and exact a financial toll from their captors. ‘Uxbridge Eight’ prisoner Gerry Cunningham reflected:
It was attack …a way of getting back … The system was there, why not use it? … Numerous cases [mounted by other IRA prisoners] as well, not because they believed in British justice, not because they believed they were going to win, but because they were going to court. And because they’d get legal aid and because it was costing the state … for those cases to be defended. They had to defend them.46
Legal initiatives mounted by Irish republicans, and their willingness to make common cause with British prisoners, raised the status of the IRA among those confined in the Dispersal System. Derry republican Brian McLaughlin noted: ‘They more and more came to respect us because they witnessed that on different occasions we had protested not only for ourselves but for better conditions for them also’.47 The solidarity demonstrated between the IRA, British gangsters and others during the 1976 Hull Riot, and the court proceedings that ensued, had accelerated the process, and Irish republicans in English prisons believed that the system ‘changed’ in consequence.48 More generally, the basic approach of staff towards Category A prisoners fell, in the late 1970s, within the theoretical definition of ‘coercive power’ coined in the 1990s. This was the most severe of several available modes of interaction and was characterized by ‘increased use of segregation, transfer, privilege removal, disciplinary punishments and lock-downs’.49
The Prison Department maintained its remit of estranging the IRA from the general Dispersal System community at a time when they were, as evidently suspected, utterly determined to disrupt jail administration. According to Eddie O’Neill: ‘[Hull] put fire into a lot of prisoners. It empowered a lot of prisoners who previously felt impotent’. The attack by staff on the IRA men in Albany, furthermore, enraged their comrades: ‘That finished us with any idea that there was some course of diplomacy to deal with things like minor protests. It was all out war at that stage … [and] the Hull riot empowered a lot of guys … The fear that had been generated by repression before that suddenly dissipated ... for a long period of time the place was just a tinderbox’.50
Broadening the front
A Bloody Sunday commemoration parade from London’s Hyde Park on 24 January 1978 attracted around 500 persons, while another 500 marched from Shepherds Bush to Hammersmith. The scale of the events was a decrease on the numbers that had attended Irish demonstrations prior to the implementation of the PTA in 1974, and a pale shadow of those that had protested internment in Trafalgar Square in 1971.51 The highly emotive Derry anniversary, however, served to promote joint political activities of pro-republican bodies based in Britain in 1978. Twenty members of the United Troops Out Movement (UTOM) from Leeds, Sheffield, Bradford and Doncaster picketed Wakefield prison four days later as part of a week of interlinked events.52 This linked to a notorious and specifically English concern for the wider Irish struggle, albeit from a numerically small subsection of the British population.53 Statements of support from the PAC and the IRA prisoners in Wakefield were as appreciative as ever, even if opportunities to reach receptive audiences were steadily diminishing.54
An Cumann Cabhrach, the charity that assisted with the welfare of prisoner’s dependents, continued to receive funds from its international associates, which in February 1978 included the Celtic Club of Melbourne, Australia, and Na Fianna Éireann (NFE) in San Francisco, California. Income of the level that had preceded the Birmingham bombs of 1974 was no longer available from UK sources, although newspaper sales and discreet donations continued.55 The international pro-prisoner networks contained elements with multiple lines of communication to the Republican Movement. The Cathal Brugha Slua of NFE, San Francisco, did not come under the umbrella of the Dublin HQ, yet produced republican activist Christina Reid, one of the IRA linked ‘Boston Three’ in 1990. She was an acquaintance of San Francisco-born IRA member Liam Quinn, who was jailed in Ireland and extradited from America to England in 1986.56
The task facing Sinn Féin and An Cumann Cabhrach was complicated by unanticipated developments in England and Ireland. The closure of Leicester Special Unit on 28 February 1978 created a new challenge in that two prominent Irish prisoners, Hugh ‘Hughie’ Doherty and Eddie Butler, were sent on a protracted tour of ‘local’ jails, where they were held in solitary confinement pending the refurbishment in Leicester. In February 1977 the men had received multiple life sentences with a thirty-year minimum, which the trial judge retrospectively wished to amend to ‘natural life’.57 Doherty ultimately spent two years in solitary confinement in Durham, where he was initially denied access to his personal books owing to the theoretically temporary nature of his stay.58 Leicester SSU did not reopen until 26 February 1980. Parkhurst Special Unit, the only other structure in England deemed suitable for the men, was not only full but contained Harry Duggan, Brendan Dowd and Joe O’Connell, all of whom the Home Office wished to separate from their former associates.59 The Clareman noted: ‘They obviously didn’t want the four of us [IRA co-defendants] together. It would be too political … too much of a statement’.60 Following a very rare escape, Parkhurst SSU had undergone a security upgrade between 26 November 1976 and 12 April 1977, which included the construction of an additional wall as well as an electrified inner fence. Whereas Harry Roberts had once planned an escape using bolt cutters smuggled into the prison by his Irish mother, a much greater degree of preparation was necessary following the additional security investment.61
Sinn Féin and the UTOM attempted to keep such matters in the news by picketing Winson Green (Birmingham), Leicester and Gartree in the months ahead, but made little headway in the context of other events.62 The POW Department of Sinn Féin claimed in 1980 that Doherty and Butler were ‘outstanding cases of victimisation’ in the English SSUs.63 Dowd was equally meritorious. Between August 1976 and June 1980 the Kerryman was in Bristol, Albany, Wandsworth, Armley, Strangeways, Parkhurst and Winchester for periods of two to three months. Frequent movement between solitary confinement cells induced disorientation, weight loss, hair loss and impaired vision. Republicans attributed the unusually harsh treatment to Dowd’s centrality to the appeals of the ‘Guildford Four’ and ‘Maguire Seven’, who were unjustly jailed for the actions of his London ASU. He was moved into the Leicester SSU in June 1980.64 Dowd was known to be a prominent IRA member, a former O/C in London and, from 1975, as ‘Dennis Power’, a disguise he used while living in Manchester.65
Prison Department scrutiny of Doherty and Butler in Leicester prior to its renovation probably derived from their knowledge that the men had explored various means of escape, which evidently inspired the improvement of the complex. The ‘Balcombe Street’ group, when on remand in Brixton following their televised arrest in December 1975, had been moved to Wandsworth when a criminal informer betrayed their plan to use smuggled explosives to blast through a toilet block wall to access a