by the British authorities in relation to Irish prisoners in England. The breakthrough signalled that the Commission in Strasbourg believed there was a prima facie breach of Article Six arising from the refusal of the Home Office to permit Campbell to consult with his lawyers between October 1976 and March 1977. This essentially reasserted the Golder v UK (1975: 1 ECHR, 524) judgement of February 1975. Another element of the complaint focused on the conduct of the Board of Visitors who had punished the Tyrone man with solitary confinement and loss of remission. However, this potentially significant advance was tempered by the failure of the Commission to accept claims from Campbell and others that Article Three had been breached by the violence inflicted by staff on the Albany prisoners.147 The case was still under consideration in March 1982 when Campbell was released and deported, having served all but a few months of his full sentence.148 Prisoners could petition the Home Secretary for restoration of forfeited remission under Prison Rule 56 (2), but IRA members rarely pursued this theoretical option. Campbell evidently did not elicit the support of the various adjudicating bodies who had imposed sanctions and who enjoyed in doing so the capacity to make restoration under Order 42 (a) of Prison Standing Orders (1977). This directed: ‘Where a prisoner’s institutional behaviour has shown a significant improvement, indicative of a genuine change of attitude (as opposed to staying out of trouble), and the improvement is likely to be maintained, a governor or Board of Visitors, depending upon which adjudicating authority originally awarded the forfeiture of remission, may restore part of the remission a prisoner is forfeited if restoration will bring forward the earliest date of release’.149
Movement in Strasbourg revived the waning issue of Irish prisoners in England. The Times of London observed that the presence of over 100 persons regarded as IRA personnel in the Dispersal System had exacerbated pressures arising from overcrowding.150 In January 1978, the official tally of those ‘connected with the IRA’ was ninety, of whom seventy-eight were Category A. There were fifteen Loyalists of whom six were Category A.151 The Home Office acknowledged the general problem when pressed by the Irish Times, and a spokesman honestly conceded that the IRA ‘obviously caused additional strain on prisons and prison officers’.152 Given the comparatively small numbers involved, the real difficulty was posed by the perceived necessity of applying labour intensive restrictions which collaterally stressed long-term prisoners accommodated in England’s maximum security wings by virtue of disproportionate resource allocation. Such men were on occasion discommoded by being obliged to share the lot of the Irish militants in their midst or, more typically, granted more consideration than IRA members sharing the Category A designation. The presence of republican women in H-Wing, Durham, warped the experience of all those contained in the annexe and it could not be concealed from informed parties that the administration of IRA prisoners had displaced many of the most dangerous men in Britain from the SSUs. This unusual admission of Irish exceptionalism in London came very close to conceding the consistently denied existence of political prisoners. Relating republican ‘behaviour’ to their typically long sentences, and supposed enmity with other prisoners, obscured the characteristic dynamic of political assertion and culture of resistance fostered in the IRA cadres. The airing of such matters, however guardedly, coincided with a bid by Hull prison officers, articulated by Kenneth Daniel of the POA, to register their objection with the Home Office to suspension of members due for trial arising from the 1976 riot.153
An Anti-Repression Conference convened by Capuchin Fr. Piaras Ó Duill in Dublin on 19–21 May 1978 attracted numerous activists engaged with the political prisoner question in Ireland. Belgian, French and Basque legal experts formed part of a panel of inquiry which convened in Liberty Hall, Dublin.154 They received reports from various expert contributors, including solicitor Alastair Logan and Jackie Kaye of the PAC, who addressed the situation in England. It was claimed that the panel ‘found the plight of Irish political prisoners in England most disturbing … they are discriminated against in a racist fashion, beatings and solitary confinement being the usual punitive measures’.155 Young Derry republican Micheal MacLochlainn, who had been held in four English prisons prior to 23 December 1977, contributed a statement in which he described the collusion between criminals and Brixton staff in the potentially fatal attack on Eddie O’Neill with boiling water in November 1974.156 The conference was informed that there were eighty-five such prisoners, of whom all but three were classified as Category A. This number compared to the 300 republicans involved in protests in Crumlin Road, Armagh and Long Kesh.157
Government-level interest in the management of imprisonment in the EEC was manifested by the publication in 1978 of Treatment of Long Term Prisoners by the European Committee on Crime Problems. Penological research commissioned by a subcommittee of the Council of Europe examined six countries. The study incorporated Home Office-aided research on 215 inmates within English prisons and included a seminar hosted in Wakefield. When reviewing the publication for the Prison Service Journal, J Williams, Governor of Long Lartin, concluded that it contained ‘no startling new theories or propositions’.158 Project psychiatrist, Dr. Sluga, concluded that men who had served four to six years of long sentences under conditions of isolation were prone to ‘functional psycho-syndrome’. Symptoms included emotional and cognitive disturbance, infantile regression and difficulties in social interaction. Williams, however, noted the findings of psychologist Professor Smith in the English Dispersal System, where ‘general deterioration’ was not as strongly in evidence as might have been expected, although hostility towards the self was a major issue. The reviewer emphasised the positive conclusion that severe mental health threats were neither inevitable nor irreversible. Williams, moreover, stressed that ‘Resolution 76 (2) on the treatment of long term prisoners’, endorsed by the Council of Ministers in February 1976, recognized the practical difficulties of implementing certain reforms and the rights of individual prison regimes to reject recommendations they deemed inappropriate. The tone and content of the Williams review would have reassured his Home Office employers in that it downplayed the relevance of many potentially disturbing factors. It also indicated that the Dispersal System was in no danger of being exposed to serious criticism.159 Other international physiatrists differed on this key mental health point and reiterated contrary findings well into the 1980s and 1990s.160
Re-organization and resistance, February-July 1978
IRA prisoners in England appreciated in 1978 that their perspective on the armed struggle and specific interests were in danger of being occluded by the extremity of the conflict in Ireland and the mounting seriousness of the crisis in Long Kesh. Many had friends, associates and relatives enduring the grim and deteriorating ‘blanket protest’.161 April had witnessed the escalation to a ‘no wash’ protest in Long Kesh, during which prisoners incapable of removing bodily waste from their cells in the conventional manner of ‘slopping out’ began spreading it on the walls.162 Billy Armstrong communicated from Wakefield: ‘All my comrades both in this prison and the other prisons [in England] … are right behind them all the way, no matter what the consequences that might befall us’. This hinted that actions would follow, a threat which the IRA were more capable of delivering in 1978 than at any time since 1969.163
