by Mia Bloom
In Mairéad Farrell’s Belfast neighborhood, murals depicting the Irish struggle stand next to images of Picasso’s Guernica, paintings of Palestinian refugees, and graffiti calling for freedom and human rights. For Republican nationalists, the connection to the American civil rights movement is clear.
Violence was all around Mairéad. As a child, she had to pass through military checkpoints and endure curfews. Her mother recalled that her daughter used to ride her bicycle to school. But on the Blacks Road, Protestant children would try to pull the Catholic kids off their bikes, so Mairéad had to start taking the bus. Soon the bus too was attacked on the Blacks Road, so the driver had to make a four-mile detour to get to the school. Such episodes contributed to Mairéad’s radicalization.19
Feeling that the Catholic community was constantly under siege, Mairéad joined the IRA when she was only a teenager. She vowed that she would do anything necessary to get the British out of Northern Ireland and end the occupation. She was captured while on active service, planting bombs at the Conway Hotel in Dunmurry, on April 5, 1976. When the three five-pound bombs exploded, they demolished the hotel, started a fire, and caused thousands of dollars worth of damage. No one was hurt because the PIRA had called in a warning fifteen minutes ahead of time and Mairéad and her conspirators had made sure everyone had evacuated the building before detonating the explosives. Within an hour of the blast, she was in police custody.
At her trial, Mairéad refused to recognize the court, give evidence, or make any statement. The judge sentenced her to fourteen years for causing three explosions, possession of three bombs and a Colt 45, and for being a member of an illegal organization. In the women’s ward of Armagh Prison, she was weighed, washed, and presented to the assistant governor (warden), who asked her what work she wanted to do while in jail. She refused to do any work, insisted on wearing her own clothes, and demanded her rights as a political prisoner. Mairéad served ten and a half years in Armagh’s A Wing. While in jail, she became a leader of the female prisoners and their official Officer Commanding (OC). She also became the PIRA’s poster girl for opposition to the British “occupation” of Northern Ireland.
The British legal system reversed the principle of “innocent until proven guilty” for Irish political prisoners at this time. Women arrested had to prove their innocence and since most Republicans refused, as Mairéad had done, to recognize the legitimacy of the British court, their conviction rate rose to 94 percent. The number of women in Armagh multiplied exponentially. According to Father Denis Faul, one of only two priests who were allowed access to the women jailed at Armagh, the prisoners were subjected to the most deplorable conditions.20
It was a prison out of Hollywood movies, characterized by iron bars, gray concrete walls, and humorless guards. It was old and falling apart. Each cell housing two prisoners was no more than six feet by nine.21 It contained two iron beds with the bedsprings soldered to the frames so they could not be detached. The beds were covered with a thin foam rubber mattress, a gray blanket, and a pillow sometimes made of straw.22 There were no amenities and no luxuries or comforts to speak of. Unlike the other wings of the prison, the A Wing had no educational or recreational facilities. As the numbers of incarcerated women increased, overcrowding worsened and the tensions between the prisoners and the guards intensified.
Mairéad had been arrested at the worst time for Irish political prisoners. In 1976, “special status” for political prisoners was arbitrarily rescinded. Women sentenced after March 1 of that year were thus denied the privileges granted to women sentenced a day earlier. Inmates in Armagh Prison’s B Wing enjoyed special status in recognition of the fact that they were political rather than criminal prisoners. They could wear their own clothes; were exempted from prison duties; received a weekly visit, letter, or package from their families; and had access to educational materials. Teachers instructed the women in a variety of subjects, including the Irish language, mathematics, geography, dressmaking, art, music, typing, and even physical education. The women could also sit for their high school equivalency tests.
