Review: Looking back on the hunger strike

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REVIEWS

LOOKING BACK ON

THE HUNGER STRIKES

Special Catagory Status - Political Status was phased out of the 6 - county prison system in 1976 by the British Administration. Ciaran Nugent was the first prisoner to begin the protest. The author describes it thus: ‘*He was put through the conveyor process and imprisoned in one of the new facilities in Long Kesh on 14th September, 1976. He refused the prison uniform. Two days later he accepted the uniform for a visit with his mother. He had in mind a little demonstration of his own. While on the visit he began to strip off the uniform. He was not a criminal, he declared, as he stood in his underpants. And if they expected him to wear their criminal uniform, they would have to nail it on his back. And so Cieran Nugent became the first blanket man’’.

THE PRISONERS STORY

In March 1978 in response to beatings and harassment by the screws the Republican prisoners refused to leave their cells -and thus began the no wash/no slop out protest.

‘Slop buckets were not forthcoming so their excrement and ‘ urine accumulated in the pots. The cells became very dirty.

Waste overflowed onto the floor. The screws finally began coming around with the slop buckets to empty the pots of.

urine and excrement. But sometimes they kicked the pots over or spolled the contents onto the mattresses, the blankets.

-or the prisoners themselves. The men’s own bodily waste was now to be used as a weapon against them’’, In response the prisoners poured their urine under the cell doors and smeared their excrement on the walls.

“By June 1978 after about 13 weeks of the no-wash no slop-out protest all furniture had been removed from the cells. The men sleeping on damp, soggy, dirty sponge matresses were getting filthier by the day. The were all undernourshed and underweight, with pale, scaby, yellowing skin. They were sleeping, living and eating on the floor. The cells were filled with huge piles of putrifying food. It was three months since most of them had had a shower’’.

There were now 360 Republican prisoners on the blanket and this was the situation which led up to the hunger strikes of 1980 and 1981. To those who had been involved in the protest movement against the withdrawal of political status there were two foci to the protest. First, and most importantly, there were the prisoners themselves. Their indomitable courage and persistence denied the British government the quick victory that the brutal regime they had initiated in the prisons in 1976 depended on for the success of the criminalisation policy. of which the withdrawal of political status was a component part. As it turned out it was the rock on which the whole policy foundered. Secondfy there was the protest movement outside the prisons.

This began with the relatives of the prisoners themselves.

The Relatives Action Committees(RACs) began on an ad-hoc basis but gradually built up a committee structurewhich by december 1976 was attempting co-ordination throughout the North. Many of the women who ran these committees had, _little organised political experience before and participation in RACs in support of husbands and brothers in Long Kesh (and the small band of women prisoners inArmagh who began’ a similiar protest on 7th January 1980 as a result of been’ beaten and kicked by male warders. This escalated a protest they had begun the previous March) was their first sustained political activity. They made it up as they went along - small pickets and marches and on occasion 24 hour vigils were women clad only in underwear and blankets occupied tents and stalis as a way of drawing attention to the plight of the prisoners. Left wing groups participated in these committees alongside the Republican movement. Eventually the work of the RACs was subsumed into the work of the National 'H-Block Committee which was set up at an open conference - in the Green Briar in October 1979. In 1980 it became the H-Block/Armagh committee. The aim of the committee was to broaden the scope of the protest and encourage all those who supported the aim of the protest to come together and put maximum pressure on the British government. As an aid to this process the prisoners crystallised their protest into the ‘65 demands’’. 1. The right to wear their own clothes 2. Free association with other prisoners 3. The right not to do prison work 4. Full 50% remission of their sentences 5. Normal visits, parcels, educational and recreational facilities Tom Collin’s 600 page book attempts to set out in detail the background to the protest and culminates in the 1981 hunger strike itself. A chatper is devoted to each of the 10 prisoners who died - their family background and early lives, how they came to be in the H-Blocks and detailed and often harrowing accounts of their deaths. The first two chapters describe the build up of the protest up to the first hunger strike of late 1980. This is accomplished largely through the device of following the progress of one prisoner - IRSP prisoner Tony O'Hara, brother of Patsy. There are two other chapters. One of these. the last chapter, as well as assessing the political effects of the hunger strikes, describes Father Faul’s role in ending the hunger strikes through putting pressure on the families to give premission for the medical staff at Long Kesh to revive comatose hunger strikers. This was largely successful in September when first Matt Devlin, in a coma after 52 days was taken off by his mother and on 26th September Liam McCloskey acceded to his mother’s 5-hour plea and he came off after 55 days on hunger strike. On the 3rd October 1971 the 217 day hunger strike was officially ended by the prisoners. That evening in a statement the prisoners said;

Bambury ignores the political significance of th Northern struggle. -**We have been robbed of the hunger strike as an effective protest weapon principally because of the successful campaign waged against our distressed relatives by the ‘Catholic Hierarchy, aided and abetted by the Catholic Catholic Hierarchy, aided and abetted by the Irish establishment {the SDLP and the Free State political parties] which took no effective action against the British government and id everything to encourage hopelessness among our kith and kin......We extend our solidarity to the families of the dead hunger strikers and to all our families and friends. We especially thank the National H-Block Armagh committee and all support groups and urge them to continue with their trojan commitment to the achievement of the 5 demands by whatever means we believe necessary and expedient. We rule nothing out. Under no circumstances are we going to devalue the memory of our dead comrades by submitting ourselves to a dehumanising and degrading fregime’’.

