in July, supplemented by a Prison Department document of 21 November attributing much of the underlying problems to ‘continuing claims made by their supporters outside prison that Irish Republicans convicted of criminal offences are “political” prisoners who should not be subject to the normal rules and regulations of prison life’.154
While the meeting of Lynch and Callaghan passed off without public discord, the Irish Embassy felt an obligation on 14 December 1978 to raise the treatment of Tyrone IRA prisoner Sean Campbell with the Republic of Ireland Department in Downing Street, London. David Blunt was informed that Campbell had cancelled a visit from his wife and three children in August 1978 when the Governor of Wandsworth refused to exercise his discretion to permit an extended time slot. Campbell regarded a counteroffer of an additional fifteen minutes for the reunion of a family separated for three years as unacceptable. The Embassy’s Administrative Attaché related the Irishman’s additional claim to have been denied permission to meet the Visiting Committee on 29 November 1978 where he intended to assert that ‘letters he had sent to his mother and brother had not been received by them’.155 Handwritten notes by Blunt acknowledged further serious allegations of impropriety, not least Campbell’s accusation that a letter posted to the Irish Embassy on 7 March 1978 was among the correspondence ‘destroyed by the Prison’.156 While awaiting comment from the Prison Department on a possible diplomatic incident, Blunt responded to the Embassy query by posting a photocopy of the Visiting Wandsworth Prison leaflet to their nearby Grosvenor Place address.157 The FCO and Irish Embassy omitted reference in their basic written exchanges to the highly germane fact that Campbell was party to a major ECHR case in Strasbourg and very much a ‘special’ Category A prisoner.158
By January 1979 the situation in Albany had gone from bad to worse. The republican magazine IRIS reported that the ‘barbaric treatment’ continued: ‘Screws are still hosing out the cells, the POWs and their bedding with hot water, depriving them of their chamber-pots, and causing undue delays in permitting toilet usage’. The four faced mail restrictions, twenty-three hour lock up and remained barred from attending Mass in the main chapel’.159 IRIS was edited by Fr. Parais O Duill, who had - first hand knowledge of the English prison system, arising from his efforts to save Frank Stagg’s life in 1976.160 He was also prominent in addressing injustice in Ireland. In March 1978 O Duill was denounced in the Special Criminal Court, Dublin, for his efforts to defend the four IRSP defendants framed by Irish authorities for the Sallins train robbery. His associate, Joe Stagg, brother of Frank, was also censured in the juryless court which had wrongly convicted the ‘IRSP 4’.161 O Duill’s organizational ability and experience of prison issues made him the ideal chair of the influential National H-Blocks/ Armagh Committee, which acted as the key co-ordinating body for protests inspired by the blanket protests and 1980–81 hunger strikes.162 His former IRA credentials lessened fears within the Republican Movement that persons interested primarily in opportunist ‘anti-imperialist’ politics lacking commitment to the Armed Struggle would dilute the campaign. Advocacy of ‘regard for human rights’ by O Duill in March 1980 posed no threat to concurrent republican efforts.163
Prisoners and Armed Struggle
‘The “Special Prisoners” in England’ feature was carried by Republican News in January 1979 and concentrated on the harshness endured by Martin Brady in Wakefield. Two significant points were made by ‘Oscair’, which effectively signalled the leadership’s policy towards the prisoners in England. Brady was cited as opining: ‘Conditions will not improve much until a victory has been achieved over the H-Block issue at home in Ireland’. This addressed the uncomfortable but obvious fact that the Long Kesh campaign was being prioritized over a potential drive to highlight the injustices of the Dispersal System. It was important, however, to stress that the prisoners in England were not seeking pre-eminence and, in fact, were fully behind the grim struggles in Long Kesh and Armagh. ‘Oscair’ balanced the de facto downgrading of the England campaign with a declaration that ‘The POWs in England must not be allowed to become the forgotten prisoners … they are in need of support and solidarity’.164 In Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Mike Duffy of Irish Northern Aid compensated by organizing a ‘Prisoners Writing Campaign’ which annually channelled thousands of letters and cards to IRA members imprisoned in Ireland and England.165 Quantities of Irish People and other Irish-American titles arrived into the English prisons where they were widely distributed, despite carrying detailed, uncensored ‘war news’ columns of a type eschewed by mainstream media.166 From a British perspective, the Irish People newspaper was regarded as: ‘Essentially Sinn Féin’s An Phoblacht with any left wing comment laundered out so not to alarm more conservative Irish-Americans’.167
Statements from the PAC and RCG were increasingly uncompromising with respect to other groupings with whom they cooperated from time to time on the Irish question. The extremity of Long Kesh and ‘similar conditions’ in Albany increased their opposition to the perceived ‘bourgeois’ equivocation and moderation of the International Tribunal organization in particular.168 The numerically small and avowedly ‘independent’ PAC was also concerned with ensuring it was not perceived as having a ‘special relationship’ with the more resourced RCG, despite close collaboration on several demonstrations and newspaper distribution arrangements prior to June 1979.169 In restating the clear political agenda of the PAC, Kaye commented on 14 November 1978 that: ‘The campaign of Irish prisoners for Prisoner of War Status in both England and Ireland is a crucial issue. Prisoners in this country have never had political status, yet they have never accepted criminalisation. The campaign of the prisoners in the H Block and the campaign of the women prisoners in Armagh have brought that central issue to a climax and to a crisis. There can be no standing on the sidelines, no impartiality’.170
The prospect of generating political pressure on the ground in England by uniting a spectrum of left wing organizations on the prisons theme ran into more serious difficulties in December 1978. Bomb attacks on commercial premises in Liverpool, Bristol, Coventry, Southampton and London on 17 and 18 December injured several civilians and fuelled a backlash against IRA tactics by groups which had hitherto offered conditional support. The blasts followed a lull in IRA actions and there had been no sustained series of major incidents since January/ February 1976.171 Criticism from Socialist Worker and pro-People’s Democracy Socialist Challenge was not unexpected, but the contention by the Worker’s Revolutionary Party that the bombings were counterproductive struck a raw nerve. WRP organ The Newsline called on 19 December 1978 for ‘IRA militants to immediately and unconditionally reject these terror tactics and those who advocate them’. This not only distanced the formerly staunch WRP from the IRA but encouraged activists to breach the constitution of Óglaigh na hÉireann.172 Clann na hÉireann, representing the Official Republican Movement in Britain, sensed the discomfort of Sinn Féin in England and criticized the party’s efforts, in what they described as ‘frantically looking to the growing rag bag of
