Action, January 1987, pp. 10–11. See also ‘Working Party on conveyance of Provisional Category “A” prisoners’, 11 July 1974, National Archives (England), Home Office 391/ 53.
12.RJ Hardiman to Robert R [Roy] Walsh, 3 March 1987, Private Collection (Walsh).
13.Roy Walmsley, Special Security Units, Home Office Research Study 109 (London, 1989), p. 29. See also HC Deb 21 June 1984, vol. 62, cc. 216. A founding member of the IRSP, Belfast man Sean McGourgan, was sentenced to four years in Lancaster Court on 5 September 1975 for stealing three Coptic crosses and possession of detonators. Sr. Clarke, ‘Sean McGourgan’, Clarke Papers (COFLA). McGourgan was not claimed by the organization, despite having apparently survived an attempt on his life in Lancaster by a rival Official IRA/ Clann na hÉireann member. The non-political aspect of his trial lessened his public profile. Sean McGourgan, 12 March 2012.
14.Report of Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Prisons, 1983, p. 18.
15.Guardian, 11 March 1992.
16.‘Letter to persons wishing to be submitted for Approved Visitors List’ to Eddie Caughey, 2 August 1996, Private Collection (Eddie Caughey).
17.See Joyce Plotnikoff, Prison Rules, A working guide, Revised Edition (London, 1988), pp. 81–3.
CHAPTER 1
Year of Crisis
In a radio interview broadcast on 8 January 1978, Irish Taoiseach Jack Lynch called on the British Government to state its intention to withdraw from the North of Ireland and claimed that in such an environment, outstanding prisoner issues would be resolved.1 This pragmatic and domestically shrewd declaration angered Britain’s Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, Roy Mason. At a meeting with Senior Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA) officials in Dublin on 5 May 1978, Mason noted somewhat illogically that ‘references to a possible amnesty had sown seeds of doubt which have now been removed’ by assurances on cross border security.2 Various British agencies knew that the Irish Government was unwilling to formally confer political status on IRA prisoners concentrated in Portlaoise Prison. On 29 April 1977, they had been one of eighteen powers who abstained when the Diplomatic Conference on Humanitarian Law, Geneva, recognized guerrillas as meriting prisoner-of-war status. Ending the bitter conflict, however, required de facto acceptance of captured and sentenced IRA and INLA members, as well as pro-British ‘Loyalists’, as political prisoners. Thus, their treatment pending a negotiated settlement was a highly sensitive matter.3
Negative trends within the Dispersal System fully warranted the retrospective characterization of 1978 by the London Times as a year of ‘crisis’.4 Acknowledgement of a trying period by Britain’s paper of record stemmed from the undeniable and diverse pressure points being exerted on the establishment. The Prison Officer Association (POA), an innate bastion of conservatism, had instigated a muscular campaign of industrial action to assert the rights of its beleaguered union membership. Understaffing, demoralization and a stressful labour environment exacerbated loss of paid overtime and sundry workplace entitlements. Overtime in the late 1970s ‘local’ prisons could be compulsory and obliged junior staff to present themselves for thirteen days’ duty in a fourteen day period.5 Extra pay for longer, and budgeted hours in uniform, was otherwise lucrative. The resultant ferment was described by the taciturn Home Office as ‘unprecedented’, and far in excess of the disturbances of 1972, when generally passive resistance from prisoners coincided with POA members working to rule.6 In the course of 1978, senior prison officers stood trial for alleged criminal offences arising from the violent suppression of the Hull riot in August 1976. The illusion of omnipotence and immunity was permanently shattered. Overcrowding all but ensured that physical confrontations with inmates increased in frequency and seriousness. The range of countermeasures developed to maintain control, not least common usage of tranquilizing drugs, draconian punishment ‘F Wings’, and secretly trained riot units served to discomfort moderates. By early 1979, when Justice May conducted a root and branch inquiry into the prison service, 42,000 prisoners were held inside a system with a Certified Normal Accommodation (CNA) of 37,735. Only 31,656 had been jailed in the jurisdiction in 1969, when both recorded crimes and convictions were considerably lower than 1978.7
As the unpopular conflict in Ireland entered its tenth year, the presence in English jails of militant republicans fostered a distinct range of challenges. The British Government received an embarrassing check on 18 January 1978 when the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) in Strasbourg found it had breached Article 3 of the European Human Rights Convention (1953) by its administration of interned persons in the Six Counties from August 1971. This revelation was palliated by the Court’s careful description of pertinent unlawful seizures and interrogations as constituting ‘degrading treatment’, despite the Commission’s prior use of the politically loaded yet applicable term ‘torture’.8 The extraordinary delay in official deliberations permitted equivocation and disavowal. Britain’s NATO allies were circumspect with regard to formalizing allegations of human rights’ violations on the western side of the mutually militarized ‘Iron Curtain’. UK Attorney General Sam Silkin dutifully assured the European Court in February 1977 that such controversial practices had been discontinued, but he could not defend the fact that the conveniently mild verdict from Strasbourg came in the midst of numerous claims of gross excesses in the treatment of detainees in the North of Ireland. This reality, coupled with developments in England’s Dispersal System, indicated that further recriminatory judgements in higher Continental courts were in the offing.9
Right wing and predominately Europhobic British Conservatives were appalled by the ECHR decision and Airey Neave, Shadow Northern Secretary, decried Silkin’s ‘unprecedented incompetence’ in failing to vindicate the UK.10 Neave, a former British Intelligence operative during the Second World War, had received milder handling by German captors in 1940s’ Colditz than many Irishmen interned by Britain did in the early 1970s.11 Numerous men detained without trial and with little or no connection to the IRA had aside from been badly maltreated in Gough Barracks, Ballykelly and Long Kesh as well as the advanced interrogation techniques inflicted on the selected ‘hooded men’. Irish republicans Noel Jenkinson, Sean O’Conaill, Michael Gaughan and Frank Stagg had all perished in custody by February 1976 as a direct result of their imprisonment in England.12
The announcement in Strasbourg coincided with a significant statement by Taoiseach Jack Lynch. On 18 January 1978, Lynch called upon the British Government, headed by Labour Prime Minister James Callaghan, to state its intention to withdraw from the Six Counties. This bid to break the stalemate in the North of Ireland was supported by Cardinal Tomas Ó Fiaich who would have inferred from Lynch’s overall comments that the Taoiseach was prepared to grant an amnesty to IRA prisoners in the southern jurisdiction. Open political commentary of this kind rarely emanated from Dublin and was underpinned in this instance