appeal mechanisms, they were open to ‘judicial review’, during which the integrity of decision-making processes could be reassessed and outcomes potentially ‘set aside’.21 Prisoners could contest BOV punishment. The Home Secretary retrospectively, in October 1983, described the St. Germain ruling as strategically significant in that it initiated a novel process whereby ‘the [Queen’s Bench] Divisional Court [of Appeal] began, in 1978, to exercise its supervisory jurisdiction over the [prison] system’. This inspired inconveniently imaginative implications for ‘what kind of adjudications’ could reconcile ‘effective determination’ of disciplinary cases with ‘safeguards for the prisoner’. This perennial conundrum of insecure political elites informed the agenda of the Prior Report which the Home Office commissioned from the Committee on the Prison Disciplinary System. Personnel were selected in the emergency environment of May 1984. Eventual publication of the Prior Report in October 1985 followed serial acts of subversion by numerous IRA prisoners in England, as well as non-republican militants, which profoundly altered the tenor of life in the Dispersal System.22
The well-informed Home Office evidently anticipated a spate of tactical reverses. In November 1983, the Divisional Court ruled in R v Secretary of State for the Home Department and Board of Visitors of Albany Prison, ex parte Tarrant and others, that BOVs must properly consider a prisoner’s request for legal representation if they were facing serious charges. This progressive reform gravely weakened the virulent potency of both in-house Governor dictations and BOV prescribed adjudications.23 It did not go unanswered by the Prison Department of the Home Office in St. Anne’s Gate, London. Justice Webster accurately predicted in late 1983 that ‘charges of mutiny’, amongst the most detrimental to any prisoner proved guilty of the offence, could be ‘referred to the criminal courts’.24 Webster, in fact, advised that any BOV proceedings involving possibly severe repercussions for transgressors should be tried within ‘the normal criminal justice system with all the rights and protections which automatically go with such [a]process’.25
The 1985 Prior Report also recognised the complaint taken to the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) in Strasbourg by IRA prisoners Sean Campbell and Fr Patrick Fell which was ‘adopted’ on 12 May 1982.26 Campbell and Fell had initiated their historic action in 1978, arising from the illegal manner in which they were treated during and following their assault by prison staff in Albany in September 1976.27 From January 1984, the cumulative effect of Tarrant and Campbell and Fell was that prisoners not alone received legal advice from outside lawyers but enjoyed their actual representation at adjudications if basic reasonable criteria applied. The ‘implication’ of this breakthrough for the Home Office, according to the Prior Report, encompassed nothing less than ‘the whole question of the proper limits of the disciplinary system’.28 Unwelcome judicial attention into the often secretive affairs of the Prison Department occurred in tandem with extraneous political developments which altered the physical structure of the Dispersal System during years of Conservative Party governance. The IRA inside and outside the prisons in England played a notable part in stimulating this far-reaching reconsideration between 1978 and 1985. Indeed, the Prior Report claimed: ‘In the context of the prison disciplinary system, the most important [ECHR] case … is that of Campbell and Fell’.29
The IRA had featured prominently in the strategic planning of the Prison Department since the early 1970s. Home Office writer Roy Walmsley highlighted the importance of the 8 March 1973 London explosions for contemporary prison policy-makers. The first car bomb attacks in Britain had raised the prospect of ‘future similar incidents’ and a generation of ‘new candidates for [special security] unit places’ in England. The IRA had inadvertently disrupted Home Office projections at a critical juncture and halted the abolition of the SSUs, which the influential Mountbatten Report had regarded as uncivilized in 1966.30 According to Walmsley:
It was immediately clear that Irish republican bombers, once detained and convicted, would pose a serious new threat to security, and there was real doubt as to whether they could be held safely within the dispersal system. This perception removed the impetus behind the policy of progressively phasing out the security units... By the beginning of 1978 there were already five bombers among the total of fourteen unit occupants [in Leicester and Parkhurst], and it was strongly felt that nowhere but the security units could safely contain such men... The case for the retention of two units and the construction of a third thus rested on the arrival of the Irish republican dimension, the dangers of increased terrorism from a variety of sources, and the increasing number of robbers with resources to finance their rescue.31
The British Government and subordinate Home Office was understandably anxious to prevent public sympathy accruing to their Irish republican opponents in English jails. In January 1978, Merlyn Rees responded to a question on the numbers of IRA members either convicted or beaten in custody by denying any such subcategory existed. Rees sidestepped Sheffield MP Joan Maynard’s query in the Commons, as well as the declared raison d’etre of the Prevention of Terrorism Act (PTA), by claiming that ‘there is no separate offence of terrorism in our criminal law’, and it was therefore impossible to collate the desired data.32 Despite this disavowal of any form of tailored protocols adopted in relation to republicans, the IRA intuited that the Home Office was devising a fresh approach to pressurize its most vulnerable imprisoned comrades. It was alleged that Wakefield had retained an anomalous place in the Dispersal System after the official closure of the Control Unit in late 1974. Trainee Assistant Governors reportedly received courses in Wakefield in the psychological dimension of long-term maximum-security detention. This reputedly encompassed the controversial theories of Fields Medal recipient Rene Thom, whose ‘Catastrophe Theory’ straddled mathematics, singularity theory, philosophy and biology with a penological application in the 1960s.33 ‘Sociobiology’, another alleged Prison Service area of interest which republicans found sinister, was defined in a 1975 American publication by Edward O Wilson. Insights into biological determinants of social behaviour and adaptation also offered potentially pertinent guidelines for those running penal institutions.34 Despite parliamentary privilege, Rees declined to comment on whether he believed Prison Regulations met European Convention standards on the distinctly evasive grounds that the question was then ‘under consideration’ in Strasbourg.35
Persons connected with republican prisoners held in England require neither Home Office admissions nor Strasbourg rulings to confirm the routine discrimination meted out to Irish republicans within the Category A population. Civil Rights advocate Fr. Denis Faul enlisted the aid of Sr. Sarah Clarke in January 1978 to answer queries posed to him on the subject by Lord John Kilbracken (John Godley). The republican nun was attached to the La Sainte Union Convent in Highgate Road, London, and worked with the city’s Irish Chaplaincy. Her primary endeavour was at the hub of a discrete circuit of contacts that extended welfare assistance and legal liaison to Irish prisoners in England. Prior to going to England the Galwegian had taught at the prestigious Our Lady’s Bower in Athlone, County Westmeath. Fr. Faul learned that often-fraught family visits provided the clearest evidence of policy differentiation of prisoners assigned an identical security rating by the Home Office. In her briefing to Kilbracken Sr. Clarke explained:
The visits esp[ecially]
