Voices from the Grave: Two Men's War in Ireland

by Ed Moloney

  Nationalist Ireland knew instinctively where this was heading if a resolution was not found. It would conclude in a hunger strike and if any IRA hunger-striker died, the consequences would be evident, very quickly and bloodily, on the streets of Belfast and Derry and the country roads of Armagh and Tyrone. Hunger striking against a wrongdoer has cultural roots in Irish society that go back to the pre-Christian era but during the Anglo-Irish War of 1919–21 it was made into a political weapon. In 1917, Thomas Ashe, a 1916 veteran, refused to wear a prison uniform or do prison work and died while being force-fed. The Lord Mayor of Cork, Terence MacSwiney, died on hunger strike in Brixton jail in 1920 and, like Ashe’s, his death became a rallying call for Republican Ireland. There were more IRA deaths by hunger strike for political status during and after the civil war and again during the Second World War, all of them south of the border where now the jailers wore Irish not British uniforms. In 1972, Billy McKee had fasted for political status and helped win it. If the H-block protesters went on hunger strike they would be following in a long and respected tradition whose impact on Nationalist sentiment throughout the island was bound to be significant.

  As the prison protest entered its fourth year, Brendan Hughes and his colleagues began threatening to use this ultimate weapon. Alarmed at what could come next, the Catholic Primate of Ireland, Cardinal Tomas O Fiaich, and the Bishop of Derry, Dr Edward Daly, intervened in the hope of settling the dispute. O Fiaich was from Crossmaglen in South Armagh and like so many in that area he was a Republican – although he opposed the IRA’s violence. He had already interceded once before, in July 1978, when he had visited and talked to prisoners in the worst-affected H-blocks. Afterwards he angrily compared what he had seen in the Maze to ‘the spectacle of hundreds of homeless people living in the sewer pipes in the slums of Calcutta’ and he voiced another heresy which particularly irritated the British and the Unionists: those on the protest were not ordinary prisoners, were not criminals, he declared. O Fiaich’s intervention made him an acceptable mediator in Republican eyes and so he and Daly began a dialogue with British prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, and her Northern Ireland Secretary, Humphrey Atkins. Mrs Thatcher had swept to power in 1979 two months after her Shadow Northern Ireland Secretary Airey Neave had been blown to pieces by an INLA bomb inside the Palace of Westminster and his death seemed to harden her already uncompromising hostility to all things Irish Republican. Not surprisingly, the dialogue with O Fiaich was the start of a stormy and troubled relationship.

  When Hughes was taken from court after receiving a five-year sentence for rioting, the hunger strike was two years and more away and there were more immediate matters on his mind, notably the shock of finding himself in the H-blocks. He could have pursued an appeal against his conviction but dropped it when he realised the protest was the sort of issue Gerry Adams could use to build support for the Republican cause outside the jail. There were two blocks on the protest at that point, H3 and H5 and their leaders asked Hughes to become their overall Commander. He agreed but, surprisingly, he argued at first that the prisoners should end their protest, become conforming prisoners, at least in name, but then subvert the prison regime from within. His view was that no prison can run without the collaboration of its inmates, so withholding that co-operation gave the prisoners great power to effect change. When that was rejected, he urged the prisoners to show tactical flexibility, to make compromises that could enhance their leverage and help publicise the situation in the H-blocks, which they did. If the British had intended to punish Hughes by transferring him to the H-blocks they had certainly succeeded; but they also provided the protesting prisoners with a new, energetic leader.