The women without special status who, like Mairéad, refused to do any prison work were locked in their cells twenty-three hours a day and deprived of any mental and sensory stimulation. They were not allowed to watch television, listen to the radio, or get reading materials. They changed their clothes once every three months: for ninety consecutive days they had to wear the same jeans, sweaters, and underwear. The authorities did not bother to put sheets on their beds.23
During their time in jail, the women learned to suppress their feelings to avoid having a mental breakdown. They communicated with one another by tapping on the pipes and during their one hour of exercise in the yard. Given their isolation, they struggled to find ways to keep their sanity. They came up with different activities: bingo, trivia quizzes, singsongs, even the occasional political debate. Their singing was infectious—sometimes even the guards would hum or whistle along. Every night at 9:00 P.M., Mairéad would announce it was time to say the rosary, which they would all recite in Irish.24 The women survived by forming strong friendships with one another. One woman recalled to me: “It was us against the system. They would try and undermine us and demoralize us but it didn’t work. We held on to our beliefs and if anything it made us stronger.”25
According to her prison mates, Mairéad became a skilled negotiator as the Armagh OC. She knew when to accept clean blankets or lice- and flea-free mattresses that would ensure the women stayed healthy, and when to turn down concessions intended to divide the women from the male prisoners in H Block and from each other. During her years there she maintained unity among the women. Typically, the spirit of every woman arriving in prison had been almost entirely broken by what she had endured during capture and trial. The police had forced most of them to sign some sort of confession, and at times the charges were fabricated. When the women were at their lowest, it was often Mairéad who lifted them up and gave them the strength to face the day.
THE PRISON PROTESTS
Over a period of five years beginning in 1976, the men in Maze prison (known as Long Kesh) engaged in the blanket protest. They were led by one prisoner, Kieran Nugent, who refused to wear his prison uniform. Instead, he wore only a blanket, and many of the newly convicted prisoners followed suit. The blanket protest led to the no-wash protest (which the British derisively termed the “dirty protest”) in which the prisoners refused to wash, and smeared excrement all over their cell walls. When the blanket and no-wash protests failed to yield any positive results for the prisoners, they opted for a radical act of self-sacrifice. In 1980 the men began a series of hunger strikes.
During the men’s blanket protest the female inmates in Armagh, led by Mairéad Farrell, refused to wear their prison uniforms in hopes of challenging the British government’s efforts to criminalize them. Unlike the men, they were not allowed to wear only blankets (which might have been more hygienic than their clothes). The women sang freedom songs in Gaelic—an overt expression of Republican nationalism—and demanded to be treated as prisoners of war and not as criminals.26
In addition to the blanket protest, Mairéad led the women in a thirteen-month campaign of passive resistance by refusing to bathe or use the two prison lavatories. According to the women, they did not start the no-wash protest of their own volition. When the women were locked down on February 7, 1980, after an incident in which the guards had ransacked their cells looking for pro-IRA contraband (including every piece of black clothing), the guards refused to provide access to the bathrooms. There were only two baths and two toilets for the thirty-plus female prisoners to begin with. Within a matter of days, the cells’ chamber pots (bedpans) were overflowing with waste. Initially the women threw the contents out the windows but then the guards boarded these up, and forbade the inmates from emptying the pots using the facilities. Finally, the women resorted to smearing excrement all over the walls of their cells in protest. Soon the cell walls were covere
d in feces, urine, and blood. The stench was overwhelming. The women recalled to me that there were days when they woke to find maggots crawling all over their hair and bodies.
Nevertheless they were undeterred. As one woman recollected, “It was amazing what one could endure for your principles, and, after a few days, the smell did not bother us and we were able to tolerate these conditions for over a year.”27 Another described the process: “You would pluck a piece of pooh out of the chamber pot using a tissue that your relatives had smuggled in. Then you would smear it all over the walls. As the shit dried to a yellow or pale brown, it eventually lost most of its smell, but it was the urine, used sanitary napkins, diarrhea, and vomit that made everyone sick. The floors were covered in dust that was actually shedded skin and flies buzzed everywhere, dying in orgies on the uneaten food and excrement.”28 When the women woke, there would be hundreds of flies covering the walls. Woodworms jumped from pile to pile as various infestations spread through the prison population. The women’s health deteriorated. They lost weight. They lost their hair. Many developed a variety of internal infections. The accumulating broken nails, flaking skin, and hair transformed the cells into rats’ nests.29 To distance themselves from the conditions, the guards patrolled the halls in nylon blue jumpsuits and white Wellington boots that made them look like astronauts on the moon.
