Madigan prior to his move to Albany.88 Madigan never set foot in Finnlader’s cell but assisted in the sewing of small bags from curtain material which were used to distribute the ‘rubbish and the rubble’.89 Other discrete preparations went undetected. Walsh persuaded an unconvinced UVF prisoner of the merits of doing him a ‘right favour’ by exchanging his A Wing cell for that of his own on B Wing.90 He otherwise could not participate. Gibson and Mulyran did much of the physical work on the basis that their known friendships with black prisoners provided cover for an otherwise suspicious presence on the top landing. Mulryan was compromised one day when an unexpected check of ‘bars, bolts and locks’ by prison staff trapped him in the cell. Although shirtless and sweating profusely from the labour, no comment was made.91 Gibson recalled: ‘Every night I went up there and chiselled out, worked on the things. Played music [to cover the noise]. After about two months, I got through to the last brick and we could see a little chink out. That was it’.92 Dirt and minor debris was scattered in the yard from the workshop-produced bags and the damage covered nightly by Finnlader’s numerous reggae music posters.93
The IRA men gathered in Finnlader’s cell on the evening of the bid with parts to assemble a twenty-foot ladder made from bolted Formica tabletops. It had been donated by a respected English gangster formerly associated with the Kray twins.94 The men also possessed ropes made from sheets and various items of useful paraphernalia. When the last few bricks were prised away, Walsh and Gibson descended the precarious thirty-foot drop to the ground. They were in the act of receiving the equipment needed to scale the walls from Mulryan when they were noticed by two alert warders who had braved heavy rain to mount a night patrol.95 A prisoner lookout positioned at the far end of the wing had not seen the staff members return towards the busy exit point.96 Walsh, a renowned fighter, spotted the prison officers radioing for assistance while staring transfixed at the extended knotted sheet rope, realised that physical resistance was futile. Within seconds ‘alarms [were] ringing everywhere. We were outside the building and the [inner] fence was about twenty yards away’. The plan had been to climb the two fences, and lacking outside harbourers and transport away from the island, to simply ‘hope for the best’. The men believed the fence line was not properly alarmed and that external help could have made the high-risk effort a viable prospect. As matters stood, ‘bad luck’ doomed it to failure.97
All aspirant escapers still inside the building managed to get away from the scene of the wall breach and avoided detection. They were surprised to be neither punished nor moved, a strong indication that informers on the wing had remained silent if not oblivious. Speculation that men were waiting to assist the group if they got over the exterior wall was not confirmed.98 Walsh and Gibson were seized in the open and punished with eighty-six days in solitary and were placed on the ‘E[scape] List’. Finnlader’s selfless aid to the republicans resulted in fifty-six days in solitary confinement and the loss of six months, remission.99 The Prison Department was undoubtedly relieved that the IRA men had been contained, not least in that it maintained its impressive record of just three Category A absconders between 1975 and 1978.100 Walsh was held in Wormwood Scrubs until 6 September 1979, followed by a month in solitary in Wandsworth before being shifted to Hull where deleterious ‘conditions’ induced him to refuse family visitors.101
Shane Paul O’Doherty
Shane Paul O’Doherty had been regarded as vulnerable prior to his transfer until he ended his blanket protest in solitary and was moved into D Wing of Wormwood Scrubs in November 1977. D Wing was the maximum-security part of the large London complex, parts of which dated from 1874. By February 1978, the Derryman, a close friend of Martin McGuinness, was a potentially problematic prisoner due to his public distancing from the Republican Movement. His refusal to wear prison uniform had been intended to secure repatriation to the Six Counties and succeeded in attracting the notice of concerned liberals.102 This evinced militancy. Contact with John Hume, MP for Derry and a leader of the SDLP, proved encouraging, although he was one of very few Irish politicians closely involved in backing O’Doherty. Bishop Edward Daly of Derry and Lord Longford supported his position, as did British Labour MPs Andrew Bennett and Philip Whitehead.103 He was persuaded that the Home Office would not relent on repatriation if it appeared that they had acceded to pressure exerted by the ‘blanket’ protest. Accordingly, O’Doherty abandoned his campaign in November 1977 ‘after fourteen months naked in solitary’ to give his influential supporters room to manoeuvre.104 This resulted in his relocation to D Wing of Wormwood Scrubs where, for the first time, he was in a position to interact regularly with other IRA prisoners such as Belfast gunrunner Jimmy Kelly.105
O’Doherty’s major break from the IRA ranks dated from 17 February 1978 when a letter originally intended for Republican News appeared on the front page of the Derry Journal. The smuggled communication had been passed by a family member to a senior republican in Derry and elicited a message that the Belfast-produced republican organ required deletions. The prospect of censorship aggrieved O’Doherty, who turned to Derry’s main newspaper in the hope that an unexpurgated version would be published in the letters column. He was taken aback when it received the prominence of a lead story, although he must have realized that life-sentenced IRA prisoners in any jurisdiction rarely aired such controversial issues in public.106 The letter caused a minor sensation and its contents were widely reported in the Irish and British media.107 His basic argument was that revolutionary socialism was incompatible with Christian morality on the grounds that it tended to create a totalitarian political environment. This view would have been contested by contemporary republicans, but any critical analysis attributed to an IRA ‘lifer’ could not be dismissed out of hand. Editorial comment added by the Derry Journal presented the communication as a repudiation of the argument that the conflict was a ‘just war’ under theological definitions devised by the Christian and specifically Catholic tradition. O’Doherty’s experience was cited in order to assert that political violence was ‘not justifiable’.108 As an avowedly pluralist and secular organization with numerous non-Catholic members, the IRA was uninterested in the moral status of its campaign within the Vatican, but published commentaries, which strengthened the analysis of the SDLP at the expense of Sinn Féin, were clearly unwelcome. The Derryman would have been viewed in some quarters as undermining comrades by disseminating such an important unilateral statement. This would have been a more daunting prospect in Portlaoise and the H-Blocks, where republican command structures would have militated against a solo run.
In the short term, O’Doherty faced the possibility of a backlash from fellow IRA prisoners in England. He claimed that some ostracized and ‘verged on wanting to beat me up for speaking my mind’, although other ‘more broadminded’ individuals offered unconditional support.109
