On the Blanket by Tim Pat Coogan

Author:Tim Pat Coogan [Coogan, Tim Pat]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781784975401
Publisher: Head of Zeus Ltd.

Jack Anderson Enters the Fray

But the irony of Mrs. Dickson’s sentiments lay in the fact that sometime earlier she had joined with the Archbishop in signing a protest at the treatment of Chilean prisoners. They were safely far away. Irish ones, however, always seemed to require an extra dimension of justification. However, the extra dimension of internationalisation which the Cardinal’s visit and statement concerning the Holy See engendered—it also became known that the Papal Nuncio Dr. Alibrandi had been interesting himself in the affair—received an additional, and to the British, unwelcome fillip when on a visit to America a group of prisoners’ relatives made contact with that contemporary master of the journalistic expose, the Washington Post columnist Jack Anderson, and his resultant column set off a publicity bombshell across America on October 29, 1978. (He actually sent over a journalist to give a first-hand report of conditions inside the Maze prison, but his envoy failed to gain admission to the complex—a fact which makes the authorities’ willingness to grant my own request for visits to Long Kesh and Armagh all the more remarkable.) Anderson’s column managed to convey a graphic sense of outrage, as the following extract shows:

President Carter so far has ignored the protests of individuals and organizations concerned about the British army’s abuses in the strife torn land.

But now critics with more political clout have urged the President to speak out on the situation. Outraged by firsthand evidence they have obtained on a recent fact-finding tour of Ulster, Representatives Hamilton Fish, R. N.Y., and Joshua Eilberg, D. Pa., sent a private letter to Carter asking that he do something about human rights outrages in Northern Ireland.

At the center of the controversy is the Long Kesh prison, a forbidding concrete fortress on the outskirts of Belfast. It is there that hundreds of Irish prisoners live in conditions of indescribable filth and physical deprivation.

Most infamous of all is the “H Block,” or “hell block” as it is called by the prisoners. Its inmates, known as “blanket men,” have been clothed only in blankets and towels since 1976, when British courts declared that IRA suspects were no longer to be given special treatment as political prisoners.

The few outsiders who have been allowed into H Block report that the walls are encrusted with rotting food, the floors are littered with excrement and an overpowering odor of decay is all-pervading.

One respected religious leader compared the horrors of H Block to the “tiger cages” of Vietnam, where American-trained South Vietnamese captors interrogated prisoners, or the North Vietnamese torture cells where American POWs were brutally mistreated.

Indeed Rep. Fish concluded that the conditions at Long Kesh were “worse than Saigon in 1968.”

Hundreds of Irish prisoners in H Block, many of them still in their teens, were put there for signing confessions often extracted under torture by British security forces. Under the emergency suspension of Britain’s honored legal system, anyone arrested may be held incommunicado for as long as seven days without even a formal charge.

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