Republican Prisoners Research Articles

Poetic Resistance: Girls’ Autograph Albums during World War II in Norway

Poetic Resistance: Girls’ Autograph Albums during World War II in Norway

Unbiddable Pasts

At the Ulster Museum in Belfast two artefacts connect the momentous events of 1916 with the thirty years of conflict in Northern Ireland brought to an end by the Good Friday Agreement in 1998. One piece is the work of republican prisoners interned aboard HMS Maidstone in the Belfast docks in the early 1970s: a plaque, signed by its creators, bearing a portrait of the only socialist among the leaders of the Easter Rising in Dublin, James Connolly. The other is a painting by Gusty Spence, the founder of the modern loyalist paramilitary group, the Ulster Volunteer Force. It commemorates the Battle of the Somme: two soldiers in silhouette, bugles to their lips, on either side of a standard bearing the words ‘In Immortal Memory’, a reference to the 5,000 troops from the 36th Ulster Division who were killed or injured going over the top on 1 July 1916. These two objects not only bring home the importance of history and memory to the paramilitaries who fought each other during the Troubles but also point to how the story of the modern conflict is already being crafted for current political debates and future generations. As William Blair writes, the greatest challenge for the Ulster Museum in the near future will not be remembrance of the battles of a century ago but ‘dealing with the difficult and divisive legacy of “the Troubles”’.1 This is also an issue which historians have already begun to confront, often through their contributions to the debates surrounding the so-called ‘Decade of Centenaries’, stretching from the Home Rule crisis of 1912 to the end of the Irish revolution in 1923. These five books deal with the politics of memory in Ireland generally, and Northern Ireland in particular, and how memorialisation of traumatic events – official, unofficial and private – has shaped both the public sphere and the hidden recesses of everyday life. Two almost simultaneous events from 1916 – the Easter Rising in Dublin and the Battle of the Somme – have acquired extraordinary resonance in the contemporary politics of memory in Northern Ireland.

‘Progress will not occur if we continually adopt positions of principle’:1 Irish republican prisoners and strategic reorientation, c.1976–1998

Examining the writings of more than 150 IRA prisoners, this article explains why a majority of jailed republicans supported the movement’s strategic reorientation between the anti-criminalisation protests of the late 1970s and the Good Friday Agreement of 1998. First, it argues, experiences of prison protests, culminating in the hunger strike of 1981, inclined prisoners to endorse electoral interventions to counter their isolation. Sinn Féin’s subsequent successes impelled prisoners to back electoralism more constructively, envisioning an all-Ireland ‘pan-nationalist’ front. By the end of the 1980s, many republican prisoners regarded tactical eclecticism as vital for their campaign’s advance. Second, the article contends, throughout the 1980s and 1990s, prisoners pragmatically approved new methods as open-ended experiments. Electoralism, pan-nationalism, and, in the 1990s, peace talks were supposed to aggregate and strengthen the struggle. Tactics were dispensable, and worthwhile only insofar as they enhanced the perceived prospects of victory. By the Good Friday Agreement, prisoners espousing a transitional, constitutional route to Irish unification regarded even the IRA’s ‘armed struggle’ as suspensible. Woven through prisoners’ voluminous acclaim for tactical adaptability, traditions of intra-movement discipline and unity cohered the bulk of the IRA’s prison population.

Political Prisoners and the Irish Conflict 100 Years On

AbstractThis article traces the impact of Irish political prisoners on the prison landscape in Ireland, north and south, over the past 100 years. For the post‐1969 period in Northern Ireland, it explores three different styles of prison management: reactive containment, criminalisation, and managerialism. It also examines the ways in which political prisoners sought to resist, including through strategic use of law, dirty protests and hunger strikes, escapes and the use of violence. The article then discusses the early release of prisoners under the Good Friday Agreement and the role that ex‐prisoners have played in the peace process. It concludes with some reflections on the ongoing tensions between the state and dissident republican prisoners, asking what lessons (if any) can be gleaned from the past 100 years.

