Republican Prisoners Research Articles

“Mother Ireland, get off our backs”: Gender, Republicanism and State Politics in Prison Short Stories by Northern Irish Women Writers

The dominant discourses of incarceration in Northern Ireland, those of the republicans and the British state, have been mainly male-centred. Like in other public discourses of the Troubles, women have had little part in these narratives which either omi[t] the experiences and actions of women or se[e] those experiences and actions as fundamentally undifferentiated from the actions and motivations of men in their communities (McAuliffe 2010: 171). A number of academics, however, have looked at incarceration from an alternative perspective in which gender interlink[s] with these powerful and competing 'constructions' of the same (McAuliffe 2010: 171). Elizabeth Shannon's I Am of Ireland (1989) and Eileen Fairweather et al.'s Only the Rivers Run Free (1984) explore the Troubles through interviews with women from different social, political and religious backgrounds. These feminist studies cover a wide range of issues and although imprisonment is one of them, they only discuss it in some sections. On the contrary, Megan Sullivan's Women in Northern Ireland focuses entirely on the topic of incarceration. She examines its cultural representations in female non-fictional, film and literary narratives, but she does not include short fiction as part of those literary narratives. Other academics have focused exclusively on women's direct experiences of imprisonment. Nell McCafferty, a feminist journalist who was a delegate of the Armagh Prisoners' Solidarity Committee, published The Armagh Women in 1981, the year in which the prison protests culminated with the second hunger strike. Her book seems factual but it has a feminist agenda. McCafferty centres on the idea that nationalism is a feminist issue, an opinion to which many feminists were hostile. Similarly, in her article It Is My Belief That Armagh Is a Feminist Issue she urges the women's movement to support Armagh prisoners on the basis that their struggle is a feminist matter. Margaret D'Arcy's Tell Them Everything was published the same year as The Armagh Women and has similar feminist objectives. D'Arcy, a feminist playwright with a strongly republican family background, (2) spent three months in Armagh Jail for refusing to pay a fine for demonstrating outside Armagh Jail on International Women's Day. Tell Them Everything is an account of her time in Armagh with the republican women on no-wash protest. Despite the republican prisoners' request to 'tell everything' when she was released, D'Arcy failed to put them on centre stage. Her account is self-centred and extremely subjective as she talks about her own experience rather than the experiences of the prisoners. Her deliberate efforts to enter Armagh and be moved to A Wing as well as her determination to fit in and participate in the protest make us have reservations about her neutrality. References to romantic notions of Irish nationalism (claims of unconditional solidarity, the use of terms such as revolutionaries and young warriors or allusions to to Celtic mythological figures) also evidence lack of impartiality in her supposedly factual account. Mary Corcoran, on the other hand, has published factual and detached research about female political prisoners. (3) Her study Out of Order (2006), the most comprehensive research on this matter to date, combines theory, history and sociology in order to analyse political imprisonment for women in Northern Ireland at different stages of the Troubles. The shortcoming with factual narrations like this, however, is that they cannot provide new avenues of understanding female imprisonment because they can only adhere to facts. The nature of creative writing enables to explore subject-matters at a deeper psychological level. Although the studies mentioned above have been vital to acknowledge the experiences of Northern Irish women with regards to incarceration, I believe that the short stories analysed in this article manage to throw new light on this socio-political phenomenon. …

‘There is Nothing Politically Right that is Morally Wrong’? Beyond Realism and Idealism in the Northern Ireland Peace Process

Deception has played an important role in advancing the Northern Ireland peace process. This article discusses the morality of British Prime Minister Tony Blair's deception to secure a ‘Yes’ vote during the referendum campaign on the Good Friday Agreement 1998. The British Prime Minister misled Northern Irish public opinion by stating that the IRA would have to decommission before either republican prisoners were released or Sinn Féin entered government. This article explores the morality of Blair's deception from a variety of perspectives combining nationalist and unionist positions with realist and idealist approaches to deception. The idealist argues that morality does and should play an important role in politics. The realist approach, by contrast, argues that morality is not, and should not be, influential on politics. A ‘democratic realist’ argument is advanced in this article, which takes from idealism: the inevitability of morality in politics, a commitment to deepen democracy and concern about the corrosive impact of deception. From realism it takes: its ability to unmask power and hypocrisy, its critique of anti-political fundamentalist idealism and moralism, and an acceptance of the inevitability of deception.