  … that afternoon after coming out of the courthouse we were put into a van and brought to the H-blocks. I was first stripped naked and then thrown into a cell … I had been in communication with the people in the H-blocks, but I had no idea really what it was like and what they were going through until I got there. My first impression was that it was so clean, so organised and the screws were so much in control, so arrogant and cocky … [you could tell] by their appearance and by their strutting that they were in charge now. This was a different situation; we were no longer POWs, we were naked criminals who were going to be treated as such. It actually did come as a shock to me [that I had been sent to the H-blocks]. We did not consider it and hadn’t talked about it until that morning when Oliver Kelly† arrived at the courthouse and warned us that … they could throw us into the H-blocks. It was only then that it struck me that this was a possibility. The screws didn’t say a word [about] where we were going. It was only when we were driven into the H-blocks [section] that we realised we had lost our status. So … obviously it was a shock to the system … Here I was that morning being called ‘Mr Hughes’ or ‘O/C’, now being called ‘704 Hughes’ and dumped into a cell. The cell was Tom McFeely’s.‡ He was O/C of that particular block. I believe they put me in that cell because Tom McFeely was a very, very strong character and … I think they expected conflict between myself and Tom. He actually wasn’t there at the time … he was on the boards for hitting one of the screws. But after a few days Tom arrived back into his cell … and we talked. I had put an appeal against the five-year sentence but after a week [in the H-blocks], I dropped it. And I think the reason was because so many people believed that I had all the answers. Obviously I didn’t. I was as frightened and confused as anybody else. But I knew what was taking place on the outside [Adams leading a takeover of the IRA] … so I dropped the appeal and decided that the protest had to be escalated … something had to be done. My first suggestion to Tom and the others was that we put on the prison gear [clothes] and go into the system to destroy it from within. That was rejected almost out of hand by the prisoners. They had been there for over two years and they just couldn’t face that – it was OK me coming in, clean-shaven and not having been there as long. These people had become … entrenched in the protest, but as far as I could see the protest wasn’t going anywhere. The screws were quite capable of containing and handling it as it was. People on the outside really had no idea. I mean, I was a couple of hundred yards away from the H-blocks and I had no idea of the conditions that the men were in. At that time we were not taking visits, so there was little or no communication with the outside. To take a visit you had to leave your cell, go up to a small cell at the top of the wing, put on the prison uniform and go through the taunts and abuse handed out by the screws. But I believe that it had to be done. We had a general agreement on the escalation of the protest, but we had no idea where it was going to finish …

  When I became O/C I suggested that … the two blocks had to be co-ordinated in some way, that there was no sense in H5 and H3 going separate ways. So the agreement was … an O/C of H5 and an O/C of H3 and I would be the overall O/C, similar to the way the structures were in the cages – a Camp O/C and then you had the Cage O/Cs. We began … organising and collaborating with each other to get some sort of coherent strategy going. That was quite easy … Tom McFeely was O/C of H5 and was quite agreeable to this; in fact he was one of those who asked me to become O/C and Joe Barnes was O/C of H3 … The idea was to co-ordinate and to escalate the protest – to get word out to the outside, to get a propaganda machine going within the prison and find ways of smuggling stuff out, smuggling stuff in. When I say ‘stuff’, I’m talking about pens, cigarette papers and things to write on. I asked people to start taking visits. Bobby Sands was in the next cell to myself and Tom McFeely. Bobby was a prolific writer … and was made PRO [Public Relations Officer] of H5 and some time later of the two blocks … He was Camp PRO in a sense. And we began to write notes. Bobby did most of it; I would give him ideas and tell him, ‘Put some meat on that.’ He would have been the most prolific DD. So we began to co-ordinate between H5 and H3 and we did that by taking visits. People … weren’t ordered to take visits, they were asked. Some … just refused to come out of the cells, people like Big ‘Bloot’ McDonnell. I had hear
d his voice, oh, for months and months and never saw his face, didn’t know what he looked like. He was one of those who refused to take any sort of visit or even to come out of his cell to go to Mass … We were allowed to go to Mass every Sunday but you had to put the prison trousers on and that was a way of communicating. Another way was through the priests who came into the jail. Some of them would carry communications from one block to another. Another way was to meet on the visits. For instance if we wanted to communicate with H3, the message would be passed on to someone taking a visit … Marie Moore§ was one of the principal couriers between ourselves and the Army [IRA] leadership on the outside; at that period she was one of the best couriers. Now going out on the visits, obviously you were searched. At this time we had very little in the cells. You’d a Bible, but no radios, no newspapers; so we had to find ways of getting information in. This was done, again, by taking visits. Now obviously … the prison authorities realised what was happening, that we were beginning to organise ourselves, and that two blocks had become co-ordinated. They attempted as much as pos -sible to stop it all, they stepped up the harassment, they stepped up brutality. When you were called for a visit, you left your cell, you went up, you put on the prison uniform and people were told that when they put on the uniform to rip the trousers around the crotch area to allow access to your rear end. Communications were written mostly on cigarette papers and the writing was very, very small. It could be carried in your mouth or up your rectum. This was prior to the dirt strike; this was [at] the stage of getting organised and getting communications going. But the prison administration knew what we were doing and searches were stepped up. I can’t actually remember when they brought the mirror search in; I think that was after we had wrecked the cells. This would have been at the end of 1978, early 1979. As time went on we became more organised and more proficient at getting communications in and out. On Sundays, at Mass, we were able to communicate even more. But there was no mixing. People went to Mass in H5 and to a separate Mass in H3, so there could only be communication between ourselves … within the one block. And you could see each other and talk on visits as well. Sometimes communications had to be sent out from H5 and then brought back in again to H3 through another visit. As I say the communication system became pretty good.

