commemorated Marx, and the gesture was an example of the anti-imperialist dimension of the prisoner controversy in England.127 Dozens of organizations and individuals had been invited to send messages of support and the meeting received statements from the IRA PROs of Parkhurst, Long Lartin, Gartree and Albany.128 The message from Albany had been smuggled out of the Punishment Block where several IRA prisoners had been confined since 25 April 1978 when, according to the Prison Department, ‘a group of Republican prisoners refused to go to work when ordered to do so’ in order to protest visiting arrangements.129 The statement, with input from Eddie O’Neill and Ray McLaughlin, was substantial and militant in its rhetoric:
Revolutionary greeting to all Comrades gathered here to expose the crimes of British imperialism in Ireland. We urge all socialist comrades in Britain to show solidarity with the Irish revolution and to wake up to the fact that a victory for socialism in Ireland is a victory for socialism everywhere ... From our attempts to politicize British prisoners we realise the difficulty of your task. We have made progress through our examples of solidarity and undying hatred of the prison system. The prison regime attempts to make psychological cabbages out of Republican and socialist prisoners but it will never succeed. The carrot of parole holds no attractions for Republican socialists. They cannot buy us so they will never control us. This message comes from the block in Albany prison. We are down here as a protest over the apartheid-style visits given to Republican socialists and to innocent Irish framed for Republican operations. We are not only [Category] ‘A’ prisoners but we are segregated from other prisoners. We are unable to embrace our wives or girlfriends, our mothers and fathers … Victory will come through solidarity combined with positive action.130
While Amnesty International did not regard the IRA as ‘prisoners of conscience’, the organization had been critical of Britain for its harsh interrogation of prisoners in the Castlereagh Centre, and this lent credence to similar and well-founded allegations in respect of the H-Blocks and England.131 The 5 May event in London, and another in Manchester on 26 May, fostered common ground between the Revolutionary Communist Group (RCG) and PAC on the wider question of political status.132 From December 1976, the RCG paper Hands off Ireland! was one of the most focused publications emanating from the British left on the conflict and a strong proponent of the contentious ‘troops out now’ position.133 TOM was divided on absolute demands for an immediate British military withdrawal from Ireland for fear of unleashing uncontrollable forces, a proposal vigorously opposed by Gerry Fitt of the SDLP, Garret FitzGerald of Fine Gael, and other anti-republican moderates.134 Two promising joint meetings held in May 1978 were interspersed by a third in London in which the Roger Casement Cumann of Sinn Féin unfurled its ‘first H-Block banner’. This debut, and the significance ascribed to it by its creators, illustrated the mounting preoccupation of the party structures in England with Long Kesh.135 In a telling development, the numerically small PAC formed a ‘Prisoners in Ireland’ sub-committee to concentrate on campaigning for republicans in the two Irish jurisdictions.136
As before, the most powerful and well-resourced organization of the British Left, the CPGB, refused to be drawn into a declaration of solidarity. The Stalinist CPGB remained wedded to a de facto policy of following the lead of communist affiliates in the North of Ireland, a body with disproportionate input from persons drawn from the Unionist as well as sectarian Loyalist community. This produced a glaring paradox whereby the CPGB voiced support for international leftist revolutionary organizations in Continental Europe, Africa and Asia, while condemning the closest equivalent within the UK and Ireland. Moreover, the stance of British communists necessitated ignoring Moscow’s general opposition to allied front groups backing sub-national elements. Irish communists were by no means immune to such tensions, and the far left was badly factionalised in the 1970s, not least by the ‘Two Nations’ tendency promoted by British Irish Communist Organization (BICO), which critics contended had conferred a degree of political legitimacy on a hardline Unionist position.137 Individual communists and far left trade unionists, however, were sympathetic towards Irish republicans. Although a well-known Spanish Civil War veteran turned his back on Eddie Caughey at a funeral in Burton-On-Trent, he obtained legal assistance for his imprisoned republican son from a CPGB union official.138
The studied and damaging detachment of the CPGB from the ‘Irish Question’ resulted in the PAC picketing their offices in King Street, London, on 16 June 1978.139 The SWP, NCCL and Connolly Association were also criticized for their perceived failure to rally behind the PAC/ Sinn Féin driven campaign on political status and amnesty.140 The Labour Party, similarly, was generally indisposed to back radical proposals from its TOM membership. This reflected sensitivity on the block votes cast by several craft and engineering unions which supported the minority opinion of their Unionist membership in Ireland. This position shifted towards a more pro-Irish Labour Party stance in late 1981 in the aftermath of the H-Block hunger strike.141 Amnesty International, frequently criticized by Irish republicans for their silence on the maltreatment of political prisoners in England, published findings on torture in the North of Ireland in June 1978 after a seven-month investigation.142 Shocking reports of the ‘blanket protest’ in the H-Blocks, and the severity of interrogations in Castlereagh distracted English radicals from the local brutalities of the Dispersal System, but even this sense of exigency failed to stimulate left wing unity in Ireland. New ‘H-Block Committees’ in Oxford and elsewhere in Britain, and a dedicated TOM demonstration in London against the Castlereagh abuses represented further, if logical, redirection of English political energy towards problems in Ireland.143
British counter-insurgents, meanwhile, gradually substituted the crude psychological and physical methods used in Castlereagh to extract ‘confessions’ with ‘supergrasses’ whose unsupported testimony was used to convict scores in the juryless Diplock Courts.144 The Brehon Law Society of New York, an organization comprising Irish-American and humanitarian practitioners of the legal profession on the East Coast of the USA, described the new Diplock proceedings that matured in the early 1980s as ‘show trials’.145 The allusion to Stalinist-era extremity in the Soviet Union’s legal system was intentional and geared towards aggravating socially conservative Irish-Americans. The tactical use of informers and agents in court, surprisingly, was never utilized against the IRA in Britain, possibly owing to attention it would have brought to bear on the conduct of certain jury trials and the statutory requirement to air ‘accomplice evidence’ in front of a civilian panel. Commitment to the jury tradition, as the numerous miscarriage of justice cases affirmed in the 1990s, provided no guarantee of fair or appropriate verdicts in trials where forensic evidence was vitiated. There were, moreover, no IRA prisoners in England willing to compromise in such a manner in the 1980s.146
The Campbell case at Strasbourg
The European Commission of Human Rights on 9 May 1978 decided to admit the test
