by Peter Taylor
One would hardly allow an animal to remain in such conditions, let alone a human being. The nearest approach to it I have seen was the spectacle of hundreds of homeless people living in sewer pipes in the slums of Calcutta. The stench and filth in some cells, with the remains of rotten food and human excreta scattered around the walls, was absolutely unbelievable … I was unable to speak for fear of vomiting.10
Mason was shell-shocked and furious. ‘He seemed to be undermining the legitimacy of our entire struggle against terrorism,’ he said. ‘In fact his words could have been written by Sinn Fein. I was appalled that such a prominent churchman could appear so indulgent towards gangsters who had caused such pain to so many innocent people over the years, including members of his own flock.’11
The ‘dirty’ protest dragged on with neither side prepared to move lest it be interpreted as a sign of weakness. Mason, true to his nature and word, made no concessions and left office in May 1979 when Mrs Thatcher and the Conservative Government inherited the problem. Like Roy Mason, she saw the protest in simple black and white terms. ‘They were keen to establish … that their crimes were “political”, thus giving the perpetrators a kind of respectability, even nobility. This we could not allow,’ she wrote.12 Inside the stinking cells, morale was sky-high due to the slaughter being inflicted on the ‘Brits’ by their comrades outside. It was ‘us hitting back at what they were doing to us,’ said Brendan Hughes. ‘Certainly there was nobody going to cry over Mountbatten or the soldiers getting killed.’13 But the assassination of Lord Mountbatten and the carnage at Warrenpoint were hardly likely to make the new Prime Minister any more amenable to the prisoners’ demands for ‘political’ status, and by the beginning of 1980 the prisoners were starting to get anxious at the lack of any breakthrough and issued a set of Five Demands in the hope of convincing the world that their claims were not unreasonable:
1 The right not to wear prison uniform.
2 The right not to do prison work.
3 The right to associate freely with other prisoners.
4 The right to a weekly visit, letter and parcel and the right to organize educational and recreational pursuits.
5 Full restoration of remission lost through the protest.14
Tactically, the purpose of the ‘Five Demands’ was to create a broader base of support: it allowed people to feel they were in favour of the prisoners’ right to live in civilized conditions without necessarily being in favour of the IRA. It was a subtle but fundamental change in presentation, liberating support from those who would normally have withheld it in fear of appearing pro-IRA (to this end, the words ‘political status’ were deliberately kept out of the document). Although Mrs Thatcher pointed out that conditions in the Maze were among the best in any prison anywhere, this had little effect. In Autumn 1980, after all attempts at mediation had failed, the prisoners decided to use their weapon of last resort, the hunger strike. They chose to do so despite the opposition of the IRA leadership outside the gaol who feared that a hunger strike would dilute the ‘armed struggle’ and divert resources from it. Perhaps even more significantly, they also believed that the hunger strikers would be unlikely to win. In the end, the Army Council had to go along with it since to have forbidden it in the face of the prisoners’ determination to go ahead would have risked splitting the Republican Movement. The notion that the Army Council manipulated the hunger strike and encouraged the prisoners to put their lives on the line is simply not true.
By now there were around 500 prisoners protesting. Hughes asked for volunteers and 170 came forward. In the end, seven were chosen who represented geographically the whole of Northern Ireland. Hughes himself, as the prisoners’ OC, was to lead it and represent Belfast. Joining him were Tommy McKearney from Tyrone, Raymond McCartney from Derry City, Leo Green from Lurgan, Thomas McFeeley from County Derry and Sean McKenna (kidnapped from over the border by the SAS) from South Armagh. The seventh person was John Nixon, the Irish National Liberation Army (INLA) OC in the H Blocks, one of 34INLA prisoners who were also on the protest. Nixon’s place as OC was taken by Patsy O’Hara from Derry.15 Hughes’s place as the Provisionals’ OC was taken by Bobby Sands.
