for Category A prisoners. They were obliged to receive visits from a limited pool of vetted family members under close observation. The Approved Visitors Scheme operated in an exceptionally strict fashion for the relatives of IRA prisoners, with the effect that only immediate family had any real prospect of occasional access following in-depth probing by the Special Branch.16
The 1964 edition of Prison Rules, an amended Home Office codex setting down general administrative practices in the jails of England and Wales, provided multiple means of sanctioning those deemed recalcitrant. The most commonly employed regulation, Rule 43, permitted governors to segregate a prisoner if it was believed the ‘good order and discipline’ of the prison had been threatened or was likely to be disturbed.17 A variant known as ‘Rule 43 own protection’ enabled prisoners who believed themselves to be under threat to be housed in isolation, a resort referred to as ‘going behind the door’.18 The pre-emptive form was widely applied to the IRA in English prisons who were additionally subjected to exceptionally frequent jail shifts referred to as ‘ghosting’ and twenty-eight day periods of ‘lie-downs’ in ‘local’ prisons. Temporary accommodation outside the Dispersal System entailed solitary confinement in ‘local’ prisons that were invariably ill-equipped to hold maximum-security men. Irish republicans in England were involved in numerous breaches of Prison Rules throughout the 1970s in their efforts to assert political status. Those who did not feature prominently in protest actions were still liable to be denied optimum parole conditions and, therefore, served high proportions of their sentences. The cumulative effect of such treatment resulted in the IRA being referred to as ‘Special Category A’, a term with no formal legitimacy under the 1966 Mountbatten Report. Deprivation of liberty, if an occupational inconvenience for career criminals, challenged ideologically motivated political prisoners to redirect their energies towards confronting the Dispersal System.
NOTES
1.Gerry Adams, Peace in Ireland? A broad analysis of the present situation (Belfast, 1976), p. 14. Repetition of the phrase ‘long war’ and ‘broad’ signaled the continuation of a military campaign until a wider alliance or acceptance of the position of the Republican Movement achieved meaningful negotiations.
2.See Laura K Donoghue, Counter-Terrorist Law and Emergency Powers in the United Kingdom, 1922–2000 (Dublin, 2001) and Kevin Boyle, Tom Hadden and Paddy Hillyard, Law and State, The case of Northern Ireland (London, 1975).
3.Adams, Peace in Ireland?, p. 11.
4.Adams, Peace in Ireland?, p. 13.
5.See Ruan O’Donnell, Special Category, The IRA in English Prisons (Dublin, 2012), Volume I, pp. 267–70.
6.J[ames] M G[lover], 2 November 1978, ‘Northern Ireland: Future Terrorist Trends’ in Sean Cronin, Irish Nationalism, A history of its roots and ideology (New York, 1980), p. 339. See also Ibid., pp. 339–57. The dictated IRA Army Council statement read by Jimmy Drumm at Bodenstown in June 1977 stated that the organization was committed to a ‘long haul’ campaign against the British Government. Irish Times, 29 December 1993.
7.G[lover], ‘Terrorist Trends’ in Cronin, Irish Nationalism, p. 340.
8.O’Donnell, Special Category, I, pp. 7–11.
9.Roy D King and Sandra L Resondihardjo, ‘To max or not to max: Dealing with high risk prisoners in the Netherlands and England and Wales’, Punishment and Society, 2010, Vol. 12, p. 69. See also New Society, 30 January 1975, pp. 254–5.
10.Report of Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Prisons, 1983 (London, 1984), p. 18.
11.Tim Owen, ‘Prison Law: 1’ in Legal Action, January 1987, pp. 10–11. See also ‘Working Party on conveyance of Provisional Category “A” prisoners’, 11 July 1974, National Archives (England), Home Office 391/ 53.
12.RJ Hardiman to Robert R [Roy] Walsh, 3 March 1987, Private Collection (Walsh).
13.Roy Walmsley, Special Security Units, Home Office Research Study 109 (London, 1989), p. 29. See also HC Deb 21 June 1984, vol. 62, cc. 216. A founding member of the IRSP, Belfast man Sean McGourgan, was sentenced to four years in Lancaster Court on 5 September 1975 for stealing three Coptic crosses and possession of detonators. Sr. Clarke, ‘Sean McGourgan’, Clarke Papers (COFLA). McGourgan was not claimed by the organization, despite having apparently survived an attempt on his life in Lancaster by a rival Official IRA/ Clann na hÉireann member. The non-political aspect of his trial lessened his public profile. Sean McGourgan, 12 March 2012.
14.Report of Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Prisons, 1983, p. 18.
15.Guardian, 11 March 1992.
16.‘Letter to persons wishing to be submitted for Approved Visitors List’ to Eddie Caughey, 2 August 1996, Private Collection (Eddie Caughey).
17.See Joyce Plotnikoff, Prison Rules, A working guide, Revised Edition (London, 1988), pp. 81–3.
CHAPTER 1
Year of Crisis
In a radio interview broadcast on 8 January 1978, Irish Taoiseach Jack Lynch called on the British Government to state its intention to withdraw from the North of Ireland and claimed that in such an environment, outstanding prisoner issues would be resolved.1 This pragmatic and domestically shrewd declaration angered Britain’s Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, Roy Mason. At a meeting with Senior Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA) officials in Dublin on 5 May 1978, Mason noted somewhat illogically that ‘references to a possible amnesty had sown seeds of doubt which have now been removed’ by assurances on cross border security.2 Various British agencies knew that the Irish Government was unwilling to formally confer political status on IRA prisoners concentrated in Portlaoise Prison. On 29 April 1977, they had been one of eighteen powers who abstained when the Diplomatic Conference on Humanitarian Law, Geneva, recognized guerrillas as meriting prisoner-of-war status. Ending the bitter conflict, however, required de facto acceptance of captured and sentenced IRA and INLA members, as well as pro-British ‘Loyalists’, as political prisoners. Thus, their treatment pending a negotiated settlement was a highly sensitive matter.3
Negative trends within the Dispersal System fully warranted the retrospective characterization of 1978 by the London Times as a year of ‘crisis’.