“Under the Pacifying Arms of the Cross.” The Valley of the Fallen: a Place of Imprisonment, Reconciliation and Social Reintegration in Spain (1940-1959)

The Valley of the Fallen is the monument that boasts the largest Christian cross in the world. Buried at its feet are tens of thousands of those who fought and fell during the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939). They rest in the Basilica of the Holy Cross together without any designation as to on which side they fought. The article focuses on the vicissitudes of the penitentiary colony made up mainly of Republican prisoners sentenced for serious crimes committed during the war. This monument, a symbol of atonement and reconciliation, has become the target of a relentless political onslaught carried out by the socialist and communist government and fuelled by a series of myths analysed in the article.

The Fight for Political Status in Portlaoise Prison, 1973–7: Prologue to the H-Blocks Struggle

Between 1973 and 1977, about 100 Provisional republican prisoners staged a series of violent prison protests and hunger strikes in the Republic of Ireland’s high-security prison, Portlaoise. Research on political imprisonment during the Northern Ireland conflict overwhelmingly focuses on the H-Blocks struggle. The Portlaoise Prison protests, thus, remain an under-researched area, largely ignored by academics, commentators, and the public. This article tells the story of these protests in Portlaoise by focussing on three periods: winter 1974/5, winter 1975/6, and spring 1977. The Portlaoise protests ended almost simultaneously with the start of the blanket- and no-wash-protests in the H-Blocks. This article is based on the testimonials of former Irish republican prisoners, statements of the republican movement, and interviews with former Portlaoise inmates.

Workers Entering the Prison

AbstractThis article argues that Steve McQueen’s Hunger (2008) represents an unexpected but compelling mutation of the genre of postindustrial labor film. Hunger depicts the protests of Irish republican prisoners inside the Maze Prison that culminated in the 1981 Irish hunger strike. At the same time, the film develops an extended representation of the labor of the prison workers who beat, humiliate, care for, and counsel the prisoners throughout the protests. By combining and reworking the genres of labor film, prison film, and Irish Troubles film, Hunger imagines the prison as a microcosm of a deindustrialized Northern Irish economy where labor has left the factory and become conjoined to the disciplinary power of the state, either as police work or as care work. In this way, Hunger attends to the “spirit” of what Lenin called the “labor aristocracy,” here reduced to the work of maintaining the very boundary between itself and those excluded from it. McQueen’s attention to the body and to the affective dimensions of labor and struggle, the article argues, allows Hunger to achieve a uniquely committed, totalizing representation of the political economy of Northern Ireland.

Mapping Trans-Domesticity in Jordan’s <em>Breakfast on Pluto</em>

Mapping Trans-Domesticity in Jordan’s <em>Breakfast on Pluto</em>

Irish republican women in Australia: Kathleen Barry and Linda Kearns's tour in 1924–5

AbstractThe 1924–5 fundraising tour in Australia by republican activists, Kathleen Barry and Linda Kearns, although successful, has received little attention from historians, more focused on the controversial tour of Fr Michael O'Flanagan and J. J. O'Kelly the previous year. While O'Flanagan and O'Kelly's tour ended with their deportation, Barry and Kearns successfully navigated the different agendas of Irish-Australian political and social groups to organise speaking engagements and raise considerable funds for the Irish Republican Prisoners’ Dependants' Fund. The women were experienced republican activists, however on their Australian tour they placed themselves firmly in traditional female patriotic roles, as nurturers and supporters of men fighting for Irish freedom. This article analyses their strategic use of gendered expectations to allay suspicions about their political agenda to successfully raise money and negotiate with political and ecclesiastical leaders.

‘It was networking, all networking’: the Irish republican movement's survival in Cold War America

ABSTRACT This article examines the Irish Republican movement's public fundraising arm on US soil, the Irish Northern Aid Committee (Noraid), which operated as a legal organisation during Northern Ireland's ‘Troubles’ (1969–1998). In its efforts to fundraise for the families of republican prisoners, Noraid faced formidable impediments from above (government suppression) and below (the dissipation of Irish communities). How Noraid survived for the conflict's duration (and beyond) given these dual challenges poses a puzzle. This study finds that Noraid's longevity lies in its network-building strategies at the interpersonal and organisational levels in the 1970s and 1980s. The research points to the importance of disaggregating diaspora communities as they relate to armed conflict. It also draws attention to how government policies shape movement strategy; how social networks enable or deter resource mobilisation; and how leadership can build grassroots and organisational relationships to serve the rebel cause.

