to acquire dramatic images of the prisoners on the roof. The ephemeral SWP sponsored Irish Political Prisoner Support Group noted that they had ‘cut through the media censorship for the first time since the Price Sisters nearly died’ in June 1974.259 The general public outside Gartree were sufficiently close to hear the shouted comments and rebel songs from the men on the roof. They were not well provisioned, however, and were unfortunate to be exposed to unseasonable high winds and heavy rainfall.260
Rainwater, at least, provided essential liquid which had been lightly contaminated by lead cladding. A more serious concern arose from news that the staff had acquired additional ‘E-List’ uniforms for the protesters, which indicated that those involved were to be regarded as attempted escapers with resultant diminution of privileges. It was negotiated that Ronnie McCartney, already ‘in patches’, would climb down and meet as planned with visitor Una Caughey, to whom this message could be relayed. This duly occurred, and having registered their position in very clear terms, the IRA men descended around 3.30 p.m. on 9 July.261 Numerous prisoners on exercise refused to return to their cells ‘until they knew the Irish prisoners were safe and well’.262 All eight received forty-two days solitary confinement from the Board of Visitors on 21 July. John McCluskey was given fourteen days solitary for his less obvious but still critical role in getting them into position.263 Jerry Mealy, who was moved to Wormwood Scrubs, lost thirteen months of remission, which was subsequently restored by legal action.264 The IRA in Parkhurst was reported to have continued their hunger strike until 9 July.265
Armstrong was returned to Wakefield when his punishment elapsed and found that Ray McLaughlin, who had been teaching him Irish, was ‘on the blanket’ after his stint in Durham.266 McLaughlin had started a unilateral protest in early August to strengthen his demand for repatriation and was immediately sent to F Wing.267 His refusal to wear prison uniform led to the withdrawal of exercise time and incarceration for twenty-four hours a day in a barren, drab cell.268 Albany prisoners were deprived of cell furniture following their recent destruction of prison property, and Tipp Guilfoyle invited extra punishment under Rule 43 by throwing the contents of his chamber pot over a warder. Strangely, no immediate repercussions were imposed in Long Lartin following the forty-eight hour fast of IRA prisoners.269
All such incidents were scrutinised by the Prison Department. Recommendations advanced by Chief Inspector of Prisons Gordon Fowler in the wake of the Hull Riot were addressed in July 1978 by the creation of a Dispersal Prisons Steering Committee, chaired by the Controller (Operational Administration). This restructuring was designed to extend scrutiny of the network by a Prison Department tasked with additional responsibilities for lower grade institutions without interposing itself between Headquarters and the Regional Offices. The Controller (OA), M Gale MC, convened monthly meetings to make ‘joint oversight more effective’ in the sector in which Category A prisoners were routinely held. It was acknowledged by the Home Office in July 1979 that the body was provided with information from the Adult Offender Psychology Unit, which monitored the Dispersal System population ‘as a whole and in relation to particular establishments’.270 By then it was reported that: ‘Attempts are also being made to devise a system for forecasting the growth of a dangerous climate in an establishment by recording in detail certain aspects of prisoner behaviour thought to act as indicators of tension and alienation in the prison’.271
The annual anti-interment rally in London attracted approximately 2,000 to Hyde Park on 13 August. Niall O’hAogan of Sinn Féin’s Ard Comhairle in Dublin joined the familiar voices of Jackie Kaye, Michael Holden, Jim Reilly and Kevin Colfer, Chair of London Sinn Féin. Support from Scottish republican bands, UTOM and An Cumann Cabhrach was in evidence, although the leftist organizations were not as well represented in what was viewed as an inherently Irish republican occasion.272 Brendan Gallagher of Strabane, Tyrone, was held for several days in Lancashire under the PTA when he travelled to preview a BBC TV play regarding the case of his son in the H-Blocks. William Gallagher was then nearing the end of a forty-eight day hunger strike to protest what he claimed was a wrongly imposed conviction for an IRA bomb attack in the west Tyrone town.273 The tenth anniversary of the historic Dungannon to Coalisland Civil Rights march was marked in Tyrone on 27 August 1978 by a major demonstration against the Blanket Protest in the H-Blocks. The original Coalisland march had united politically assertive Nationalists, radical students and republicans in a publicity seeking venture intended to highlight institutionalized discrimination by Stormont towards non-Unionists. The commemoration, however, was organized under the auspices of the RAC and drew in supporters of Sinn Féin and the IRSP, as well as the allied PAC and many others. This reflected the significant change in political emphasis in the course of the proceeding decade during which the more moderate Nationalists had combined within and around the non-violent SDLP. With the focus firmly on the prison struggle in the North of Ireland in 1978, Kaye stressed the PAC view that ‘the political status issue is to do with the struggle going on outside the goal’. Only concerted action in the form of ‘revolutionary struggle’, she averred, would resolve the anomalies of the Irish prisoners in England and the North of Ireland.274
From 8 August 1978, Sinn Féin was engaged with applications from four H-Block prisoners at the European Commission on Human Rights, claiming ‘multiple breaches’ of the European Convention.275 This initiative followed the damning indictment of Long Kesh by Archbishop Tomas O Fiaich who famously described the cell conditions he observed on 1 August 1978 as being reminiscent of ‘the sewer pipes in [the] slums of Calcutta’.276 The high-profile denunciation and the imbalance of prisoner numbers ensured that significant legal developments in Strasbourg on the English dimension were overshadowed by the Long Kesh controversy.277 Among the main public responses of English Catholics to O Fiaich’s comments were criticism of his viewpoint in the Tablet, which allegedly complimented private overtures by the British Delegation to the Holy See to oppose his meteoric advancement from Archbishop to Cardinal.278 Sr. Clarke defended O Fiaich, and implicitly, the validity of his stinging ‘Calcutta’ allusion in the letters page of the Catholic Herald.279 Roy Mason, one of the most fervent political promoters of the H-Block regime, rejected the Cardinal’s pronouncement as ‘a disaster’.280 The NIO claimed ‘these criminals are totally responsible for the situation in which they find themselves … These facilities are better than those available in most prisons in the rest of the United Kingdom’.281 In hindsight, it became clear that mutually destabilizing prison issues on both sides of the Irish Sea were teetering on the precipice of intensifying the Long War.
NOTES
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