State Violence

by Raymond Murray

I salute courage and sacrifice wherever I find it. Whatever the past deeds of the men in H-Block may or may not have been and whatever the justice or injustice of the sentences, one has to admire their courage, fortitude and endurance against impossible odds. The Athenian prisoners in the stone quarries of Syracuse could not endure their deprivations for two months. The American and British prisoners collapsed in Korea. The men in H Block, the majority of them 17–21 years, have already created a place for themselves in the records of human endurance. The words of Terence MacSwiney ring true – it is not they who inflict the most but those who endure the most who have the victory.

  Extract from a lecture given in St Patrick’s College, Maynooth, under the auspices of Cumann na Sagart, 6 December 1978. Published in H Blocks: British Jail for Irish Prisoners, 1979.

  Christ and the Prisoner

  When men tried on a few occasions to carry Jesus off and make him king, he ran away and hid himself. He didn’t want power. His kingdom was not of this world. He was a king, he said himself, in the sense that he bore witness to the truth. We admire in others, perhaps subconsciously, the good qualities we have ourselves. The picture Jesus gives of John the Baptist when he praises him may be a picture of Jesus himself, ‘When you went out to John in the desert, what did you expect to see? A blade of grass bending in the wind? What did you go out to see? A man dressed up in fancy clothes? People who dress like that live in palaces! ... From the time John preached his message until this very day the kingdom of heaven has suffered violent attacks and violent men try to seize it’ (Matthew 2:7–8, 12).

  Jesus did not wear fine clothes. He did not live in a palace. He did not try to charm the world or show off. He was a friend of the oppressed and chose to live more in obscurity than in the limelight. He rebuked those who called for fire and brimstone. He took a safer line; he called for a change of heart. No crown, no seal of office, no signet ring, no purple band, no red cloak. These would come later in the castle-yard of Pilate. No presentations except the perfume in the house of Simon the Leper. Jesus appreciated Nathaniel because there was nothing false in him. There was nothing false in Jesus, friend, brother, reconciler. There was room for Simon the Zealot and Matthew the tax collector among the twelve apostles. He healed the government official’s son and the Roman officer’s servant. He touched lepers and ate with sinners. He taught that God ‘makes the sun to shine on bad and good people alike, and gives rain to those who do right and those who do wrong’. This message is clear – kindness to all, not only to respectable people but to the outlaws and outcasts as well. The goodness of Jesus was closely connected with his obscurity. For thirty years he was the carpenter’s son from Nazareth who shocked his village people in the three-year period of his public life. And always his interest is in redeeming and mercy. Not lording it over people. The greatest is the one who serves! No hatred, no hostility. He recognised the dignity of Bartimaeus and the Phoenician woman. He had room for all in his heart from the children to the thief on the cross. For our sake he opened his arms on the cross. His embrace is for all.

  This attitude of Jesus is a scandal to humankind. The guests at the dinner party recoiled when the street woman touched him and kissed his feet. ‘Does he not know what kind of a woman is touching him?’ ‘This day you will be with me in paradise’ was his dying promise to his fellow prisoner.

  Life is short. It has pain, sickness, tragedy, quarrels. War and killing seem pathetic. The unborn are killed. For some there is no happiness in life at all. Who understand more than the compassionate Christ who never condemns? ‘Has no one condemned you?’, he said to the woman taken in adultery. ‘No one, Lord’. ‘Neither will I.’

  Nameless, obscure, hidden. Christ the teaching beggar. Even his death was as ordinary as the thousands of others who were crucified in his time. Only the film producers make it grandiose. Jesus in pain cried out in a loud voice; he was parched with thirst; he felt the abandonment of his friends.

  Prisoners are not dressed in fancy clothes. In H Block, Long Kesh, in the north of Ireland nearly 400 are naked. They live obscure lives. Their names are replaced by numbers. They are dossiers. ‘Show me his file!’ They are outlawed. They are oppressed. They are vulnerable. The world goes about its business. Important men who travel long distances to discuss finance are not worried about them. Cars scud along the M1 motorway alongside the massive prison camp of Long Kesh. The occupants hardly turn their heads. Courting couples saunter in the Mall in Armagh. They don’t even know that 34 girls on protest in the prison opposite them are locked in for most of the day. The world is too busy, too occupied. It is in a hurry. ‘I was in jail and you did not come to visit me’.

