We Don't Know Ourselves by Fintan O'Toole

Author:Fintan O'Toole
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Liveright
Published: 2022-02-12T00:00:00+00:00

23

1979−1982: The Body Politic

Bodies had always been the ultimate currency of the Troubles – bodies shattered, torn apart, broken, beaten, tortured, displayed, disappeared. But, from the point of view of the members of the IRA, the bodies in question were other people’s. They belonged to the people they killed. As the surreal saga of Frank Stagg’s corpse had shown, however, there was also a tradition of using the Republican body itself as a weapon of war. That saga had also reminded the authorities south of the Border just how dangerous this kind of war could be, how the dead or dying body could take a fierce grip on the living. The British government, though, never really understood this. It allowed itself to be dragged into a conflict it could win physically but would always lose imaginatively – a fight, quite literally, to the death in the H-Block prison complex at Long Kesh, nine miles southwest of Belfast.

The eight single-storey buildings known from their shape as the H-Blocks were, ironically, at the centre of ‘the most up-to-date and luxurious prison in Europe’. The complex had sophisticated training workshops and classrooms, a fine indoor sports hall, two all-weather sports pitches, a hospital and a dental clinic. As David Beresford put it in his sympathetic account of the hunger strikes mounted there by Republican prisoners, ‘Imprisonment in the H-Blocks was a status tens of thousands of prisoners around the world would have envied.’1

Up to 1975, political prisoners in Northern Ireland had been recognized as such and given ‘Special category’ status. This system allowed them to wear their own clothes, move freely around the compounds outside the H-Blocks in which most of them were housed, and maintain quasi-military structures, with their own commanders. But, after it ended internment, the British government announced that those convicted of terrorist offences committed after 1 March 1976 would be treated as ordinary criminals and subjected to ordinary prison rules. Brendan Hughes, the IRA commander in the H-Blocks, recalled the ‘shock to the system’ – ‘Here I was that morning being called “Mr Hughes” or “O/C” [officer in command], now being called “704 Hughes” and dumped in a cell.’2

What followed was a process of acceleration that no one really planned. Hughes described it as ‘like getting on a bike at the top of a hill… it gained its own momentum’.3 It started in September 1976 when one newly arrived prisoner, Ciaran Nugent, asked what size uniform he would take, replied, ‘You must be joking me.’ He was placed in a cell with just a blanket to cover him. Other new prisoners followed his example. This meant that they were not allowed to leave their cells and lost almost all privileges, including remission of sentences. After furniture in one wing was broken in a confrontation between prisoners and warders, all cell furniture was removed.

In 1978, Hughes decided to escalate the protest. Prisoners going to have their weekly shower were subjected to jeering from warders because they were covered only in a towel.

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