15 November 1978.
111.IRIS, 15 November 1978. Tony Cunningham wrote to the Daily Telegraph to assert that he was not a member of the IRA and was seeking improved visiting rights rather than repatriation. Daily Telegraph, 26 June 1980. His weekly applications to attend Mass were rebuffed and he was in July 1978 kept in the Punishment Block after his term had expired. Sr. Clarke, ‘Albany Notes’, Clarke Papers (COFLA).
112.Irish Times, 19 October 1978 and Republican News, 25 November 1978. He claimed: ‘The unit was designed to break you psychologically, to disorientate you. Everything’s white in your [seven by twelve foot] cell. The window faces north/ north-west, so that no sunlight ever penetrated. There’s also a white wall twenty feet high around the unit, and from your window you can see just the white wall or the sky – you become an expert on the different moods of the skies. Every cell is like a little prison on its own. It’s total isolation, you talk to nobody and the Screws are specially trained not to talk to you, or only in a very terse fashion. You couldn’t hear conversations elsewhere, either’. Quoted in AP/RN, 13 December 1984. He confided in his wife that ‘if he was in there long enough that he thinks it could get to him. You have to be very, very strong minded … I think they are using this unit to find out what the prisoners are made of’. ‘Interview with Mrs [Mary] MacLaughlin [sic]’ in Hands off Ireland!, No. 5, January 1979, p. 13.
113.See Irish political prisoners, p. 73 and Irish Post, 16 September 1978.
114.McLaughlin, Inside an English jail, p. 46.
115.Irish Times, 30 October 1978. Tory MP Jill Knight was among those perturbed by such cases. When questioning David Taylor, Branch Chairman of the POA in Brixton in January 1981 Knight claimed: ‘I am told it is very, very worrying to a prison officer that he can be now be at the receiving end of a prosecution at the instigation of a prisoner. This is something which was never intended to arise because the rules are such that no prisoner should be able to prosecute a prison officer’. Session 1980–8 … 19 January 1981, HM Prison Brixton, p. 82.
116.Wakefield IRA PRO to editor, Irish News, 13 November 1978.
117.Gerry Cunningham, 25 September 2007.
118.Thomas and Pooley, Exploding prison, p. 98.
119.Quoted in Hands off Ireland!, No. 5, January 1979, p. 14.
120.Irish Times, 1 September 1976.
121.Irish Times, 26 January 1979. Joe Duffy, Paul Hill and Gerry Cunningham also gave evidence. McLaughlin, Inside an English jail, p. 50. See also Guardian, 26 January 1979.
122.Republican News, 25 November 1978.
123.O’Doherty had maintained the protest in solitary from 10 September 1976 to 19 November 1977. O’Doherty, Volunteer, p. 203.
124.Republican News, 25 November 1978. Murray perceived his role, a resumption of earlier blanket protests, as ‘against the repressive prison conditions all the Irish political prisoners are held under’. Ibid. See also IRIS, 21 July 1979.
125.AP/RN, 7 June 1980.
126.Republican News, 25 November 1978. Stephen Blake was sent to Wormwood Scrubs following a ‘lie-down’ in Bristol. John McCluskey also arrived due to his role in the October Gartree protest. Ibid.
127.IRIS, 12 January 1979. Governor William Driscoll described ‘appalling conditions’ in Walton in the aftermath of February 1979 violence in which five warders were injured. Guardian, 13 February 1979.
128.Cited in Irish People, 25 September 1982.
129.Irish Times, 19 October 1978.
130.Republican News, 9 December 1978. Turton represented the PAC at the communist inspired World Youth Festival in Havana, Cuba, in late July/ early August 1978. Hands off Ireland!, No. 5, September 1978, pp. 7–9. The PAC expelled both the IMG and SWP from the November 1978 organizing committee due to alleged factionalism. FRFI, September 1982, p. 11. See also PAC, Press Statement, 28 October 1978, Private Collection (O Mathuna).
131.Allen, Larkin and O’Brien were hanged outside the New Bailey, Manchester, on 23 November 1867 despite a sizeable campaign for commutation of their sentences. Their bodies were soon moved into the grounds of the then newly constructed Strangeways Prison. The Manchester Martyrs Memorial Committee, founded by local Fenian Seamus Barrett, erected the monument in the early 1900s. See Herbert, Wearing of the green, pp. 53–8.
132.Jackie Kaye, ‘Case against the Tribunal’ in Hands off Ireland!, No. 6, January 1979, p. 12.
133.See Quinlivan and Rose, Fenians in England, p. 166. Paul Hill taught the words to London armed robber Graham Little whom he first encountered in Wormwood Scrubs. He explained how the song had been sung during the Spanish Civil War in honour of a group of Republicans who fought to the death. This inspired Little to sing the song every morning at 6.00 a.m. Hill, Stolen years, p. 207. Ray McLaughlin heard Little’s ‘incessant chanting’ during a lie-down in Bristol and feared ‘it must be gibberish’. On raising it with him later and learning the true purpose of his recitation of what transpired to have been ‘The Internationale’, the two parted as ‘the best of friends’. The Irishman was then reading Sean Cronin’s biography of ex-IRA and Republican Congress leader Frank Ryan, a senior officer in the anti-fascist XVth International Brigade. Reamonn [Ray McLaughlin] to Eamonn [Eddie O’Neill], 1 November 1983, Private Collection (O’Neill). English prisoner Little endorsed the Bobby Sands portrait he painted and presented to the ISM with the slogan ‘Solidarity’. FRFI, April 1984, p. 16.
134.Republican News, 25 November 1978.
135.Republican News, 13 November 1978. See also IRIS, 15 November 1978 and 21 July 1979.
136.‘Visit of the Taoiseach: 27 November 1978’ enclosure with BR Grange to DG Blunt, 21 November 1978, NAE, FCO 87/ 763.
137.‘Irish