Iranian consecration of Irish nationalist ‘martyrs’: the Islamic Republic of Iran and the 1981 republican prisoners’ hunger strike in Northern Ireland

This article focuses on the official and semi-official Iranian coverage and representation of the 1981 republican prisoners’ hunger strike in Northern Ireland and the related corporeal constructs of the hunger strikers as ‘martyred’ bodies. The particular characterization and utilization of Irish republican hunger strikers by media outlets, officials, and other propagandists of the Islamic Republic of Iran (IRI) was an instance of groups outside Northern Ireland appropriating Irish nationalist bodies for their own ends. IRI commentators re-articulated the starving bodies of Irish republican hunger strikers, re-infusing them with symbolic meanings in a cross-cultural and ideologically laden configuration in the service of IRI’s self-projection as the patron of worldwide struggles for justice and liberation against the twin forces of imperialism and domestic opponents. In the process, IRI added its own layers of agency and politically crafted somatic meaning to the hunger strike. Meanwhile, IRI’s extensive advocacy of the republican hunger strike in Northern Ireland was eagerly welcomed by the Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA), to which most hunger strikers belonged; with PIRA and its political wing, Provisional Sinn Féin, hoping to secure diplomatic recognition, and possibly material aid, from the Iranian government for bolstering PIRA’s domestic and international standing vis-à-vis the British government.

In the Firing Line: Censorship, the Civil War in Ireland, and its Aftermath

In the Firing Line:Censorship, the Civil War in Ireland, and its Aftermath John Horgan Correction: Ceartúchán: Correction We wish to correct an error in volume 33, no. 3 (Autumn, 2018) in the article "Redemptive Suffering in the Isenheim Altarpiece and Bernard MacLaverty's Cal,"https://muse.jhu.edu/article/714957 by Lanta Davis. The image on page 82 is mislabeled. The image credit should instead be: The Isenheim Altarpiece (third view). By permission of Musee d'Unterlinden/Art Resource, NY. We regret the misidentification. The online version has been corrected. Much of the research about media in independent Ireland in the first half of the twentieth century has focused, understandably, on the controversies that attended the establishment and convoluted history of the Censorship of Publications Board, especially in relation to work by Irish writers that was thought to impinge on the allegedly pristine and incorrupt nature of Irish sexuality, and on political censorship during the World War II. Less studied—perhaps because it was more chaotic, and also more short-lived—is the military and political censorship instituted in the early years of the Free State by an administration that found the problems of establishing its legitimacy exacerbated by the unexpected but lethal and intense, events of the civil war.1 The challenge of focusing on this brief, but significant period of controversy is made more difficult by the sometimes chaotic condition of the early Free State administration's filing system, and by what appear to be differing (but, at least on paper, unvoiced, views within that administration on the relative values of military activity and of more irenic measures to be taken against their republican opponents. This is particularly true of the period of heightened tension and, eventually, civil war, following the Treaty setting up the Irish Free State administration in January 1922, which was to be ratified by the UK parliament on December 6 of that year. It is impossible to overestimate the climate of fear and suspicion that prevailed in 1922–23 as former comrades-in-arms found themselves first politically, and then militarily, in conflict with each other in the increasingly ruthless civil war that broke out in July, and the heightened tension following Michael Collins's assassination on August 22. The security and [End Page 62] military situation was further exacerbated after November of that year, following the execution of eight republican prisoners, and the retaliatory murder by republicans of the TD Sean Hales in Dublin in December. Clearly, political and administrative responsibility for managing the resultant challenges presented by the institution of media censorship was diffuse and inadequately centralized, involving recurrent tensions between military and civil leaders. The cabinet papers from this period reveal many unresolved tensions, and disputes about areas of responsibility between different government departments, about the role of the military, and regarding the nascent and erratic machinery of censorship itself. The leaders of the Anglo-Irish War had not anticipated this problem; this may, in part explain, their unfocused, often uncertain (and on occasion, despairing) attempts to deal with it. The relatively scant records that remain also reveal that newspaper editors' attitude to the new Free State government did not preclude attempts by both the Irish Independent and the Irish Times to record some of the events of the civil war in ways that sometimes failed fully to heed the new government's hostility to any language that might imply that their military opponents had claims to political legitimacy. The implications of the onset of civil war for newspapers had been considered poorly, if at all, by the new administration. The national daily newspaper with the greatest circulation in Ireland, the Irish Independent, had been hostile to the Rising because of its loyalty to the fast-disappearing Irish Party at Westminster, but by the time of the civil war it had patently shifted its loyalty to the new Free State administration. Its national contemporary, the Protestant-owned and Unionist Irish Times had—albeit for different reasons—been hostile to constitutional Irish nationalism, and opposed post-1921 Irish Republicanism virulently, but rapidly came to a political accommodation with the new Irish Free State—not least because of that newspaper...

