Prisoner 1082 by Donal Donnelly

Author:Donal Donnelly [Donnelly, Dónal]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-1-84889-067-1
Publisher: The Collins Press
Published: 2010-09-08T04:00:00+00:00

9

PLANNING THE BREAKOUT

Keeping an Eye on the Outside

Our time in Crumlin was brightened by news of the Curragh breakout in December 1958 and the subsequent escape by Daithí Ó Conaill and Ruairí Ó Brádaigh from the Curragh just six months before the Fianna Fáil government closed the internment camp. Another escape that gladdened the heart was that of Séamus Murphy from Wakefield Prison in England in February 1959. He and two others were serving life sentences for a raid on Blandford Army Barracks in which tons of ammunition were taken. The men in British prisons were constantly on our minds. What kind of life did they have among seasoned criminals who had neither an understanding nor sympathy for their cause?

During my years inside, the international news that made most impact on us was the death of Pope Pius XII. And what a surprise his successor, 83-year-old Pope John XXIII, had in store in the five years of his pontificate. The election of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the first Catholic president of the US, in November 1960 was another milestone. And extraordinary as it may appear to younger readers, the victory of Fidel Castro and the ousting of the dictator Batista in Cuba was greeted as warmly by us in prison as Kennedy’s election. Castro’s ascension to power brought land reform, education and health for Cuba’s poor. His forces’ military campaign featured many of the guerilla tactics favoured by the IRA and we were, therefore, their natural allies.

The long battle for independence and freedom in Kenya, led mainly by the Kikuyu ethnic group, came to an end in 1960 with the declaration by the British of an end to the ‘emergency’. The Mau Mau were defeated militarily but most of their demands for land reform and democracy had been conceded, although at a terrible price. This war had begun in 1952 and again the nationalist Irish sided with the Mau Mau despite the usual smear tactics of the British press, both gutter and high brow. Over 50,000 people were killed and the British executed over 900 men during that period. Even before I was jailed I used to read with horror of the torture and killings by the British military. Interestingly, we were indebted to Time magazine as its reporters often told the stories of the ‘underdog’, even if it had an imperial slant. I received the magazine regularly. Irish newspapers, on the other hand, took all their international news from Reuters or Associated Press which meant that one had to read a cross-section of newspapers and even then read between the lines to obtain some semblance of what was really happening. The real horror of Kenya was uncovered with the massacre of eleven African prisoners in a concentration camp known as the ‘Hola Camp’, a name forever associated with torture and death – and with the British.

British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan made a famous speech in which he spoke of ‘the winds of change’ blowing through Africa. The winds were blowing

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