  Where are the Good Samaritans? Jesus told us the story of the Good Samaritan, not to make us think, not to weigh up reasons for doing this or that, not to calculate ambition or popularity – not even to be charitable for the love of God. All that Jesus said in the story is that the Samaritan looked and he saw a man, a human being. He did not even think. He saw, he looked, he stopped. The good Samaritan never heard the story of the Good Samaritan! All Jesus is saying is that our very human existence should move us to compassion. Jesus was compassionate, not because he was God, because he was human.

  In the H Blocks, Long Kesh, 370 prisoners are denied the basic status of life for going on a minor strike as a protest for political status. For refusing to wear prison clothes and work, excessive punishments have been imposed which, taken together and over a period of several months, amount to inhuman treatment. The punishments are: complete removal of remission; twenty-four hour lock-up; deprivation of mental stimulation of any sort, reading material, newspapers, books, television, radio, games, hobbies or writing materials. These are combined with intimate body-searching. Here is an extract from a letter written on toilet paper and smuggled out of H Blocks:

  ‘Seeing it is a special occasion I have decided to write. The last time I wrote you on this date I was one year “on the blanket”. I wrote then, I thought it was an achievement. But I don’t know about this for it is hard to gauge even now how much longer I will be on it. What would I say after four or five years lying naked in a cell and times change so much? One would think being in our position we have lost out in experience in life, that is normal life. I can assure you that these last two years have changed my outlook in many things and have helped me to learn and realise many other things. Everyone of us has his regrets that he didn’t do this or that, and we all have our desires and yearnings for this or that, which change every week. None of you outside could gauge fully the amount a visit or letter would mean to us or some small thing that indicates we are not forgotten. It is being deprived of the small luxuries of life that has helped us to face up to the harsher realities plus all the suffering and anxiety. We don’t say any more that it is a hard station, as most of us believed long ago our station had reached its limits, only to learn this isn’t the case. Well, I suppose there are those who say, “They made their beds so they can lie on them”. I used to accept this, especially in regard to myself, but now I realise that this is another person’s opinion. My own now is that our beds were well made long before we lay in them.

  ‘Well, these are the thoughts in my head tonight. No harm in re-examining our commitment to things in life, in trying times like this asking what would be the best thing to do. You know you are strong and there is no chance of reneging on it’.

  There is a crisis of human existence. The H Blocks are like the empty desert Jesus went into. The desert of the mind, the dry parched desert places of the mystery of man, the limits of human endurance. Amid the rocks and stones of deprivations, sufferings and anxiety a new man emerges. Out of Christ’s H Block came his compassion. He recognised the dignity in the human person – the woman who suffered from bleeding, the deaf-mute, the boy with an evil spirit, the men killed by the tower at Siloe, the widow and her offering. For him no one was insignificant. He welcomed the lovable and the unlovable. He accepted the Samaritan woman at the well. He lis
tened to Nicodemus. He told us not to show off, to invite to our dinner the poor, the maimed, the blind, the lame. Not to be anxious for our body. Who says the prisoners in H Block are bitter? Will they be bitter? No. They have learned compassion in the school of suffering.

  Christ did not wear fancy clothes. He was a beggar who had nowhere to lay his head. He is still the beggar who keeps coming back to the door when we hurt him. His bloodied body still lies in death from Brazil to Iran. His little belly is still swollen with hunger in Kampuchea. He keeps coming back, for the love of people who are suffering, for people who die in tragedies, for their families and those who mourn for them. He is a human being standing defenceless before us full of goodness and understanding. He would not be ashamed to go into the H Blocks, or give clothes to the naked, or bury the dead. The risen Christ dwells in every man. This is the new creation. ‘I was hungry and you fed me, thirsty and you gave me a drink; I was a stranger and you received me in you homes, naked and you clothed me; I was sick and you took care of me, in prison and you visited me.’

