mediator in Republican eyes and so he and Daly began a dialogue with British prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, and her Northern Ireland Secretary, Humphrey Atkins. Mrs Thatcher had swept to power in 1979 two months after her Shadow Northern Ireland
Secretary Airey Neave had been blown to pieces by an INLA bomb inside the Palace of Westminster and his death seemed to harden her already uncompromising hostility to all things Irish Republican. Not surprisingly, the dialogue with O Fiaich was the start of a stormy and troubled relationship.
When Hughes was taken from court after receiving a five-year sentence for rioting, the hunger strike was two years and more away and there were more immediate matters on his mind, notably the shock of finding himself in the H-blocks. He could have pursued an appeal against his conviction but dropped it when he realised the protest was the sort of issue Gerry Adams could use to build support for the Republican cause outside the jail. There were two blocks on the protest at that point, H3 and H5 and their leaders asked Hughes to become their overall Commander. He agreed but, surprisingly, he argued at first that the prisoners should end their protest, become conforming prisoners, at least in name, but then subvert the prison regime from within. His view was that no prison can run without the collaboration of its inmates, so withholding that co-operation gave the prisoners great power to effect change. When that was rejected, he urged the prisoners to show tactical flexibility, to make compromises that could enhance their leverage and help publicise the situation in the H-blocks, which they did. If the British had intended to punish Hughes by transferring him to the H-blocks they had certainly succeeded; but they also provided the protesting prisoners with a new, energetic leader.
…
that afternoon after coming out of the courthouse we were put
into a van and brought to the H-blocks. I was first stripped naked
and then thrown into a cell … I had been in communication with
the people in the H-blocks, but I had no idea really what it was like
and what they were going through until I got there. My first impression
was that it was so clean, so organised and the screws were so
much in control, so arrogant and cocky … [you could tell] by their
appearance and by their strutting that they were in charge now.
This was a different situation; we were no longer POWs, we were
naked criminals who were going to be treated as such. It actually did
come as a shock to me [that I had been sent to the H-blocks]. We did
not consider it and hadn’t talked about it until that morning when
Oliver Kelly
†
arrived at the courthouse and warned us that … they
could throw us into the H-blocks. It was only then that it struck me
that this was a possibility. The screws didn’t say a word [about]
where we were going. It was only when we were driven into the
H-blocks [section] that we realised we had lost our status. So …
obviously it was a shock to the system … Here I was that morning
being called ‘Mr Hughes’ or ‘O/C’, now being called ‘704 Hughes’
and dumped into a cell. The cell was Tom McFeely’s.
‡
He was O/C
of that particular block. I believe they put me in that cell because
Tom McFeely was a very, very strong character and … I think they
expected conflict between myself and Tom. He actually wasn’t there
at the time … he was on the boards for hitting one of the screws.
But after a few days Tom arrived back into his cell … and we
talked. I had put an appeal against the five-year sentence but after
a week [in the H-blocks], I dropped it. And I think the reason was
because so many people believed that I had all the answers. Obviously
I didn’t. I was as frightened and confused as anybody else.
But I knew what was taking place on the outside [Adams leading a
takeover of the IRA] … so I dropped the appeal and decided that
the protest had to be escalated … something had to be done. My
first suggestion to Tom and the others was that we put on the prison
gear [clothes] and go into the system to destroy it from within. That
was rejected almost out of hand by the prisoners. They had been
there for over two years and they just couldn’t face that – it was OK
me coming in, clean-shaven and not having been there as long.
These people had become … entrenched in the protest, but as far as
I could see the protest wasn’t going anywhere. The screws were quite
capable of containing and handling it as it was. People on the outside
really had no idea. I mean, I was a couple of hundred yards
away from the H-blocks and I had no idea of the conditions that the
men were in. At that time we were not taking visits, so there was
little or no communication with the outside. To take a visit you had
to leave your cell, go up to a small cell at the top of the wing, put on
the prison uniform and go through the taunts and abuse handed
out by the screws. But I believe that it had to be done. We had a
general agreement on the escalation of the protest, but we had no
idea where it was going to finish
…
When I became O/C I suggested that … the two blocks had to be
co-ordinated in some way, that there was no sense in
H5
and
H3
going separate ways. So the agreement was … an O/C of
H5
and
an O/C of
H3
and I would be the overall O/C, similar to the way
the structures were in the cages – a Camp O/C and then you had
the Cage O/Cs. We began … organising and collaborating with
each other to get some sort of coherent strategy going. That was
quite easy … Tom McFeely was O/C of
H5
and was quite agreeable
to this; in fact he was one of those who asked me to become
O/C and Joe Barnes was O/C of
H3
… The idea was to co-ordinate
and to escalate the protest – to get word out to the outside, to get
a propaganda machine going within the prison and find ways of
smuggling stuff out, smuggling stuff in. When I say ‘stuff’, I’m
talking about pens, cigarette papers and things to write on. I asked
people to start taking visits. Bobby Sands was in the next cell to
myself and Tom McFeely. Bobby was a prolific writer … and was
made PRO [Public Relations Officer] of
H5
and some time later of
the two blocks … He was Camp PRO in a sense. And we began to
write notes. Bobby did most of it; I would give him ideas and tell
him, ‘Put some meat on that.’ He would have been the most prolific
DD. So we began to co-ordinate
between
H5
and
H3
and we did that by taking visits. People …
weren’t ordered to take visits, they were asked. Some … just refused
to come out of the cells, people like Big ‘Bloot’ McDonnell. I had
heard his voice, oh, for months and months and never saw his face
,
didn’t know what he looked like. He was one of those who refused to
take any sort of visit or even to come out of his cell to go to Mass …
We were allowed to go to Mass every Sunday but you had to put the
prison trousers on and that was a way of communicating. Another
way was through the priests who came into the jail. Some of them
would carry communications from one block to another. Another
way was to meet on the visits. For instance if we wanted to communicate
with
H3
, the message would be passed on to someone taking
a visit … Marie Moore
§
was one of the principal couriers between
ourselves and the Army [IRA] leadership on the outside; at that
period she was one of the best couriers. Now going out on the visits,
obviously you were searched. At this time we had very little in the
cells. You’d a Bible, but no radios, no newspapers; so we had to find
ways of getting information in. This was done, again, by taking
visits. Now obviously … the prison authorities realised what was
happening, that we were beginning to organise ourselves, and that
two blocks had become co-ordinated. They attempted as much as
pos -sible to stop it all, they stepped up the harassment, they stepped
up brutality. When you were called for a visit, you left your cell, you
went up, you put on the prison uniform and people were told that
when they put on the uniform to rip the trousers around the crotch
area to allow access to your rear end. Communications were written
mostly on cigarette papers and the writing was very, very small. It
could be carried in your mouth or up your rectum. This was prior
to the dirt strike; this was [at] the stage of getting organised and
getting communications going. But the prison administration knew
what we were doing and searches were stepped up. I can’t actually
remember when they brought the mirror search in; I think that was
after we had wrecked the cells. This would have been at the end of
1978, early 1979. As time went on we became more organised and
more proficient at getting communications in and out. On Sundays,
at Mass, we were able to communicate even more. But there was no
mixing. People went to Mass in
H5
and to a separate Mass in
H3
,
so there could only be communication between ourselves … within
the one block. And you could see each other and talk on visits as
well. Sometimes communications had to be sent out from
H5
and
then brought back in again to
H3
through another visit. As I say the
communication system became pretty good
.