Brits by Peter Taylor

Author:Peter Taylor
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2014-09-03T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty

The Iron Lady and the Iron Men

March 1976—October 1981

There were two great watersheds for the ‘Brits’ during the thirty-year ‘war’. One was ‘Bloody Sunday’ in 1972, the other was the IRA hunger strike of 1981. Both had profound repercussions for British policy and the course of the conflict. In Future Terrorist Trends Brigadier Glover had warned that ‘an isolated incident such as “Bloody Sunday” can radically alter support for violence’. Like so much of his report, that too was prophetic.

The origins of the hunger strike lay in Merlyn Rees’s decision to abolish special category status for all prisoners convicted of terrorist offences committed after 1 March 1976 and send them to the newly constructed H Blocks of the Maze prison where they would be locked up in cells like common criminals. The first IRA prisoner to be convicted under the new regime was a nineteen-year-old IRA man from West Belfast called Kieran Nugent who had been arrested in May 1976 and found guilty of possessing weapons and hijacking a car. When he entered the Maze, he was ordered to put on a prison uniform and refused on the grounds that he was not a criminal but a political prisoner. Nugent stayed unclothed for his first day in the H Blocks but on the second day prison officers gave him a blanket so he would not have to walk round the exercise yard naked. ‘If they want me to wear a uniform,’ he said, ‘they’ll have to nail it to my back.’ He spent the rest of his three-year sentence wearing the blanket.1 In the ensuing weeks and months, other IRA prisoners followed his example, forming the nucleus of what became known as the ‘blanket’ protest. One of those who came close on Nugent’s heels was Gerard Hodgkins who was gaoled in December 1976 for a firearm and bombing offence as well as IRA membership. He told me what happened when he entered the prison.

The prison officer said, ‘Right, you’re here to do your time. You can do it the hard way or the easy way. If you take my advice, you’ll get them uniforms on you now. If not, strip.’ So you stripped there and then whilst you were being ridiculed and jeered at by the screws [prison officers].2

In those early days, the ‘blanket’ protest attracted no great attention outside republican ranks, as Hodgkins was the first to admit. The handful of ‘blanket men’, as they became known, felt a profound sense of isolation. Nevertheless, Hodgkins was convinced that the prisoners would win and do so very quickly. ‘Believe it or not, you were hoping against hope that we’d get political status,’ he said. ‘Being honest about it, within a few months, we really believed we’d get it.’3 For years it was a vain hope. The prisoners had little else to keep them going until, over the months and years, the handful became hundreds. Solidarity, shared hardship and deprivation forged a bond that became ever stronger in the face of the ‘Brit’ enemy.

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