THE CARDINAL ARCHBISHOP

‘The longest chapter in the book is called ‘The Cardinal Archbishop’ and is devoted to Cardinal O’Fiach’s involvement with the impasse in the H - Blocks. It is in this chapter that the biggest weakness in the book is typified.

Yom Collins has written the H-Block/Armagh committee practically out of history. It is referred to in passing several times but no attempt is made to describe its composition, how it was set up and what relationship it had to the forces that were set in motion in Irish society during the hunger strike. Consequently the size and scope of the protests in ireland and abroad, the elections of Bobby Sands and Owen Carron to Westminster, the local government elections of 1981, the Dail elections which turned Kieran Doherty and Paddy Agnew into TDs and recorded supstantial support for other prisoner candidates and which was one of the factors leading to the fall of Haughy'’s administration are described briefly in passing with little attempt to analyse their significance. The industrial action taken by tens of thousands of Irish workers during the hunger strikes is ignored altogether. In place of the protest campaign Tom Collins has substituted the church and a romantic notion of his own of what the hunger strikers represented in the Irish nation.

‘It is a sad and depressive world of suffering and slow death.

But it is also a world of men with families who are filled with at times charged with - hope: Hope for a world in which men could lay down their lives so selflessly. Hope for the fulfill- ‘ment of the dream of freedom in another world where - ‘** ina flash, at a trumpet crash!”’ - all things would be made new.

page 15 Hope even for this world; even for Ireland; even in this generation. Tiocfaidh ar la! Inexorably their day will come.

And surely it will come more quickly for what they were: and did.” The book rises frequently to this kind of overwritten cpiphany. its reverential hero-worshipping tone towards the hunger-strikers takes the place of searching analysis and frequently obscures the political issues involved in the hunger strikes. Never is this more glaring than in the chapter on Cardinal O’Faich. Clearly he has had unprecedented accesss to the Cardinal. As well as quoting in detail many letters between him and British officials it gives candid accounts of the Cardinal’s private opinions and details of private meetings - for example with Thatcher at the height of the hunger strikes and with leaders of Sinn Fein in 1980 who were anxious to find internediaries to resolve the H-Block crisis before the hunger strike began. Clearly Cardinal O’Fiach was anxious to set the record straight, to get his version of the chruch’s involve ‘own on record. He is well aware that how the church performed during this crisis for the anti-unionist people will be used as a yardstick of its commitment to social justice for a lo ng time to come. And how do they come out of it? Well, if one is to accept at face value the picture presented by Tom Collins in his chapter ‘The Cardinal Archbishop’ - well. Not so well if one places it into the.context of the real protest campaign that was going on in support of the prisoners. Collins, however, has denied us this opportunity because he has ignored the real campaign that was organised by the National H-Block Armagh comittee and substituted it with the behind the scenes negotiations of the church first through Cardinal O’Faich and later on through the Irish Commission for Justice and Peace(ICJP). Tom Collins describes the Cardinal’s and the Church's position on Irish Unity thus: ‘The Cardinal had thought a lot about the problem. He was Irish of the Irish, and had always seen himself that way. But he recognised that some of his people did not feel as he did, and he had to be pastor for them as well. He'd been reflecting on this dilemma for years, the church as an organisation had no position at all towards Ireland as a nation.

Its attitude was indifferent, except in so far as one set of political circumstances might be considered more favourable to its mission than another. And a situation where its people -were comfortable in their freedom was not necessarily better for the church than a situation where they were forced to live under a hostile regime...... Some felt that the Catholics of Dublin, who lived under [rish rule, were more ‘prone to materialism than the poorer Catholics of Belfast who lived under British rule’’.

page 16 WE

SALUTE THE

HUNGER

STRIKERS —

Francis Hughes Kevin Lynch Ray McCreesh Bobby Sands Micky Devine Leaving aside the implications in this evaluation of the religious benefits of poverty, there is a contradiction here and it is not surprising that as the hunger strike progressed this contradiction opened up wide chasms of credibility.