After thirteen months of this, Mairéad Farrell, Mary Doyle, and Margaret Nugent began a hunger strike in solidarity with Bobby Sands and the other men at Long Kesh. The women felt that they had exhausted every other possible source of leverage with the prison authorities and the hunger strike was their last resort. All three were prepared to fast to the death to make their point.30 Sands wrote of Mairéad, Mary, and Margaret in his diary before his death: “I’ve been thinking of all the girls in Armagh. How can I ever forget them?”31 One of the other male hunger strikers, Lawrence McKeown, said that the women’s experiences during the prison protests made the men more conscious of Irish gender stereotypes. The women recalled that the men at Long Kesh supported their struggle and wrote them notes of encouragement while the women’s movement never did. Large segments of the feminist movement viewed the women of the PIRA with suspicion and, at times, contempt. In fact, within the Irish feminist movement they were called the slaves and dupes of the men. In London, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher declared the three women were criminals.
Mairéad Farrell agreed with Lawrence McKeown that women in Ireland suffered twice, once as Catholics and once as women. Mairéad was quoted as saying: “I am oppressed as a woman, and I’m also oppressed as an Irish person. We can only end our oppression as women if we end the oppression of our nation as a whole. I hope I am still alive when the British are driven out. Then, the struggle begins anew.”32 For the women of the PIRA, the Republican nationalist struggle was intertwined with the struggle for equality. For many of them, there was no difference. The fight for freedom and equality was joined with the fight against the Unionists and the British army and crown. At the same time, most PIRA women did not consider themselves feminists. They felt a deep distrust of the women’s movement and resented the feminist argument that women’s rights came first, before revolution, independence, or freedom from Britain. Mairéad told her cell mates, “Everyone tells me I’m a feminist. All I know is that I’m just as good as others, and that especially means men.”33
Once in the movement, the women were treated as equals. Seán Mac Stíofáin, former chief of staff for the Provisional IRA, said that in the early 1970s the PIRA had selected a number of women to be trained on the basis of full equality with the men. Some of the best shots he ever knew were women, as were the smartest intelligence officers in Belfast.34 According to the women themselves, they never felt any kind of sexual discrimination or second-class status. Mairéad recalled that she was treated equally to the men, as were all of the women in the PIRA. “You got doing what the lads did but it depended to what extent you were committed, not measured by what sex you were.”35
The women’s organization Cumann na mBan (Union of Women), founded in 1914 alongside the Irish Citizen Army, was one of the precursors of the IRA. Decades later, women were involved only peripherally in the movement, as support units or as “molls” used to lure British soldiers to an apartment or isolated area to be attacked by the women’s colleagues.36 Women accompanied men on a mission as cover; a couple attracted less attention. Women also served as couriers, ferrying messages and weapons. The army’s difficulty was that they could not properly search women for contraband. The women also picketed at the drop of an insult; according to the women themselves, the British were terrified of them.
The British army often conducted night raids in Catholic neighborhoods, in night squads called Duck Patrols. Women began patrolling the streets in units that became known as Hen Patrols. They would blow whistles, bang garbage-can lids, and make as much of a ruckus as possible to warn of an army incursion. The women of Belfast and Derry became the not-so-secret weapon of the PIRA. They were lookouts who raised the alarm when British soldiers approached. They shielded fugitive gunmen when troops swooped into the Catholic ghettos. Over time, they began carrying weapons and taking part in armed encounters against British soldiers.