Handwritten Rebellion: Autograph Albums of Irish Republican Prisoners in Frognach

Handwritten Rebellion:Autograph Albums of Irish Republican Prisoners in Frongoch Marguerite Helmers Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. "This book was lifted for a joke out of Cook House. Return to Paul Cusack." Internment Camp Autograph Book Belonging to Paul Cusack. Kenneth Spencer Research Library, University of Kansas, MS K18. [End Page 20] On Easter Monday, 1916, three members of the Irish separatist militia from Granard, County Longford, motored to Dublin in a Model T Ford.1 An armed rebellion for Irish freedom had begun at noon that day and, intending to join the fighting, the men traveled sixty-five miles before being turned back by the British army at the city limits.2 In the car were Paul Dawson Cusack, John Cawley, and Cusack's cousin Larry Kiernan.3 Cusack was recognized as a "prominent separatist" and was particularly well-connected to the rebel mainstream.4 His older brother, Dr. Brian Cusack (later a TD for North Galway) was a member of the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) and, with John Cawley, established the Irish Volunteer Army in Granard in 1913.5 Brian called Paul "a prime mover" in the Granard Irish Volunteers.6 Undoubtedly known to British authorities, Cusack and Cawley were arrested in the general sweep of suspects after the Easter Rising and imprisoned in Richmond Barracks, Dublin.7 After a month or more in Dublin, Cusack was deported to England and from there, to Frongoch detention camp in Bala, North Wales. He was assigned [End Page 21] to work in the kitchen. There he appears to have found an autograph book, which he and began to pass around to his fellow prisoners for signatures. A page in the center of the album is marked, "This book was lifted for a joke out of Cook House. Return to Paul Cusack"8 (figure 1). Cusack's book is a typical album, a small and inexpensive bound volume filled with cheap wood-pulp paper in pastel colors of orange, yellow, grey, and blue. The book opens in a horizontal orientation, what we would today call "landscape format." Irish republican autograph albums such as Paul Cusack's provide material evidence of a situation occasioned by World War I and the ongoing political conflict in Ireland. They emerged from the conditions of imprisonment under the Defence of the Realm Act of 1914: boredom, camaraderie, and reified Irish identity. Yet the label "autograph album" is misleading. Although it defines the format of the bound book, it suggests ephemera and "the assumption that their contents were essentially meaningless."9 These small books are more than a list of mates; Irish republican autograph albums are complex collections of original writing and artwork, remembered refrains from political speeches and ballads, and sentiments about the war and the Irish rebellion. Furthermore, they provide a link between Irish prison memoirs of the nineteenth century (such as works by John Mitchel, Thomas Clarke, and Oscar Wilde) and those of the late twentieth century in Northern Ireland (such as the writing of Bobby Sands). Autograph albums kept by Irish republican prisoners can be found in the collections of the National Library Ireland, the National Museum at Collins Barracks, and at Kilmainham Gaol. It is likely that even more remain in the private hands of families. These objects should thus be viewed as significant repositories of cultural communication; autograph albums reveal the consciousness of a people during a momentous time of change. Paul Cusack's album, one of several hundred housed in archives in Ireland and the United States, clearly illustrates the continued use of an autograph album. Now in the special collections at the University of Kansas, Cusack's book was part of a large collection of Irish writing and ephemera belonging to P. S. O'Hegarty, a writer, civil servant, and supreme commander of the IRB. [End Page 22] O'Hegarty knew Dr. Brian Cusack, Paul's brother, and also Terence MacSwiney, who was imprisoned with Paul in Frongoch. Cusack himself could not be called a major figure in the story of Irish independence; his significance lies in the fact that we can trace the autograph album to him and that his autograph album is typical...

