of a trying period by Britain’s paper of record stemmed from the undeniable and diverse pressure points being exerted on the establishment. The Prison Officer Association (POA), an innate bastion of conservatism, had instigated a muscular campaign of industrial action to assert the rights of its beleaguered union membership. Understaffing, demoralization and a stressful labour environment exacerbated loss of paid overtime and sundry workplace entitlements. Overtime in the late 1970s ‘local’ prisons could be compulsory and obliged junior staff to present themselves for thirteen days’ duty in a fourteen day period.5 Extra pay for longer, and budgeted hours in uniform, was otherwise lucrative. The resultant ferment was described by the taciturn Home Office as ‘unprecedented’, and far in excess of the disturbances of 1972, when generally passive resistance from prisoners coincided with POA members working to rule.6 In the course of 1978, senior prison officers stood trial for alleged criminal offences arising from the violent suppression of the Hull riot in August 1976. The illusion of omnipotence and immunity was permanently shattered. Overcrowding all but ensured that physical confrontations with inmates increased in frequency and seriousness. The range of countermeasures developed to maintain control, not least common usage of tranquilizing drugs, draconian punishment ‘F Wings’, and secretly trained riot units served to discomfort moderates. By early 1979, when Justice May conducted a root and branch inquiry into the prison service, 42,000 prisoners were held inside a system with a Certified Normal Accommodation (CNA) of 37,735. Only 31,656 had been jailed in the jurisdiction in 1969, when both recorded crimes and convictions were considerably lower than 1978.7
As the unpopular conflict in Ireland entered its tenth year, the presence in English jails of militant republicans fostered a distinct range of challenges. The British Government received an embarrassing check on 18 January 1978 when the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) in Strasbourg found it had breached Article 3 of the European Human Rights Convention (1953) by its administration of interned persons in the Six Counties from August 1971. This revelation was palliated by the Court’s careful description of pertinent unlawful seizures and interrogations as constituting ‘degrading treatment’, despite the Commission’s prior use of the politically loaded yet applicable term ‘torture’.8 The extraordinary delay in official deliberations permitted equivocation and disavowal. Britain’s NATO allies were circumspect with regard to formalizing allegations of human rights’ violations on the western side of the mutually militarized ‘Iron Curtain’. UK Attorney General Sam Silkin dutifully assured the European Court in February 1977 that such controversial practices had been discontinued, but he could not defend the fact that the conveniently mild verdict from Strasbourg came in the midst of numerous claims of gross excesses in the treatment of detainees in the North of Ireland. This reality, coupled with developments in England’s Dispersal System, indicated that further recriminatory judgements in higher Continental courts were in the offing.9
Right wing and predominately Europhobic British Conservatives were appalled by the ECHR decision and Airey Neave, Shadow Northern Secretary, decried Silkin’s ‘unprecedented incompetence’ in failing to vindicate the UK.10 Neave, a former British Intelligence operative during the Second World War, had received milder handling by German captors in 1940s’ Colditz than many Irishmen interned by Britain did in the early 1970s.11 Numerous men detained without trial and with little or no connection to the IRA had aside from been badly maltreated in Gough Barracks, Ballykelly and Long Kesh as well as the advanced interrogation techniques inflicted on the selected ‘hooded men’. Irish republicans Noel Jenkinson, Sean O’Conaill, Michael Gaughan and Frank Stagg had all perished in custody by February 1976 as a direct result of their imprisonment in England.12
The announcement in Strasbourg coincided with a significant statement by Taoiseach Jack Lynch. On 18 January 1978, Lynch called upon the British Government, headed by Labour Prime Minister James Callaghan, to state its intention to withdraw from the Six Counties. This bid to break the stalemate in the North of Ireland was supported by Cardinal Tomas Ó Fiaich who would have inferred from Lynch’s overall comments that the Taoiseach was prepared to grant an amnesty to IRA prisoners in the southern jurisdiction. Open political commentary of this kind rarely emanated from Dublin and was underpinned in this instance by the prior public engagement of US President Jimmy Carter. The mild-mannered Democratic Party leader had expressed a willingness to offer political and economic sponsorship to an Irish peace process in late 1977. Callaghan, however, failed to respond with the requisite degree of commitment for which he incurred the criticism of powerful Irish-Americans, such as Senator Ted Kennedy. If high-level negotiations had commenced in the course of 1978, the immediate or phased release of IRA prisoners would have featured on the agenda. The Strasbourg censure remained to agitate both poles of political opinion in the interim.13
Celebrity intellectuals Jean Paul Sartre, Angela Davis and Herbert Marcuse were amongst those who backed leftist calls for an international tribunal on British crimes in Ireland to be convened in London. Davis had a deep interest in the maltreatment of black American prisoners and spent eighteen months in jail prior to her June 1972 acquittal of aiding a bloody courthouse escape bid in August 1970.14 Sartre had condemned the conditions imposed on Red Army Faction (RAF) members in West Germany’s Stammheim Prison in 1974.15 Despite evoking the scorn of the politically ‘sectarian’ revolutionary left, British MPs Joan Maynard, Tom Litterick, Dick Kelly, Arthur Latham and Maureen Colquohon declared their support, as did Irish-based moderates, media, trade unionists, socialists and constitutional republicans Dr Noel Browne, Eddie McAteer, Bernadette McAliskey (nee Devlin), Matt Merrigan, John Mulcahy and Michael Mullen. Numerous additional public figures promised solidarity. Among the litany of essentially rhetorical questions posed were requests for information from the authorities in London concerning ‘allegations of abuse and assault on Irish prisoners in British, including English, jails’.16 Sinn Féin correctly interpreted this development as one of the salient ‘issues for 1978’ and expected the England dimension to be raised in Strasbourg.17
In Britain, the Government’s legal position appeared, superficially, to have been rendered more secure. Recent domestic court cases, primarily Becker v The Home Office, had confirmed that the Prison Rules were ‘regulatory’ and not subject to ‘civil claim’, even if found to have been breached.18 Prisoners effectively had no rights, merely privileges, which governors were entitled to either suspend or modify without external consultation and statutory oversight. Moreover, the High Court in London had ruled in 1977 that the adjudications of Board of Visitors were ‘separate and immune from ordinary judicial procedure and review’.19 BOVs were fundamental to the adjudication of discipline within the jails where they operated on an individual basis. They exercised responsibility for administering often significant penalties for infractions of locally observed rules. The disparity between their function and actual legal capacity was found to be in breach of Article 13 in March 1983.20
An important and unexpected development arose in the Court of Appeal in London in October 1978 relating to the suppression of the Hull Riot of 31 August–2 September 1976. Lord Justice Shaw, in R v Hull Prison Board of Visitors, ex parte St. Germain, found that BOVs performed a quasi ‘judicial role’, contrary to the sense of an