Donaldson v United Kingdom: No Right for Prisoners to Wear Easter Lilies

In the recent case of Donaldson v United Kingdom the European Court denied a claim from an imprisoned Irish Republican that HMP Maghaberry prison violated Article 102 and Article 143 of the European Convention on Human Rights when it asked him to remove an Easter lily from his clothing. The Easter lily has long been regarded as a symbol commemorating Irish Republican combatants who died during or were executed after the 1916 Easter Rising, a rebellion against the British Government’s rule in Ireland. In this case, the applicant, who is currently serving a 12-year sentence at Roe House, a segregated wing of HMP Maghaberry for Republican prisoners, affixed an Easter lily to his outer clothing on Easter Sunday in March 2008. A prison officer asked him to remove the Easter lily and when he refused he was charged with disobeying a lawful order under the Prison and Young Offenders Centre Rules (Northern Ireland) 1995, which prohibits prisoners from wearing emblems outside their cells. In HMP Maghaberry an exception was made with respect to the wearing of a shamrock on St Patrick’s Day and the wearing of poppies on Remembrance Sunday as these emblems were deemed to be ‘non-political and non-sectarian’

On the Archaeological Impulse in Contemporary Spanish Narrative Fiction

The essay elaborates how Benjamín Prado's Mala gente que camina (2007) deploys an archaeological-historical methodology to uncover a largely unknown practice during Spain's postwar years: the removal of babies and children from Republican prisoners of war and their adoption by families sympathetic to Franco's regime. The novel, which forms part of an emerging sub-genre of self-reflexive historical fiction in which a first-person narrator, from the democratic present, investigates an episode of political violence occurring during the Civil War or the postwar, offers a metaphorical method of making buried history visible through a reflexive attention to the process of archival research. The essay concludes by theorizing how discourses of memory, the archive, and the use of archaeology as motif function together to comment on the ethical responsibility of the writer to engage with his or her political and cultural milieu. Through its reflexive narrative strategy and archival consciousness, Mala gente que camina reflects through fiction the democratic potential of a responsibly enacted archaeology of knowledge.

The Maintenance of Republican Ideology and Tactics in the Discourses of IRA Former Prisoners

The debate concerning ideology and ideological shifts during peace-building in Northern Ireland has generally failed to account for the attitudes and opinions of former combatants concerning the nature and meaning of discursively constructed identities and political strategies. This invisibility is peculiar in that debates concerning ideological shifts have been driven by academic analysis or by those former combatants who maintain that the Irish peace process is paralleled by core ideological abandonment. The material presented within this article indicates that former Provisional Irish Republican prisoners do not view the peace process as involving ideological ditching but instead that their commitment to republican discourse remains complete.

The Body as Weapon: Bobby Sands and the Republican Hunger Strikes

The 1981 Hunger Strike marked an important point in the Northern Ireland conflict, shifting its focus away from city streets and country lanes into the H-Block prison. Here republican prisoners used their embodiment to resist and fight back at attempts to recast them as criminals as opposed to the soldiers they perceived themselves to be. Given the centrality of the body and embodiment in the prison struggle this paper will theorise the ‘body-as-weapon’ as a modality of resistance. This will begin by interrogating key themes within the sociology of the body before discussing and dismissing an alternative explanation of the Hunger Strike: the actions of the hunger strikers standing in the traditions of heroic Gaelic myths and Catholic martyrdom. Finally, drawing from the sociology of the body, I will then proceed to discuss how the body and embodiment deployed in this manner can be effective, concentrating on how the ‘body-as-weapon’: (i) acts as a resource for minority political groups; (ii) destabilises notions of the body in modernity and related to that point (iii) engages in a ‘hidden’ impulse of modernity, that of self-sacrifice.

Franquismo: prisiones y prisioneros

The prison policy implemented by the Franco regime brought about a major reverse vis-a-vis the important humanitarian advances that the Second Republic had managed to achieve through its programme of prison legislation. From the very beginning, the Nationalist side passed coercive legislation, which would apply not only during the war period, but would remain in place for decades to come. Republican prisoners were subjected to acts of humiliation in unhealthy and overcrowded jails, where they fought to survive in precarious circumstances, particularly during the war years and the post-war period which are the focus of this article. Such was the fate of the prison population of Extremadura, who would first be locked away in overcrowded provincial prisons and municipal cells, later in improvised concentration camps, and finally, in the post-war period, in penal colonies.

Medical Ethics and Political Protest

O n October 3, 1981, Republican prisoners in Maze prison of Northern Ireland announced that the hunger strike must, for tactical reasons, be suspended. The hunger strike was begun on March 1, to support Republican prisoners' claims for political status; and by time it ended, seven months later, ten men had died. Four men had been taken off hunger strike at onset of a coma when their families authorized medical intervention.

Toward a Homosocial Theory of Sex Roles: An Explanation of the Sex Segregation of Social Institutions

Occupational segregation of women is a major reflection of the generalized segregation that characterizes all aspects of Western social life. It is the visible sign of a massive institutional substructure on which we are most likely to founder unless we are able to find a way around it. Two of the papers in this section deal with macrosociological segregation patterns that link different institutional sectors of society: Safilios-Rothschild addresses the question of sex segregation in the articulation between the institutions of the family and the occupational world; Gates explicates the ways in which the legal institutions buttress the segregation of the domestic and occupational domains. The Laws paper, operating on a different level of analysis, looks at different theoretical approaches to women's segregated involvement in the labor force.