  Christ wants us to be beggars too, to be moved with compassion for the helpless, the hunger and poverty of oppressed peoples. Not by words only. By action. We are to pour in the oil and wine and put the wounded on our own beasts. Not just because we are Christians but because we are human beings.

  Homily delivered by me on a tour of Northern Italy. Published in The Furrow, March 1980.

  Remembering the Hunger-Strikers, 1990

  In Ireland the names of the hunger-strikers are hardly mentioned. Now when an occasional political prisoner in Ireland or the European mainland threatens to go on hunger strike to highlight an injustice, he or she is met with severe opposition from organisations and friends. Why is that? Is it because Irish people no longer revere the men who died so bravely ? No. It is because the whole episode hurt everybody too deeply. Everybody suffered. Everybody longed and prayed for an early and just solution of the prison problem. It was a simple enough problem; basic demands for prison conditions that would respect dignity and admit the fact that there was an extraordinary situation in the north of Ireland which had led to many people being imprisoned who otherwise would not. Everybody could see that a compromise solution was possible and easy; in fact now that the men are dead such a solution was found and the conditions they sought now exist in the Maze prison. Why then had they to die? Because the British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher would not allow the plan worked out between the Irish Commission for Justice and Peace and the Northern Ireland Secretary of State, Mr Humphrey Atkins, to be implemented. That is why it is so sad. The men need not have died. Their families need not have suffered. The country need not have been torn apart. So one understands why, when Irish people think of these men, it hurts them so deeply that they do not want to talk about them. It is a kind of on-going grief.

  The present war in Ireland has been waged for twenty years. It makes Irish people very sensitive to troubles elsewhere and makes them very wary of the policies and motives of powerful states. There is so much trouble in the world. It is all brought home to us because the world is a smaller place. The plight of starving children in Ethiopia, the civil war in Afghanistan, the agony of Lebanon, the oppression of the Palestinians, perennial problems of racial and religious conflicts, perennial power struggles between great powers, economic wars, political wars, tribal wars.

  What lesson are to we to learn from the deaths of Bobby Sands, Kieran Doherty, Joe McDonnell, Raymond McCreesh, Martin Hurson, Thomas McElwee, Patsy O’Hara, Francis Hughes, Kevin Lynch, Michael Devine?

  The world cries out for justice. Small nations, nations that are economically weak, the poor and the oppressed can not accept a situation where the Great Powers and lesser Great Powers and the Churches of the west condemn them for taking up weapons as a last resort to defend their basic rights and their human dignity. At the same time powerful nations loudly boast their own nationalism, control the raw materials and trade of the world, hand out ‘gifts’ and ‘aid’ with their own political strings attached and invoke ‘God’ ‘democracy’ and ‘free world’ at every turn. The powerful nations do not hesitate to use violent military might, either invasion or repulsion of every little revolution of the poor and oppressed. The same powers are weighed down with weaponry of the most deadly kind.

  In time the deaths of the hunger strikers, their thirst for justice, will demand a chapter in the history of Ireland. Then the hurt will be over, the wound healed. The salve of time heals everything. It would be lovely to think that their deaths would also demand a footnote in the wider history of our world, that they would be taken as examples of courage, that it would be understood that they died for justice, and that one could learn not to leave the oppressed and the weak in the lurch but come to their aid with faith, justice and love.

  The hunger strikers suffered. There are others like them in the world today. They will have hope if we are ready to carry the Cross with them, to share life and death with them.

  They need the deeds of our love.

  They must experience that we are Christ.

  ... For Christ has no other heart

  to have mercy on mankind

  except yours

  except mine.

  This short talk was prepared for the annual Mass for the Irish Hunger Strikers in Holy Redeemer College, Washington DC, 1990.