  While the conflict in the H-blocks was fundamentally about who controlled and defined the prison regime, Hughes was conscious of the big picture. The prison protest could help Gerry Adams rebuild the movement and give it an issue around which Sinn Fein could agitate; this was one reason why he had accepted leadership of the protesting prisoners. But this raised a question about who ran the protest. Traditionally, the prisoners themselves made all the key decisions but during the blanket protest, the needs and agenda of the outside leadership would intrude in important ways.

  I saw the situation in the blocks as a tool to help the leadership on the outside – specifically Gerry – to build up a propaganda machine. The Army [IRA] leadership needed an issue that would help them organise street protests … to rebuild the Republican movement on the outside. I was very conscious of that. Myself, Tom [McFeely], Bobby [Sands], who became more and more a central figure, would discuss this aspect with as many people as we could at weekly Mass. The outside did not try to push us at any time to escalate, there was no attempt to do that. If anything we were left to our own devices. They would give advice but they would not encourage anything at all. It was up to us how we would escalate the protest. I was quite conscious of the need to escalate things [and] I was quite conscious that outside could really do with an issue. [But] it was basically left to ourselves in the blocks … That was always the case or it was supposed to be the case, right through the whole Republican struggle, not just the 1970s, right back till the 1920s. The decisions on the inside were exclusively taken by the prisoners [but] at times it was hypocritical and not true. Even before I left the cages, people knew I was going to be appointed O/C of the blocks. But by and large the decisions of the prisoners were theirs to make. But obviously there are contradictions in that because, for instance, during the hunger strikes there was a large input by the leadership on the outside. Another example were the five demands.¶ I had nothing to do with them. They came from the outside … I was a bit concerned about this because … we had been demanding political status or special-category status. The outside came up with the so-called five demands, without any great input from the prisoners themselves. Danny Morrison was sent into the prison on a visit to explain the five demands to me … [They were formulated as] humanitarian demands that no one could really object to, whereas they could object to political status. The British government would find it easier to implement the five demands rather than give in to political status. It was an attempt to lessen problems for the British government … But as I say, we did not devise them. I think probably Gerry [played a big part], him and probably Danny Morrison. I don’t even know, that’s how much input I had into it; I can’t say with any great certainty who came up with the so-called five demands, but certainly it didn’t come from within the prison.

  The opportunity that Brendan Hughes had been seeking to intensify the protest came in March 1978, with increasingly violent confrontations between prison officers and IRA protesters in the bathrooms and showers of the blocks. It was a short journey from there to the dirty protest.

