Voices from the Grave: Two Men's War in Ireland (50 page)

…
I think that … it’s a tragedy that the continuum of the compound
process until the end of the conflict wasn’t allowed because I
think that the Ph.D. s would be coming out of our ears. Interestingly
enough, in the UVF compounds people were inclined to take classes
that were related to mathematics and very practical things, computers
and so on, whereas the Provos were inclined to take classes
related to social issues. I was doing a foundation course, an Arts
and Humanities foundation course, and part of it was the study of
poetry and I remember a big guy called John Wallace, who now is
living in Scotland, whose view of poetry was that poetry was for
pansies, poetry was for big girls’ blouses. He would say things to
me like, ‘What are you doing that for, you big idiot you?’ Totally
disparaging. John Wallace eventually had to take the compulsory
classes and out of that [he] did an Open University degree. He then
left Long Kesh to take up Ph. D. work at St Andrews University in
Scotland and stayed in university for I don’t know how many years
after that. So it was quite interesting to see the mindset changes in
people with exposure to education … it was tremendous stuff
.

We were provoked, tortured almost, by Spence. I can remember sitting
in the sunshine in 1975 minding my own business on the steps
of the study hut and Gusty Spence came over. ‘How are you doing,
son?’ ‘I’m doing all right, sir, thank you very much.’ He was always
given the title ‘sir’. I think anybody who begrudged that soon
accepted it and ‘sir’ just rolled out. It would even today roll off my
tongue without thinking when I meet him, but anyway we started
talking about politics. I was just an average basic chap, and he
started asking, ‘Had anybody thought of the politics of the goldfish
bowl?’ ‘What is this stupid auld bastard talking about?’ you’re
saying to yourself … and he went on to talk about the politics of the
goldfish bowl in a society where not only would one be fair but one
would have to be seen to be fair, how this was the only way that you
could ever have … power-sharing. ‘Power-sharing! Power-sharing!
You mean let the fifth column inside the house? Sure you wouldn’t
want the fifth column inside the house!’ And I think that Spence’s
theory was probably well enough summed up when he would say,
‘Well, I’d rather have them pishing out from inside as pishing in
from the outside.’ And that was 1975, and Northern Ireland Unionists
had not in any way come to terms with the concept of power-sharing.
The power-sharing Executive had just fallen, à la the Sunningdale
Agreement. Now whether or not people would have acquiesced in
power-sharing and were more agitated by … the suggestion of a
Council of Ireland is a debatable issue. I think for many … the
Council of Ireland was used to justify the strike … In other words,
my argument would be that I am not convinced, far from being convinced
that the people of Northern Ireland or the Protestant or the
Unionist community were wedded to any notion of power-sharing.
Spence was away ahead of the game, and he was almost a devil’s
advocate. He was constantly facing us with theories that were weird.
I mean, you had just come into Long Kesh and the basis of your life
was hatred for the Republicans [and] the next thing you know
there’s a Camp Council in which every faction, an unheard-of
thing, [were] all pulled together by Spence to [engage in] dialogue
about the conditions in the jail, to challenge the jail regime about
our conditions and circumstances. But that’s not what his real
reason was; it was to talk politics among all of the factions, and he
nearly pulled it off. The Provos ran away from it eventually because
the idea was that you would then extrapolate from these contacts to
the outside, and the Provos ran away from it. It’s quite interesting
[that] it was the Provos who ran away, not the Loyalists, not even
the UDA. That was Spence’s baby, and here he had, by that time,
two hundred and forty men who were all full of gung-ho hatred for
the Republicans and yet Spence was able to pull it off; he was able
to sleep in his bed among these murderers who were dubious about
talking to the enemy, bringing in a fifth column. They would be
saying, ‘What is this man doing?’ We got that all the time [from
Spence]; it was constant, absolutely constant, and if you look at Billy
Hutchinson, Billy Mitchell, David Ervine, Marty Snodden, ‘Skittle
’
or Alistair Little, ‘Winkie’, Tom Winston, and others, you’re looking
at a class of 
’
75 and the teacher was Spence. I think you were
expected to do a lot of your own learning, but the provocateur was
Spence … It was structured and unstructured, structured by Spence
in ways that he would have tried to provoke debate and in an
unstructured manner where he would have tried to collar you and
make you think. You were in a cubicle or what some people would
call a cell, and you were just sitting around having a yarn, up came
politics, paramilitarism, all of that … and it was all the time. The
violence outside and the fact that nobody outside was doing anything
about it [was] probably … part of the reason why we ourselves
took steps that took us into arenas that people had never been
before, testing ideas on each other. I remember writing a letter to
Combat
‡
about the possibility of power-sharing, and being attacked
in the compound, well almost attacked. [The attacker] was stopped
before he got to me … There was an intensity in our community
about such issues and anything that looked like it was reasonable
to the other side was seen as a weakness. You would have got that
internally as well within the compound system, but in fairness, and
it’s been something that the UVF has been very good at since, and the
peace process tells the tale. You could fall out with the UVF leadership
on a Monday morning and Monday afternoon go back and do business.
The UVF in that respect has always facilitated discussion and
debate, in my experience, both inside and outside [jail]. I’m sure
sometimes they sit with their fingers in their ears not wishing to
hear what they’re hearing, but this current leadership has followed
on in that tradition. I think that is one of the reasons why the UVF
as an organisation as a whole is more sophisticated and settled
…

