20 January 1983.
86.Noel Gibson quoted in AP/RN, April 1998.
87.‘Walsh-BOV Adjudications’ in A Aylett [For the Treasury Solicitor] to BM Birnberg & Co, 28 September 1990, Private Collection (Walsh).
88.Roy Walsh, 9 March 2008 and Andy Mulryan, 17 November 2008. Communication difficulties ensured that AP/RN claimed that the attempt occurred in 1978 ‘several months’ before the March 1979 roof top protest. AP/RN, 20 January 1985. Sr. Clarke noted ‘around March [19]78 Roy Walsh & Noel Gibson tried to escape from Parkhurst’. Sr. Clarke, ‘Roy Walsh’, Clarke Papers (COFLA). Sean Kinsella was the centre of a black joke when a London prisoner learned he had been a barber in Monaghan at the outset of the Long War. With reference to a heavy caliber revolver he quipped: ‘What does he part your hair with then, a forty-five?’ McLaughlin, Inside an English jail, p. 33.
89.Tony Madigan, 7 March 2008.
90.Roy Walsh, 9 March 2008.
91.Roy Walsh, 9 March 2008.
92.Noel Gibson, 24 August 2008.
93.Sean Kinsella, 3 August 2007.
94.Noel Gibson, 24 August 2008.
95.Irish political prisoners, p. 84.
96.Andy Mulryan, 17 November 2008.
97.Roy Walsh, 9 March 2008.
98.Sean Kinsella, 3 August 2007.
99.Irish political prisoners, p. 84 and ‘Walsh-BOV Adjudications’ in A Aylett [For the Treasury Solicitor] to BM Birnberg & Co, 28 September 1990, Private Collection (Walsh).
100.Report of the work of the Prison Department, 1978, p. 25.
101.Sr. Clarke, ‘Roy Walsh’, Clarke Papers (COFLA).
102.Shane Paul O’Doherty, The Volunteer, A former IRA man’s true story (London, 1993), p. 207. Jack Duggan, a Tipperary IRA man settled in Manchester, was held in solitary in Dartmoor for over two years in the 1940s ‘with nothing in the cell but a compressed paper pot and a bible’. He and other republicans on protest were forcibly dressed by guards once a week when obliged to appear before the Governor. United Irishman, February 1968.
103.O’Doherty, Volunteer, p. 207 and ‘An Irish prisoner and Home Office lies’ in The Irish Prisoner, No. 11 [1987], pp. 10–11. See also Conlon, Proved Innocent, p. 185. Whitehead also assisted Gerry Conlon of the Guildford Four. Gerry Conlon, University of Limerick, 18 March 2014.
104.O’Doherty, Volunteer, p. 209.
105.Jimmy Kelly, a West Belfast republican and occasional resident of Southampton, England, received a five-year sentence on 27 January 1976 for contravening the Firearms and Explosives Act. He progressed from Winchester to Long Lartin and Wormwood Scrubs by January 1977 and was present when O’Doherty was transferred. See Sr. Clarke, ‘James Kelly’, Clarke Papers (COFLA). In 1975 Derry republican socialist and former MP Bernadette Devlin contacted progressive London solicitor Mike Fisher to assist Kelly’s defence. Fisher, an innate liberal of Catholic and Jewish parentage and educated in Mount St Mary’s Jesuit boarding school in Sheffield, became one of the most important lawyers willing to take ‘Irish cases’. Guardian, 28 January 2015.
106.O’Doherty, Volunteer, pp. 209–10.
107.O’Doherty, Volunteer, p. 210.
108.Derry Journal, 17 February 1978. For overview of ‘just war’ concept and theology see Charles E Rice, Divided Ireland, A cause for American concern (Notre Dame, 1985), Chapter IX.
109.O’Doherty, Volunteer, p. 211.
110.PAC News, February 1978, p. 1.
111.O’Doherty, Volunteer, p. 211.
112.Eddie O’Neill, 1 February 2008. O’Neill was held with O’Doherty in Wakefield but not close enough for the pair to converse. He gained that impression that the Derryman ‘wouldn’t talk to any of us … He wouldn’t talk to anyone’. See also Irish Post, 14 September 1985 and O’Doherty, Volunteer, p. 228.
113.Republican News, 4 February 1978. Sid ‘Seanna’ Walsh had already spent a year on the blanket in H5. Walsh spent over twenty years in prison and was selected to read the IRA’s standing down statement on 28 July 1995. Ibid. See also An Phoblacht, 1 March 1978.
114.See An Phoblacht, January 2014, p. 4 and Prison Struggle, Paper of the Relatives Action Committee, March [1980].
115.See Republican News, 11 March 1978.
116.See Jim Reilly and Jacqueline Kaye to Editor, Republican News, 18 March 1978. London Sinn Féin leader Jim Reilly addressed the Workers Revolutionary Party conference in Wembley on 26 February. Ibid., 11 March 1978. His socialist inclinations and trade union work appealed to several left wing groupings with which Sinn Féin interacted on prisoner issues. See RCG tributes in AP/RN, 4 October 1980 and FRFI, November/ December 1980, p. 16. For Livingstone and Ireland see Curtis, Ireland and the propaganda war, pp. 207–11. Kaye, an English leftist who had met Eamon Smullen on a work camp in 1960s Cuba, became drawn into prisoner support when he was jailed on arms charges in England in 1969. See Jackie Kaye, ‘What price peace?’ in FRFI, October/ November 1999, p. 6.
117.PAC Statement in PAC News, July 1977.
118.Eolas,