  … you were allowed one shower a week. And it was at the discretion of whichever screw was on [duty] at the time whether you got a shower or whether you didn’t get a shower. And going to the showers was an ordeal in itself because you had to go through the humiliation and the snide remarks. And often with a lot of the younger ones there was brutality and beatings and slappings. And we made a decision to stop taking showers. So the order was given … From my point of view, it was a tactical move. This was the first attempt to escalate the protest. So that was the beginning of the no-wash protest. The reaction from the prison authorities was to bring in basins of water every morning and [this was done by] orderlies, or ‘ordinary decent criminals’ who … got bonuses for this work: extra cigarettes and tobacco and … more food. And these people would come round every morning. The door would open and a small basin of water would be thrown in. Often cells were missed. And sometimes empty basins were thrown in so there was no water to wash with. So the order was given to smash the basins and stop washing altogether. By not going out to take showers that meant you did not get out to go to the toilet. So the wastage, the excreta and the urine built up in the small chamber pots that everyone had. So the prison authorities organised for this to be collected … The orderlies would come round with a large bin, they came to the door and you emptied your wastage into it … quite often it was thrown back into a cell – they would pick a cell, and the wastage would be dumped into it. So the order was given to stop co-operating with this waste collection.

  By mid-1978 there were over three hundred prisoners on the protest and, to accommodate the growing numbers, a third H-block, H4, was turned over to the protesters. Because of the refusal to slop out, the prisoners threw their waste under the doors and soon the cells became filthy and stinking. When prison staff removed furniture from one wing, prisoners elsewhere smashed their furniture and beds. The furniture was removed from all the protesting cells after that. The warders began dousing cells with heavy disinfectant which caused some prisoners to pass out and so the cell windows were broken to create some ventilation. After the prisoners had started to smear their cells with excreta the authorities sealed the windows, a move ostensibly prompted when the protesters threw other waste outside but whose effect was to intensify the stench inside each cell. The dirty protest that Cardinal O Fiaich would soon compare to the Calcutta slums had begun.

  A lot of this was caused … by the reaction of the prison authorities to us becoming organised. But certainly underneath it all was this intent on our part to escalate the whole thing. I had no intention at that time of ending up in the dirty protest. I had no idea where this was goi
ng to finish. In fact, before it ended, I got really frightened at the momentum that this had taken on. I mean it was like getting on a bike at the top of a hill. Your intention is to get to the bottom of the hill. But you’ve no idea what obstacles you’re going to meet on the way down. It gained its own momentum to the point … that if the screws did something, we reacted to it. We wrecked all the furniture, the beds, the chairs, the tables … and we smashed the windows. So we were left with wreckage and this was co-ordinated between the two blocks. The brutality just seemed to be stepped up and stepped up and I was quite often fearful that someone was going to be killed. Once the excreta went up on the walls, I don’t think they knew how to handle it. But they found a way of doing it. What they did was to empty one wing and shift us – ‘wing shifts’ they were called. This took place in the early hours of the morning and they just came in … and systematically, cell by cell, a man was trailed out, spread-eagled across a mirror, which lay on the floor, to check the rectum, which was a totally ineffective way of finding contraband that was there, it was … degrading; the whole point of it was to degrade. I don’t believe they ever found anything by mirror searches. Maybe once or twice, when some, some fool had it hanging out. But largely, when you put something up your rectum it goes up and a mirror isn’t going to find it. So it was an attempt to degrade and brutalise. And it was a frightening experience, the mornings of wings searches. And the most frightening bit was to be the very last man. They would take all day sometimes or a good part of the day to shift a wing of men – I think there was maybe fifty men in a wing, forty to fifty men in a wing. You can imagine what it was like – I remember really well the cries and the thumps and you knew exactly what was happening. But for the last two men to be moved across from the dirty wing to the clean wing it was an everlasting day. The last two men had to listen to all this. I had to go through it as well. But by and large I escaped most of the brutality because I think … they were more careful with me. And so … I can’t remember ever being beaten. [The prison authorities] accepted that I was who I was … but they never ever made any sort of approach to me. I remember —— coming into my cell. I had already gone through the wrecking of Crumlin Road jail with this man. And I knew how devious he was. He was … a … one of the most brutal people. I don’t know how he survived … he was a … But I remember him coming into the cell and just standing looking at me – the cell was just filthy. I had a blanket round me, with a long, long beard and long hair. And I remember the sarcastic look on his face. Another memory I have, and I’ll never forget the man till the day I die, a Labour Party MP called Don Concannon … strutting down the wing and cells being opened for him to have a look. And I remember him laughing at the men lying in these cells with blankets round them and filthy. It was another telling memory of that man. I don’t know where he is now, I hope he’s dead.||