1916--One Hundred Years of Irish Independence by Tim Pat Coogan

Author:Tim Pat Coogan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group

8

Towards Peace

Everything goes up your bum. The lads are circling around so that the screws don’t see the priest slipping us the cigarette box. We roll up the fags in our hands and cram the tobacco into a biro casing. Then one of your mates comes behind you and you bend down and up it goes. The lads make sure that it’s well up so nothing will show when the screws search us after Mass. It’s amazing what fits up there – one fellow brought out three pencils that way and another hid a pen, a comb and a lighter. You don’t feel it unless the casing is too long, but you do bleed all the time, sometimes pieces of flesh come off. Everyone has piles.12

This insight into how what was literally a battle of the bowels was carried out by IRA prisoners helps to explain how, at the time of writing, the Sinn Féin political party occupies an important place in the parliamentary life of Ireland, both north and south of the border. The reminiscence above, dating from the prelude to the hunger strikes of 1980–1, contextualizes how this came to be the case.

Hunger striking had an established precedent in Irish politics. It was used as a weapon in the Anglo-Irish War, during the Civil War, in the run-up to and during the ‘Emergency’ by IRA prisoners – and, as indicated earlier, by the IRA in 1972 in order to lever the British authorities into introducing Special Category status for republican prisoners in the approach to the Cheyne Walk talks. This special status outlived the talks, of course – and by 1976, conditions at the internment site at Long Kesh outside Belfast were creating tension in Northern Ireland, the prison being referred to by unionist spokespersons and some of their Conservative allies as the ‘Sandhurst of Terror’. The republicans had their own command structure within the camps, wore their own clothes, associated freely with their comrades, received food parcels and, importantly for the development of the Provisional movement, took part diligently in educational courses. The republicans allowed only their own members to join a compound or ‘cage’, as they called them, with the result that these political prisoners were able to cultivate their own encapsulated and powerful spheres of influence.

All this was, to some, highly objectionable, and in the mid-1970s unionist complaints bore fruit. At this time, new prison buildings began to take shape on the Long Kesh site: these were the ‘H-Blocks’ – two rows of cells joined in the middle by an administrative corridor. To the IRA’s opponents, these had the merit of providing cellular confinement to reinforce the ‘ordinary decent criminal’* image desired by the authorities. At this time, the British were engaged in yet another subterranean ceasefire negotiation with the IRA. This was given an air of authenticity by the fact that the British allowed the prisoners’ leader, David Morley, out of Long Kesh to hold consultations with IRA leaders in the South.

It was around

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