  Stripping Girls Naked in Armagh Prison, 1985

  Dear Sir,

  Since strip searching was introduced into Armagh Prison on 9 November 1982, Cardinal Ó Fiaich, Mr Peter Barry, congressmen and senators of the House of Representatives, USA, the Irish Missionary Union, the National Council for Civil Liberties, London, Amnesty International, Action des Chrétiens pour l’Abolition de la Torture, and many more national and international organisations and individuals have voiced their concern. Labour MPs in particular, such as Kevin McNamara, Joan Lestor, Tony Benn, Clare Short, Joan Maynard, Sarah Roloff, Jeremy Corbyn, Peter Archer and Clive Soley, have by visits to the prison, by letters or public statements, shown their distaste for this new procedure. Mr Kevin McNamara in particular has campaigned to have it ended by raising it in Parliament and by his pointed written questions at Westminster. The nationalist community in Northern Ireland will share his disappointment that the Minister for Prisons, Mr Nicholas Scott, finds the strip searching acceptable. As chaplain to the prison I would like to take Mr Scott up on some issues and explain to him some of the feelings of the nationalist Catholic community.

  1. The stripping was introduced on 9 November 1982 shortly after a delegation from the Help the Prisoners organisation, consisting of Cardinal Ó Fiaich, Councillor Jim Canning, Fr Denis Faul and myself met Lord Gowrie, then Minister for Prisons, and some civil servants. We pointed out then how a restoration of lost remission, releases of young prisoners sentenced at the Secretary of State’s pleasure, ill prisoners, those who had completed long sentences, improvements in legal proceedings, education and meaningful work in prisons, Irish magazines and journals, ending of degrading searching, would help to create a climate towards peace. Their answer was the stripping of the women, a new procedure, an end to dialogue. We took it as the customary slap in the face to our community from our colonial masters. The subject more than two years later fits into the ‘Alienation’ context.

  2. Since there is no internal searching of the women, as the Northern Ireland Office has often pointed out, what is the logic of stripping them completely naked, even during their periods, and visually examining the genitals and anus? Can you blame people for logically concluding that the purpose is to degrade and cruelly punish them? Punishment was uppermost during the ‘Blanket Protest’ period; the authorities thought nothing of the mental suffering of the Armagh women prisoners at that time and only ameliorated the situation when public protest grew.

  3. It is unfair for the Northern Ireland authorities to say that the prisoners do not object. They have objected in the past and were punished severely. Furthermore prisoners on parole or t
aking inter-jail visits may not want to jeopardise their position; this is a form of emotional blackmail.

  4. The Northern Ireland authorities constantly point out that their procedure compares favourably with England and Wales. I am not convinced by arguments that compare degrading practices in England, Republic of Ireland, or any country. However the comparison does not stand up. Dr Susan Kramer has pointed out in the British Medical Journal from parliamentary questions, for example, that between 11 November 1982 and 1 March 1983 a total of 722 strip searches were carried out in Armagh on an average population of 40 women, most of whom were long term prisoners and never left the prison; during the same period 1,430 strip searches took place during routine cell and special searches in women’s prisons in England and Wales where the average population was 1,400.

  The serious decline in the standards of behaviour on the part of the Northern Ireland Office prison management took place on 9 November 1982 and has continued. This type of degrading inhuman treatment had not been used during the previous fifteen years of my chaplaincy, nor in the seventeen years of my predecessor, not in the worst times of the 1970s when the situation was very bad and there were some hundred political prisoners in Armagh Prison.

  Why now, when the number of killings has decreased significantly, are we still faced with such grievances as plastic bullets, stripping of women, ‘Shoot-to-Kill’, corruption in the ‘Supergrass Courts’, the PTA? Is it not a matter of the authorities putting in the boot?

  A letter from Fr Raymond Murray, Chaplain Armagh Prison, to Nicholas Scott, Minister for Prisons, 11 January 1985. This letter was issued as a leaflet by the Armagh Social Action Group.

  A Visit with Cardinal Tomás Ó Fiaich to English Prisons, January 1990

  When Pope John XXIII visited San Angelo Prison in Rome, his simple action, screened universally on television, brought tears to many an eye. One could feel the gentle compassion emanate from him as he raised his arms in greeting to meet the outstretched arms of the prisoners, so wretched looking in their pyjama-like garb. He showed his solidarity, not only by his love and prayer, but by confessing that his own brother had done a term in jail for poaching. Like Jesus washing the disciples’ feet, Pope John had given an example.