I remember a number of questions that were nightmare questions,
and very simplistic I would have to say, but nevertheless I think of
significance. Why do people hate people they don’t know? Imagine
[Spence] asking that of the murderers: why do people hate people
they don’t know? … Without personal basis or personal foundation
,
there’s a capacity to hate, and out of the dialogues around that issue
it was very clear that the process of manipulation in Northern Ireland
is not a thought process, it’s a taught process. So what is that
manipulation about, what does it really mean, who does well out
of that manipulation, who does badly? Big-house Unionism in bed
with little-house Unionism, little-house Unionism goes home to its
difficulties and big-house Unionism manipulates the difficulties and
remains in the big house, you know. That’s simplistic but nevertheless
that was the style and nature of the debate and the discussions
.

Gusty Spence carried the mantle for most of that, but I can remember
being sent to, I think it was Compound 9, [where] the Provo
compounds bordered the soccer pitches and they were out playing
soccer. I loved to play a game of soccer, and Gusty asked me
expressly not to do that, but to go to the football game and I asked
him, ‘Aye, OK, well, what do you want me to do?’ ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I
want you to get a Provo out to the wire and talk to him’ … It was
Hugh Feeney, one of the London car bombers, and I remember talking
to Hugh Feeney expressly about a message that I was asked to
pass on and then the conversation went on further. I said to him,
‘Well, where’s your victory?’ And his reply was shocking in its
simplicity: ‘Our victory is every day we can hold down the might of
the British Army.’ And I said, ‘Well, Hugh, I feel sorry for you.’ And
that’s exactly the language that I used, because it really was not
about the outcome, but that the war was the cause. I felt that was
rather a tragedy, but it was interesting, in terms of the answer, a
tragic answer and was one that was unsustainable
.

We had lots of conversations with the Official IRA. They were in
the same part of the jail as us, quite close … it was relatively easy to
have dialogue across the wire. Even though we were separated by
about ten yards, you could have reasonable discussion, but then we
both also had a penchant for education and the judgement call was
made whether you let them share your education facilities or not,
and we agreed to let them do that. So the UVF and the Stickies used
the same education facilities but the UDA did not. Now whether
[that was] because they hadn’t got the interest in education, I don’t
know. I’m not aware of anybody who was doing any great degree of
education in their compounds. But then again didn’t John White
§
get a degree, and he was in Compound 17, but he didn’t avail of the
study-hut opportunities, maybe because he didn’t want to share
space with either the UVF or more likely the Stickies. In those discussions
with the Stickies, I mean, it just came quite naturally. You
did your study and you had your work to do, but you also had quite
interesting discussions about the history of the Republican movement.
I have to say I was quite fascinated by a lot of their views and where
they were coming from. I always had a grand desire to know my
enemy and whilst they were somewhat less the enemy after 1972
when they called a ceasefire and expressed the desire to pursue any
arguments it had politically, they also said that ‘If you can’t unite
Northern Ireland then you can’t unite the island of Ireland’, which is
quite interesting and quite practical in its outlook. So they in some
ways ceased to be the enemy. You could learn a lot from them in
terms of Republican ideology and the engine driving the agenda
that lay behind it. It was also quite interesting to hear them talking
about other Republicans or others who have adopted the name of
Republican. I think we learned a bit all right … and the exposure
itself was probably good because there was a difference between us.
One had been brought up a Catholic and the other had been brought
up a Protestant, so you were getting exposed to something … that you
and many in your own community had never been exposed to before
.

Q.
And did you ever bounce your own conclusions and ideas off
…?

A.
Oh yes, oh aye
.

Q.
And how were they received
?

A.
Usually with patience and fortitude, but you’ve got to remember
that the core belief of the Stickies at that time was the socialist
republic and the ruling elites and all of that stuff. Whilst we understood
the process of manipulation, we would not have been gung-ho
ideological communists, where they were, I think. There was always
a form of socialism within us, a caring politics within us, but not in
an ideological sense. Spence always tried to avoid ideology because
he believed that ideology was the root cause of the destruction of the
Stickies and that the purist emerges when the ideologue emerges and
so far, in fairness, the UVF and the PUP have managed to steer a
fairly steady course … in terms of the development or entrenchment
of dogma
.