It had been decided that all seven prisoners should start their hunger strike together which meant it was only as strong as its weakest link. This proved to be a mistake because all prisoners would approach death at roughly the same time which meant that the ‘Brits’ only had to stand firm for a relatively short period of time. The prisoners’ other mistake was to underestimate their opponent. ‘If we had known anything about Thatcher and her personality, perhaps we mayn’t have embarked on the hunger strike at that stage,’ Hughes admitted.16 The prisoners’ ignorance of the character of the new Prime Minister was the result of not having read a newspaper, seen a television or heard a radio since the protest began. The only news they received was from their families when they came on visits, for which the prisoners agreed to put on prison clothes. Mrs Thatcher had no illusions about the real purpose of the ‘Five Demands’.
The IRA and the prisoners were determined to gain control of the prison and had a well-thought-out strategy for doing this by whittling away at the prison regime. The purpose of the privileges they claimed was not to improve prisoners’ conditions but to take power away from the prison authorities … The IRA were pursuing with calculated ruthlessness a psychological war alongside their campaign of violence: they had to be resisted at both levels.17
The fast to the death began on 27 October 1980. In the days running up to the start date, the Government had tried to reach a compromise by announcing that it was scrapping prison uniform in favour of ‘civilian-type’ clothing but this was not enough for the prisoners. The Government had granted only half a demand. There were four and half others still to be met. Again, Mrs Thatcher made it clear that the Government would not give in. ‘There can be no political justification for murder,’ she said. ‘The Government will never concede political status to the hunger strikers or to any others convicted of criminal offences in the province.’18 Twelve days into the hunger strike, the seven prisoners were moved to a separate part of the H Blocks which had previously been set aside as a hospital wing in case an epidemic broke out from the filth in the cells. Priests and lawyers now became the sole intermediaries, most notably Father Brendan Meagher, a priest from Dundalk, who was to become the main mediator between the prisoners and the Northern Ireland Office. His code-name was ‘the Angel’. The NIO was in a quandary as to what more it could do without appearing to bend to the prisoners’ will. Its Permanent Under Secretary, Sir Kenneth Stowe, knew he did not have many options.
My reaction was, I suspect, the same as everybody else’s, what do we do now? One knew that forced-feeding was out, therefore, if the hunger strike continued, these people would die. Then we would have more martyrs, and Northern Ireland is not a place to grow martyrs if you can avoid it. Therefore we were very anxious to try to find some way of enabling the hunger strikers to get off the hook.
Mrs Thatcher was equally opposed to forced-feeding, which she described as ‘a degrading and dangerous practice which I could not support’.19
The NIO set up its own emergency hunger strike committee consisting of Sir Kenneth; the GOC; the Chief Constable; and Humphrey Atkins, the Conservative Secretary of State who had succeeded Roy Mason. ‘There was a continuous discussion taking place about how we can find a way out of this,’ Sir Kenneth recalled. ‘We spent many hours just kicking this around, asking, How can we find a solution? We were all aware that if it went on, there would be new martyrs and new killings to avenge the martyrs. So the stakes were very high. We began to explore whether the rules regarding prison dress could, in any way, be adapted in a UK context so that some of the steam could be taken out of this issue.’
Then, at a crucial moment, with some of the hunger strikers now in a critical condition, a deus ex machina emerged in the person of Michael Oatley, the MI6 officer who had kept his ‘bamboo pipe’ in working
order since he had helped negotiate the IRA ‘truce’ in 1975, despite Roy Mason’s forbidding undercover negotiations and any contact, direct or indirect, with the IRA by any British official following the resumption of violence. Oatley had decided to ignore these instructions. Without seeking permission or advising either his own Service or the NIO, he remained in touch with his friend in Derry, the Contact, and agreed with him that the IRA’s leadership should be told that a secret channel of communication to the British Government, represented by himself, remained in place for use when needed. This situation was maintained and tested from 1975 to 1991, during which time Oatley became known to the IRA as the ‘Mountain Climber’.