As the community was increasingly mobilized, more women and children became involved in the movement. Scotland Yard prophesized that mothers and wives would no longer provide a restraining influence on the men in their families. The women would not only egg the men on, but also join in the fight. But not all Republican women were involved in violence. Many joined the local citizen’s defense committees and participated in the anti-internment struggles, lobbying for the release of their husbands, brothers, and sons. Some women supported the PIRA simply by wearing paramilitary dress: black skirt, white blouse, and black beret. Wearing this outfit was sufficient cause to get a woman arrested and questioned for possible membership in a terrorist organization, which was itself criminalized. One woman told me that membership was used as a holding charge, especially if the authorities could not find any evidence against them. “So if you got off on one set of charges, they could prove membership in what they had termed an illegal organization and you would be sentenced anyways.”37
As the numbers of women active in the PIRA increased, the number imprisoned also grew. There were few women interned at Armagh Prison in 1972, more than one hundred in 1976, and more than four hundred by 1982.38 More and more women were arrested on weapons charges and “intent to bomb.” Hundreds of young girls were dragged out of their homes in the middle of the night and interrogated. Once arrested, the women were forced to sign confessions that were often fabricated; many of the women on the Republican wing of Armagh jail had no real connection to the PIRA, and the actual number of women involved with the movement was much smaller than the number serving sentences.39
Allegations of sexual misconduct and impropriety followed. In one notable case in 1975, Margaret Shannon, a prisoner who had been strip-searched, alleged that the guards had threatened to rape her in her cell that night. For four consecutive nights, officers came down to her cell, unlocked the door, and menaced her for hours, shouting obscenities and threatening to come in.40 Another prisoner at Armagh, Anne Walsh, was beaten so badly in the head that she lost the hearing in one ear.
According to military sources, the army’s dossier on women’s involvement grew thicker every day, with women playing “an increasingly important role in IRA activities, especially as communications officers.” In 1973, the Price sisters, Marian and Dolours, made headlines when they received life sentences for the March London bomb attacks that killed one person and seriously injured 216. The following year, Judith Ward was arrested for a bombing on the M62 highway which caused many civilian casualties, and Roisin McLaughlin was wanted in connection with luring three British officers to their deaths.
The British use of the policy of internment refers to the arrest and detention without trial of people suspected of being members of illegal
paramilitary groups. The policy was introduced a number of times during the conflict in Northern Ireland, including from August 9, 1971, until December 1975. During this period a total of 1,981 people were detained, more than 90 percent of them Catholic: 1,874 were Catholic/Republican, and 107 were Protestant/Loyalist.41 Six months after internment was introduced, nearly three hundred Irish Republican women (but no Loyalist women) had been taken into custody and Armagh Prison was bulging at the seams with female political prisoners. Maire Drumm had always said, for every woman they put in the Armagh jail, there would be fifty more ready to take their place.42
Many of the women fighters exceeded even the PIRA’s expectations in terms of their skills and lethality. One of the most accurate snipers in the Belfast Brigade was a teenage girl; another young woman was their most experienced expert on booby traps. At times, the women were more ruthless than the men and made credible Rudyard Kipling’s assertion that the female of the species is more deadly than the male. Critics used hyperbole to demonize the women, comparing them to the harpies better known as tricoteuses who, during the French Revolution, sat knitting before the guillotine, counting their stitches by the severed heads. The women did not want the men accusing them of holding back just because they were women. The critics felt that the women were competing not only against the enemy, but also against the men of their own side to show that women could do anything men could do, and could hate better than the men too. The British military claimed that their troops were reluctant to fire upon women, even when faced with female snipers, although this was not always the case, as the subsequent events in Gibraltar would demonstrate.
Starting in the 1970s, scores of teenage girls bolstered the thinning ranks of the PIRA as men were either killed or jailed by British forces. The organization recruited the girls to carry timed devices, hidden under their clothing, into shops; they hoped that because of the girls’ youth, they would receive only cursory examination by security staff.43 Girls as young as thirteen smuggled bombs into Belfast city center. They targeted women’s and children’s clothing and toy stores, the kinds of places where a man would stick out like a sore thumb. Some nights, as many as ten devices would be found along Belfast’s busy Victoria Street, all timed to explode when the shops were closed and shoppers had gone home, nevertheless disrupting the economic life of the city. Some of the more fashionable girls hollowed out their three-inch platform heels and smuggled weapons, ammunition, and even rifle parts through security checkpoints. Each pair of platforms could carry half a pound of explosives.