Cardinal O'Fiach is an ambiguous figure in the Church and the author uses him to good effect to obscure the role of the church in the protests as an institution. With his South Armagh background and gaelic scolasticism he is not really a typical figure in the church _ hierarchy. His ‘Sewers of Calcutta’ statement of July '78 was the first time that conditions in Long Kesh made news throughout the world. He made no bones about his position on special : Kieran Doherty catagory status. . ; Patsy O'Hara ‘The authorities refuse to admit that these prisoners are in a different catagory from the ordinary, yet everything about their trials and family background indicates that they are different’. He continued working quietly behind the scenes. Yet if one tries to reconcile his above statement with the one quoted about his views on Irish Unity it becomes quite clear why his efforts were ineffectual. There were political implicatons which flowed from his realisation that the prisoners were ‘*special”’ that given his position in the church it would have been very uncomfortable for him to carry through. Because he was unwilling to join the protest campaign the British administration realised early on that they had effectively neutralised him. BEDE e 1] Tom McElwee Joe McDonne The same was true also of the church as a_ whole, though more glaringly. The involvement of the its official organ - the ICJP - was a shameful episode. Bishop Mahony ofDublin, chairman of the ICJP, said some time after: the hunger strike:

‘All along we were against granting political status to the IRA prisoners, To grant political status would help the IRA and we couldn’t do that. What we were looking for was a compromise. The IRA would have as their goal not only getting the British Army out of Ireland but undermining the democratic process in the South of Ireland.....0ne can’t forget the crimes most of those in prison are guilty of, even though they were tried in special courts; attempted murder, bombing, all kinds of violence’’.

And in June °81 in the middle of the hunger strikes the Irish Bishops published the following statement: ‘*We implore the hunger strikers and those who direct them, to reflect deeply on the evil of their actions and their consequences. The contempt for human life, the incitment to revenge, the exploitation of the hunger strikes to further a campaign of murder, the intimidation of the innocent, the initiation of children into violence, all this constitutes an appalling mass of evil’’.

All this from an institution which “took no position at all towards Ireland as a nation’’. These were the people who were trying to resolve the hunger strike as Joe McDonnel lay close to death.

WHAT CAN IDO?

The involvement of Haughey and Fitzgerald is chronicled handwringing assurances of concern and behind the scenes pressure on the British government, but because they were not able to go the whole way and join the campaign in support of the five demands the British government had effectively neutralised their efforts. Meanwhile the prisoners kept dying. The plight of the Irish middle class is well summed up in the following scene where Cardinal O’Fiach came to the Hurson household for the wake of Martin Hurson who was from Cappagh in the Cardinal’s diocese.

“They gave him a cup of tea and a sandwich and Francie{Martin’s brother] went over and started talking to him - ‘Father, you’ve got the power of the Catholic Church.

And yet you didn’t do anything to save Martin - > The Cardinal was nodding his head sympathetically. ‘Young men like Martin’, Francie said ‘are dying on hunger strike, starving themselves to death for their country. They only wanted to be Irishmen, Father. They have proven themselves to be Irishmen. And you couldn’t even save their lives’.

‘Francie what can 1 do? I honour Martin. I’ve come here to the house to be with the Hurson family. But I have no power.

England has the power’. ”’ But they did have power. The one power that they could have used to save the hunger strikers. When Thatcher ignored their private approaches they could have taken to the streets with the campaign. But they didn’t and the British knew that the Irish middle classes North and South were effectively check-mated. In many ways they had as much to lose as the British had. Tom Collins book is required reading for anybody interested in the hunger strikes. It is an akward ungainly book.

‘It is written partly in documentary style and partly like a novel. The technique works only patchily. Obviously, a lot of time has been spent with the families although there are some key people whom, it is clear, he has not interviewed. The most glaring example of this is his treatment of Sinn Fein.

Like the H-Block Armagh committee they are dealt with scarcely at all. The book is littered with hostile reference to the ‘Provos’, the political movement to which the majority of protesting prisoners belonged. This sits oddly beside his reverential approach to the hunger strikers themselves.

There is a contradiction here which the book never resolves.

The picture he builds up of the prisoners is assembled largely through the accounts of the families and the picture that page 17 emerges is one of ordinary working class families - for the most part devoutly Catholic. And in the atmosphere of the hunger strikes and approaching death it is not surprising that this was an aspect that was stressed by all. But it is an incomplete picture that would have been rectified if the author had included more detailed analysis of the politics of the prisoners and the political movement to which they had given their allegiance - a side of them which many of their families admitted they had little knowledge of and didn’t understand. But his hostility to the Republican movement prevents him from doing this and apart from the ritual assertion of the fight being an age-old fight for Irish freedom the precise politics of those intimately involved with ‘the hunger strikers is at best ignored and frequently slandered. One of the ways he has made up for this is by substituting IRSP personnel (who clearly have co-operated externsively with the author) for those of Sinn Fein when he is presenting informed political comment. The result does justice to neither organisation and presents a one - sided analysis to key events in the campaign(e.g. the attitude of Sinn Fein to the early RAC’s on page 63) and an inadaquate picture of the real balance of forces of the political organisations involved in the campaign.

IT would not like to put anyone off reading this book.

There is much here that will move people and much that ts new and has not previously appeared in print. But the book should be approached cautiously. As a chronicle of the experiences of the hunger strikers and their families there is much that is fine in it. As a contirbution to an understanding of the political currents that moved and shaped the forces involved in the hunger strikes it is confused and woefully inadaquate.

JAMES MACKIN:

“THE IRISH HUNGER STRIKE”

BY TOM COLLINS

WHITE ISLAND BOOK COMPANY

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