Intersectional solidarity? The Armagh women, the British left and women’s liberation

In 1980, three Republican women prisoners held in Armagh prison in Northern Ireland joined the hunger strike being conducted by male Republican prisoners in Maze Prison. Overshadowed by the fatal 1981 strike, the 1980 strike involved these women in Armagh, who challenged the traditional nationalist notion of the strong male warrior, while generating sympathy and solidarity across the globe, including with the far left and the women’s liberation movement in Britain. This article will look at how the left and the women’s liberation movement in both Britain and Ireland looked to portray these women within their competing narratives.

Male Republican Prisoners in Northern Ireland: Resistance, Emotions and Homosociality

The literature on male imprisonment consistently reveals a particular form of hegemonic masculinity based on competition, dominance and violence, actual or threatened. This article seeks to examine this standard view via the experience of republican politically motivated prisoners in Northern Ireland. It finds evidence of elements of hegemonic masculinity as in other prisons, but alongside this there was an alternative form of hegemonic masculinity, one based on the ability to endure rather than inflict violence. The article also examines the way in which homosociality – male fraternity without homosexual desire – was an integral part of the prison experience and was enhanced by the solidarity among the prisoners; this solidarity was based on both initial political ideology and the collective resistance against the prison system's attempts to break their solidarity. Finally, it also examines the space for emotions and emotional support in the difficult circumstances of violence inflicted by prison officers, an extended “blanket protest” and a harrowing hunger strike.

Political prisoners and the Irish language : a north-south comparison

The Irish language is witnessing a revival in some parts of Ulster. This revival is most visible in Belfast where An CheathruGhaeltachta (Gaeltacht Quarter) was founded to promote the Irish language. While Irish was marginalized during the conflict in the North, Belfast, for example, had more Gaelscoileanna (Irish-language schools) than any other city in Ireland except Dublin and Cork in 2013. One of the most important aspects for this development was the release of the Irish Republican prisoners following the signing of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998. In contrast to the North, although considered as the national language in the southern Republic of Ireland, the Irish language is further declining in the South. Thus, while the former Republican prisoners perform a pivotal role in the North, their role in re-vitalising the language in the Republic is marginalized. By comparing the role of the Irish language in Long Kesh/ HMP Maze and Portlaoise Prison, I will discuss two aspects for this North-South divergence. These two differences are first the role of former prisoners within their community, and second the colonial/ post-colonial framework of the two states.

Book Review: Feargal Mac Ionnrachtaigh, Language, Resistance and Revival: Republican Prisoners and the Irish Language in the North of Ireland

Book Review: Feargal Mac Ionnrachtaigh, <i>Language, Resistance and Revival: Republican Prisoners and the Irish Language in the North of Ireland</i>

“My First Victim Was a Hurling Player . . . ”

Much of the recent literature on sport, political violence, and terrorism has been focused on security issues and, more critically, their potentially damaging implications for civil liberties. Far less attention, however, has been paid to the place of sport in the lives of the so-called terrorists themselves. This article draws heavily on personal experience of interaction with loyalist and republican prisoners in the Maze between March 1996 and October 1999. The main focus of the article is on the ways in which these prisoners talked about and related to sport and the insights that discussions with them offered in terms of their wider political views. Sport was never dismissed by any of the prisoners I met as being of secondary importance to other matters—a diversion from the real world of politics. In fact, as our discussions revealed, politics was often presented as being intimately bound up with and embodied in sport cultures. On the other hand, their interest in sport also highlighted the fact that these were rather ordinary men, some of whom had shown themselves to be capable of committing seemingly extraordinary crimes.