This was a personal decision. I merely allowed the situation to develop over the next year or two where some members of the Provisional IRA leadership were aware that the ‘pipe’ was still there and that I was at the other end of it. From my own point of view I think that people on the IRA side thought I had come out of it as a reasonably reliable person with whom they could deal and I, for my part, had been quite clearly convinced that people on the other side were able to keep secrets. So I didn’t think I was running any serious risk politically for the Government in letting the IRA know that there was still a point of contact if they should ever need it and it would operate wherever I happened to be in the world.
Oatley knew he was taking a risk: had Roy Mason found out that Oatley’s ‘pipe’ was still ‘live’, he would have been ‘severely reprimanded’. Ironically, the IRA leadership, as well as the British Government, wanted to find a way out, not least because there was growing pressure from the nationalist community to do so. In Derry, the Contact was well aware of the mood and, as crisis point approached, with Sean McKenna now close to death, he activated Oatley’s ‘pipe’ and rang him in the middle of the night, as was his wont, suggesting that an acceptable compromise could be worked out, given the IRA’s desire to resolve the impasse. ‘We spent two or three hours discussing it in veiled language over the phone,’ Oatley said. ‘It seemed that one might be able to develop a formula with, no doubt, some ambiguities in it, which would be a gesture by the British Government to the demands of the hunger strikers.’
The following morning, 18 December, Oatley went to see Sir Kenneth Stowe at the Northern Ireland Office in London, which had already been considering ways of amending the prison regime. Sir Kenneth met Oatley in his room at about 9 a.m. and remembers Oatley explaining the IRA’s position. ‘It was, in effect, “Is there a way out, is there something that can be done?” At which point our thoughts about adapting the prison regime in order to find an escape hatch for the hunger strikers began to become highly relevant and we then started talking to see whether we could achieve something along those lines.’ During their discussion Stowe remembers Oatley getting the Contact on the telephone to make sure that the compromise they were working on would be acceptable to the IRA and the prisoners. ‘Michael Oatley was able to discuss this, standing beside me, with his Contact in Northern Ireland, and through that process the arrangement was put in place.’ Oatley and Stowe then produced a revised version of the prison rules which Sir Kenneth described as ‘a face-saving formula’, now satisfied that it would be acceptable. Oatley described it as ‘fairly open-ended and in some ways ambiguous’, covering ‘parcels and visits and clothing and so forth’ without being too specific in any area. Ambiguity had been one of the notable features of the phrase ‘structures of disengagement’ which the British had used to entice the IRA into the ‘truce’ of 1975. I asked him if the formula allowed prisoners to wear their own clothes since that was the issue that lay at the heart of the ‘blanket’ and ‘dirty’ protests and the hunger strike. He said he could not quite remember but thought ‘it left that sort of question rather open’. Stowe then had discussions with Ministers without Oatley being present ‘in a few very crowded hours’, since he could not move without their approval. Nor, even more crucially, could he move without Mrs Thatcher’s. The Prime Minister, whose Principal Private Secretary Sir Kenneth had been, was consulted and gave her approval.
It was agreed that the formula would be conveyed to the IRA leadership and the hunger strikers themselves via Oatley and their intermediary Father Meagher, and not through the official prison channels. Had it gone the formal route, the Government’s backstage negotiations would almost certainly have been leaked, destroying both the Government’s credibility and the initiative to end the hunger strike, which was approaching its fifty-third day with Sean McKenna ever closer to death, Stowe knew that ‘We had to act speedily if we were going to resolve this situation before we had a martyr.’
With Prime Ministerial approval, Stowe told Oatley to use his NIO official car and get the document to Northern Ireland before it was too late. Oatley was then driven to Heathrow at high speed along the hard shoulder of the M4 motorway.
