138.Republican News, 30 September 1978.
139.Republican News, 10 February 1979 and Irish political prisoners, p. 71.
140.Sr. Clarke, Miscellaneous MSS, Clarke Papers (COFLA).
141.IRIS, 12 January 1979.
142.O’Donnell, Special Category, I, p. 113.
143.Martin Brady, 12 April 2008.
144.McLaughlin, Inside an English jail, p. 49.
145.IRIS, 6 December 1978.
146.DG Blunt to BR Grange, 23 November 1978, NAE, FCO 87/ 763. See also Grange to Blunt, 27 November 1978, Ibid.
147.The Irish Prisoner, No. 7 [1986].
148.Irish World, 4 and 11 September 1976. Frank Stagg’s story also remained in the foreground in America where the IRA conviction of Patrick Stagg and Sinn Féin activities of George and Joe Stagg were reported in detail. See Irish World, 18 September 1976. Sheehan moved from Ireland to Australia in 1951 and was involved in the Anti-Partition League which De Valera had promoted worldwide. On resettling in the US he was greeted by George Harrison, Liam Cotter and other leading republican activists. Irish World, 6 September 1980 and 11 December 1982.
149.See ‘Patrick Miles Fell: proposed visit by the Bishop of Texas’ [n.d., 1978], NAE, FCO 87/ 763.
150.See Rev. Cosmas Korb to the Editor, Irish World, 4 December 1979. See also Clarke, No faith, p. 107 and Irish Echo, 18 August 1984.
151.‘Patrick Miles Fell’ [n.d., 1978], NAE, FCO 87/ 763.
152.DG Blunt to BR Gange, 16 November 1978, NAE, FCO 87/ 763.
153.PJ Goulden to AL Free-Gore, 9 November 1978, NAE, FCO 87/ 763.
154.BR Gange to DG Blunt, 21 November 1978, NAE, FCO 87/ 763.
155.J Murphy to David Blunt, 14 December 1978, NAE, FCO 87/ 763.
156.D[avid] G B[lunt] MS notes, 14 December 1978, NAE, FCO 87/ 763.
157.David Blunt to John Neary (First Secretary), 21 December 1978, NAE, FCO 87/ 763. See also DG Blunt to M Paice (Home Office Prison Department), 18 December 1978, 14 December 1978, NAE, FCO 87/ 763. Blunt was also contacted regarding Stevie Blake to which he replied: ‘Mr. Blake has certainly been moved from prison to prison a large number of times. Such moves are never made lightly and in Mr. Blake’s case they have always been necessary in the interests of prison security or good order and discipline. The remedy seems to lie largely in Mr. Blake’s own hands … in the event of a transfer, every effort will be made by the prison authorities to notify Mrs [Mary] Blake of her son’s new location if a visiting order is outstanding’. Blunt to Neary, 4 December 1978, NAE, FCO 87/ 763. Mary Blake lived in Wolfe Tone Place, Letterkenny, Donegal. Dick [O’Brien] to Sherrard [Cowper-Coles], 9 May 1978, Ibid.
158.Irish Times, 10 May 1978.
159.IRIS, 12 January 1979. The paper averred: ‘All the POWs retain their strength and determination in this struggle for their just demands and BASIC HUMAN RIGHTS’. The same issue carried a report of a meeting of major literary figures opposed to the situation in the H-Blocks. IRIS, 12 January 1979.
160.Fr. Piaras O’Duill, 12 July 2011.
161.See Framed through the Special Criminal Court, p. 34. Joe Stagg chaired the Irish Civil Rights Association until September 1978 when he resigned arising from his public comments concerning the allegedly excessive internal discipline of IRA prisoners in Portlaoise. Irish Times, 9 September 1978.
162.IRA prisoners in Long Kesh had reputedly made representations to the leadership of the Republican Movement to form such a body in the late 1970s. One claimed that the progression from ‘no wash’ to hunger strike had been deliberately delayed to permit time for the Committee to coalesce. See Maxwell Taylor and Ethel Quayle, Terrorist lives (London, 1994), p. 91.
163.See An Phoblacht, 8 March 1980 and Pat Walsh, Irish Republicanism and Socialism, The politics of the Republican Movement, 1905 to 1994 (Belfast, 1994), pp. 172–8, 184.
164.Republican News, 20 January 1979.
165.Jim Panaro, 11 November 2009. See AP/RN, 8 January 2008. Duffy passed away in late 2007 at which time Ann O’Sullivan of the POW Department noted in his obituary that he had been assiduous in confirming prison addresses: ‘Particularly important in relation to prisoners held in England. The process of “ghosting” … meant that we constantly had to trace the current whereabouts of these prisoners’. Ibid.
166.Martin Brady, 12 April 2008.
167.Observer, 28 March 1993.
168.See Kaye, ‘Case against the Tribunal’ in Hands off Ireland!, No. 6, January 1979, p. 10.
169.PAC Statement in The Irish Prisoner, No. 5, June 1979, p. 2.
170.Kaye, ‘Case against the Tribunal’ in Hands off Ireland!, No. 6, January 1979, pp. 11–12.
171.For a full listing of the attacks see IRIS, 12 and 21 January 1979. See also McGladdery, Provisional IRA in England, pp. 242–3 and Moloney, Secret history, p. 173. The incidents sparked a bizarre turn of events when an English policeman concocted a story of being fired upon by an IRA