Site of memory and dismemory: the Valley of the Fallen in Spain

This article focuses on the Valley of the Fallen in Spain as both a site of memory and dismemory. The monument at Cuelgamuros was constructed as a burial site for the Francoist fallen and the commemoration of their victory between 1940 and 1958 with the help of forced labour, consisting of thousands of Republican prisoners. Not only did many of these prisoners suffer serious injuries or death, but, in addition, thousands of Republican remains were exhumed from mass graves throughout the country, transferred and anonymously interred at the Valley in 1959 over and above the authorized burial of Francoist bodies. The destruction of the mass graves in the process, as well as the transfer of the bodies, was instrumental in disguising committed atrocities, and must be viewed as an attempted ‘mnemocide’ of the Republicans. The interment of dictator Francisco Franco's remains in 1975 at the basilica of the Valley certainly highlights the contested nature of this memory site. In this discussion, it will be argued that the Valley of the Fallen represents a site with blurred distinctions between a mass grave, a monument and an unacknowledged site of suffering for Republican prisoners, whose memories and stories continue to be silenced and unacknowledged at the site. The article will focus on the ‘dissonant heritage’ of the Valley, which has become a focal point of controversies and debates in recent years. It will further be argued that the unacknowledged ‘heritage of violence’ of the Valley has transformed the site into a contested lieu de mémoire, and that debates about and clashes at the Valley of the Fallen reflect conflicts rooted in the past dictatorship and still existing in contemporary Spain.

Dirty Protests, Dirty Thoughts

Dirty Protests, Dirty Thoughts Michael Epp (bio) In blanketmen, richard o’rawe shares one particularly memorable account of the Irish Republican dirty protest in the late 1970s: It was a choking summer day; there wasn’t a breath of air in the cell, and the smell was abominable. A swarm of bluebottles buzzed about the rotten food piled up in the corner. I hated bluebottles; they and the seagulls, with their infernal buzzing and squawking, would awaken us at dawn every morning. Dollhead and myself were playing chess on a board marked out on the floor, using little squares torn out of the Bible as chess pieces. Suddenly my eyes nearly popped out of their sockets, as I noticed that the rotten pile of food was moving. Dollhead saw it too and went to investigate. As he removed the outer layer of the decomposed food, little white insects started to emerge. Hundreds of them were wriggling their way to freedom! The insects must have had a prearranged timetable for mobilisation, because they emerged together at exactly the same time all over the wing. Lads were shouting that their cells were infested with these creatures. Hurson-Boy informed the [End Page 37] wing that they were maggots and had come from bluebottles laying their eggs in the rotten food. Nothing had prepared me for this. Cleaky Clarke, the wing oc, ordered that the maggots weren’t to be destroyed or interfered with in any way, but I made it clear to Dollhead that either the maggots went or I did. While I could take all that the screws threw at me, maggots were a different matter: these little guys had the potential to finish me off. We found it harder to kill them than we had imagined, for even when we cut them in half they still wriggled about. Eventually, we mixed the pile of rotten food and the maggots together into a hard paste with water. We then scooped up small amounts of the paste on the lids of our pisspots and threw it onto the walls, where it stuck like glue. Other men obeyed the order and woke up every morning with maggots in their hair and beards. How they could do that was beyond me. (36–37) The point of the dirt in the dirty protest—in which Republican prisoners wore only blankets in their otherwise empty cells, smearing their shit on the walls—was twofold: to make the ordinary work of prison guards impossible and to resist clumsy government policies of criminalization that attempted to cast political prisoners as ordinary criminals. Dirt was a crudely material weapon in a propaganda war fought over the more abstractly material terrain of symbolism. Symbolically, calling Republican prisoners regular criminals (as opposed to political prisoners), and making them wear prison uniforms, would mean that there was nothing really political going on in the conflict. For the state, such symbolism would reduce its responsibility to simply managing thuggy gunmen. Symbolically, wearing only blankets, smearing shit on the walls, and living with maggots meant that the Republican prisoners were anything but ordinary. This, in turn, suggested that the state might be responsible in a specifically political way for the troubles. Dirt had a distinct advantage over other materials for protest. It was, for instance, one of the materials the prison system could not ban. Prisoners needed access to food, which their bodies transformed into dirt. Smearing that waste onto walls symbolically transformed that dirt into dirtiness. Even if left unconsumed, food could be allowed to decompose and then become dirt, and dirty, too. The dirty protest was meant to register, propagandistically, both inside and outside the prison and was much more effective than more familiar Republican tactics of disruption [End Page 38] (these included breaking windows, smashing furniture, or burning down prison huts), which had little symbolic impact outside of the prison itself. The dirty protest found its ultimate conclusion in hunger strikes, which resulted in numerous deaths by starvation. Dirt in the dirty protest was produced by food, so extending the protest to hunger strikes produced a kind of material and symbolic continuity between the forms of protest (not to mention...