Oatley met Father Meagher at Belfast’s Aldergrove airport in the evening. The Arrivals area was already empty and a bizarre situation developed with the arrival of several Special Branch officers who had suspected that something was afoot, tailing Father Meagher. There were probably also a few IRA men around to make sure they were not being taken for a ride by the ‘Brits’. The formalities were kept to a bare minimum. Oatley gave the document to Father Meagher as arranged and left the airport. The priest first took the document to representatives of the IRA leadership convened at a safe house on the Falls Road. They were dismayed at what they read. In their eyes the document was too vague and gave none of the guarantees they required. As they were studying its thirty-plus pages, a Sinn Fein member, Tom Hartley, came rushing into the room with the news that the hunger strike was over. Brendan Hughes, having been assured in advance of the contents of the document, had called the hunger strike off in order to save Sean McKenna’s life. The news was received with huge relief at the NIO. Stowe immediately rang the Secretary of State, Humphrey Atkins, to tell him it was all over. Hughes had taken a gamble which he believed was vindicated when Father Meagher brought the document into the hospital wing accompanied by the prisoners’ OC, Bobby Sands.20 ‘By that stage I’d been on hunger strike for fifty-three days so I couldn’t read the document so I asked Bobby and Father Brendan what they thought. They believed that we had a settlement. The euphoria was fantastic that night in the prison hospital.’
Whatever its shortcomings, the document was all the prisoners had. There was a feeling they had been outmanoeuvred by the ‘Brits’. Sands said it was so wide open, he could drive a bus through it.21 Mrs Thatcher believed the Government had won. ‘The IRA claimed [that they had called the strike off] because we had made concessions, but this was wholly false. By making the claim they sought to excuse their defeat, to discredit us, and to prepare the ground for further protests when the non-existent concessions failed to materialize.’22 It was only a matter of time before the agreement negotiated between the Contact, Oatley and Stowe fell apart. Relatives brought the prisoners’ own clothes into the gaol, expecting them to be handed over immediately so they could put them on. But the clothes never reached the wings. The settlement only worked with the combined goodwill of both the prisoners and the prison authorities, but, after four years of confrontation in the H Blocks and the deaths of prison officers, there was precious little of that around. It seems the regime dug in its heels and was in no hurry to give the prisoners what they believed they now had a right to expect. Brendan Hughes, recovering from his fifty-three days without food, feared the worst.
A few days later it became obvious that something wasn’t right. It needed the co-operation of the prison authorities to implement the agreement and Bobby [Sands] became increasingly frustrated at the sabotaging of this agreement by the prison administration. They just didn’t want this to work and they really went out of their way to make sure it did not work.
It was only a matter of time before the prisoners picked up the gauntlet again. Despite the spirit of the document Oatley had brought, the prisoners never got their own clothes.
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There was a tragic inevitability to what happened next. Plans were laid for a second hunger strike, this time to be led by Bobby Sands. Now there was to be no compromise. It was victory or nothing. The Army Council was even less enthusiastic than before but had no choice other than to support its prisoners. Nor this time was there any Michael Oatley on the spot (who had been posted to South Africa) to help avert the headlong rush to disaster. The Provisional Army Council (PAC) made it clear to the prisoners that although it had tempered its operations during the first hunger strike so as not to alienate public support, it now reserved the right to return to full-scale operations against the ‘Brits’. The PAC was true to its word: during the seven months of the 1981 strike, the IRA killed 13 policemen, 8 soldiers, 5 members of the UDR and 5 civilians. In total during the period, sixty-one people died, more than half of whom were civilians as the loyalist paramilitaries too unleashed their gunmen.23 This time, unlike the previous occasion, the strike was to be staggered, with prisoners joining at regular intervals so that if one died, another would take his place in the spotlight, in the hope that negotiations would take place in the short interval before the next death came. It was agreed that Bobby Sands would be first, then Francis Hughes from County Derry (who had survived the shoot-out with the ‘Det’ in 1978), Raymond McCreesh from South Armagh, and Patsy O’Hara, the INLA prisoners’ OC from Derry. If they all fasted to the death, there were plenty of other volunteers. It was to become a titanic struggle between the Iron Lady and the Iron Men. Neither Mrs Thatcher nor the prisoners had any intention of giving in.