aside for them. One of these rooms is for closed visits, i.e. behind glass & wire etc. Two rooms have a large table and there are two screws behind the prisoner & two screws & a police woman or security woman in civilian dress behind the visitors. A large table is between the prisoner & the family. All other than Irish Cat[egory] A prisoners have visits in open rooms, well heated [and] comfortable at coffee tables with free access to canteen facilities. There are approx 12 Irish prisoners in Albany … The Irish visitors however cannot visit when it is convenient for them, they must come when one of the two rooms mentioned above is not being used by other prisoner’s visitors. Nobody wants a visit in the ‘closed’ room.36
The basic situation outlined by Sr. Clarke, who had assisted prisoners’ dependents from the early 1970s, described the unacknowledged existence of a ‘special’ Category A cohort of Irish republicans.37 She also ascertained that visitors to IRA prisoners in Albany in late 1977 and early 1978, who frequently arrived at the complex at the same time as others calling to see criminal inmates, were not permitted to use the Waiting Room. Being required to stand outside the main gate imposed hardship on the elderly and the young during winter months, some of whom travelled to the remote Isle of Wight from as far as Donegal. It was obvious to all but the most hardened cynics that this physical dislocation inflicted, possibly intentionally, psychological harm on the families of the imprisoned. This, in turn, discomforted the prisoners. However, scenes of this nature were replicated across the Dispersal System, as Sr. Clarke knew well on the basis of constant interaction with the families her network conveyed to and from England’s many prisons and airports.38 The Prisoners Aid Committee (PAC) astutely regarded such aggravating policies as ‘a kind of “political status” within the Brit prison system’.39
Kilbracken had sought precise information from Longford in the light of reading Faul’s disturbing In prison in England pamphlet, circulated in December 1977.40 This consultation was intended to assist him in framing a parliamentary question for the House of Lords which was aired on 7 February 1978. Writing from his home address in Killegar, Cavan, Kilbracken claimed to be ‘personally in favour of Irish prisoners being transferred to Ireland’, but felt that the objective could not be fruitfully addressed as the ‘UK Gov[ernmen]t have clearly set their minds against this’. His well-intentioned intervention did not enlist support from republicans as it envisaged a proposal to concentrate Irish Category A prisoners in a ‘convenient’ location for family visits. Wormwood Scrubs in London was posited as the best option for this purpose; it was a prison designated the Lifer Assessment Centre for southeast England in January 1975.41 This resembled a superseded line of argument in the Mountbatten Report, albeit one substituting humane visiting conditions in lieu of security considerations as the underlying justification.42 The Ministry of Defence appreciated the importance of family contact and made elaborate arrangements vis à vis accommodation, allowances and communications for dependents of soldiers serving in the North of Ireland under ‘Operation Banner’.43
Sr. Clarke, who furnished much of the original data drawn upon by the campaigning Ulster priests, reviewed the Kilbracken letter on behalf of Fr. Faul. In her draft response she wrote: ‘Rees, when I spoke to him … said something about [why he] could not return them [to Ireland. It was] because they would have to enjoy political status’.44 If this viewpoint was accurately recalled, Rees admitted that the key reason for opposing the repatriation of IRA prisoners was their subsequent entitlement to political status in Long Kesh, site of the H-Blocks. His own Labour Government, however, was moving purposefully to eliminate the last vestiges of this much-resented vestige of internment in Belfast, Derry and Armagh, a process that led to an uncompromising republican reaction in 1976–81. This historic policy shift may well have been a critical element in shaping Home Office attitudes towards the republicans it retained in England. On 7 February 1978 Lord Harris deflected the central thrust of Kilbracken’s representation by claiming ‘there simply are not enough facilities in any one dispersal prison to take up to 100 IRA prisoners who at the moment are serving sentences in this country’.45 The prisoners in question, meanwhile, persevered in their efforts to use the courts to expose injustices within the Dispersal System and exact a financial toll from their captors. ‘Uxbridge Eight’ prisoner Gerry Cunningham reflected:
It was attack …a way of getting back … The system was there, why not use it? … Numerous cases [mounted by other IRA prisoners] as well, not because they believed in British justice, not because they believed they were going to win, but because they were going to court. And because they’d get legal aid and because it was costing the state … for those cases to be defended. They had to defend them.46
Legal initiatives mounted by Irish republicans, and their willingness to make common cause with British prisoners, raised the status of the IRA among those confined in the Dispersal System. Derry republican Brian McLaughlin noted: ‘They more and more came to respect us because they witnessed that on different occasions we had protested not only for ourselves but for better conditions for them also’.47 The solidarity demonstrated between the IRA, British gangsters and others during the 1976 Hull Riot, and the court proceedings that ensued, had accelerated the process, and Irish republicans in English prisons believed that the system ‘changed’ in consequence.48 More generally, the basic approach of staff towards Category A prisoners fell, in the late 1970s, within the theoretical definition of ‘coercive power’ coined in the 1990s. This was the most severe of several available modes of interaction and was characterized by ‘increased use of segregation, transfer, privilege removal, disciplinary punishments and lock-downs’.49
The Prison Department maintained its remit of estranging the IRA from the general Dispersal System community at a time when they were, as evidently suspected, utterly determined to disrupt jail administration. According to Eddie O’Neill: ‘[Hull] put fire into a lot of prisoners. It empowered a lot of prisoners who previously felt impotent’. The attack by staff on the IRA men in Albany, furthermore, enraged their comrades: ‘That finished us with any idea that there was some course of diplomacy to deal with things like minor protests. It was all out war at that stage … [and] the Hull riot empowered a lot of guys … The fear that had been generated by repression before that suddenly dissipated ... for a long period of time the place was just a tinderbox’.50
Broadening the front
A Bloody Sunday commemoration parade from London’s Hyde Park on 24 January 1978 attracted around 500 persons, while another 500 marched from Shepherds Bush to Hammersmith. The scale of the events was a decrease on the numbers that had attended Irish demonstrations prior to the implementation of the PTA in 1974, and a pale shadow of those that had protested internment in Trafalgar Square in 1971.51 The highly emotive Derry anniversary, however, served to promote joint political activities of pro-republican bodies based in Britain in 1978. Twenty members of the United Troops Out Movement (UTOM) from Leeds, Sheffield, Bradford and Doncaster picketed Wakefield prison four days later as part of a week of interlinked events.52 This linked to a notorious and specifically English concern for the wider Irish
