Talking to Terrorists: A Personal Journey from the IRA to Al Qaeda. Peter Taylor
the months of the truce continued unabated through the rest of the 1970s, with a further three hundred deaths,15 including the assassinations of Christopher Ewart-Biggs, the UK Ambassador to the Republic of Ireland, and Lord Louis Mountbatten, the last British Viceroy of India.k
By 1980 a new crisis had arisen that was to have momentous consequences for the future course of the conflict and the long and bloody road to peace. IRA prisoners in the Maze were still refusing to wear prison uniform, claiming that it criminalised them and their ‘struggle’. They insisted that they were not criminals but prisoners of war, and as such demanded that they should be allowed to wear their own clothes, a demand that the new Conservative government under Margaret Thatcher steadfastly refused. In 1972 a previous Conservative government, confronted with Billy McKee’s thirty-day hunger strike in Crumlin Road prison, granted ‘Special Category Status’, under which prisoners were allowed to wear their own clothes and were given other privileges. This was taken by the IRA to be the political status they demanded. In 1976 the Labour government rescinded these concessions and insisted that prisoners wore prison uniform. The protest began when prisoners rejected uniforms and wrapped their naked bodies in the blankets provided for the beds in their cells. The government was unmoved. In 1978 the prisoners escalated the blanket protest by smearing their excreta on the cell walls in the so-called ‘dirty’ or ‘no wash’ protest. Again the government stood firm. In 1980, with no sign of movement from Mrs Thatcher’s new administration, IRA prisoners took the step of last resort and embarked on a hunger strike, the weapon of ultimate protest, to put pressure on the British. Their use of the tactic went as far back as 1920, when Terence MacSwiney, the Sinn Féin Lord Mayor of Cork, arrested on charges of sedition during the Irish War of Independence, died in Brixton Prison after seventy-four days on hunger strike.
Brendan was deeply depressed. Throughout the period he had remained in touch with his ‘old’ IRA contacts and with Michael Oatley, who had kept his ‘bamboo pipe’ in good working order. Oatley had made it clear to Brendan that he was always available as a point of contact, wherever he happened to be in the world. He believed he had the confidence of the new IRA leadership: ‘I think that people on the IRA side thought I had come out of it as a reasonably reliable person with whom they could deal, and I for my part had been quite clearly convinced that people on the other side were able to keep secrets.’16
As the crisis over the hunger strike escalated, Billy McKee came to see Brendan at his home. ‘He was really upset about hunger strikes due to his own experiences in gaol,’ Brendan remembers. ‘He said, “You’ve got to do something about this. I prefer a man to die on the front line rather than die in prison.”’ Brendan had feared the worst during the lead-up to the hunger strike, before Mrs Thatcher came to power. Labour’s tough, Yorkshire-born Northern Ireland Secretary, Roy Mason, had a visceral loathing for the IRA. He once described squeezing them like a tube of toothpaste: ‘We are squeezing them out of their safe havens. We are squeezing them away from their money supplies. We are squeezing them out of society and into prison.’17 ‘We had that awful man Roy Mason here,’ Brendan recalls. ‘We had the sides getting further and further apart. The IRA didn’t want to know. They didn’t want to be involved in anything. I saw the hunger strike as a possibility for reopening negotiations. That’s how I read it.’
Brendan picked up the phone to Michael Oatley, as usual in the middle of the night, told him what McKee had said, and stressed the urgency of trying to break the impasse. Christmas 1980 was approaching, and some of the seven original hunger strikers appeared to be near death.l ‘We spent two or three hours discussing it in veiled language,’ Oatley told me. ‘It seemed that one might be able to develop a formula, with no doubt some ambiguities in it, which would be a gesture by the British government to the demands of the hunger strikers.’18
Oatley went to see the Permanent Under Secretary at the Northern Ireland Office, Sir Kenneth Stowe, to attempt to work out a solution that would bend the prison rules and provide a face-saving formula for both parties. While talking to Stowe – a pragmatic civil service mandarin, not a dogmatic ideologue – Oatley kept in touch with Brendan over the phone to make sure that the ‘escape hatch’ being devised would be acceptable to the IRA. A formula was agreed, with the question of what constituted the prisoners’ ‘own clothes’ being left imprecise, or as Oatley described it to me, ‘fairly open-ended and in some ways ambiguous’.19 Stowe got in touch with Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, whose Private Secretary he had previously been. She signed off the deal, no doubt reluctantly. All this, of course, was done in the utmost secrecy. Oatley was then driven at top speed along the M4 to Heathrow, from where he would take a plane to Belfast’s Aldergrove airport to deliver the compromise formula to the IRA via another intermediary, Father Brendan Meagher, a priest from Dundalk in the Irish Republic.
Brendan had driven from Derry, and was waiting at Aldergrove with Father Meagher. When Oatley arrived he handed the envelope containing the formula to Brendan, who gave it to Father Meagher, who conveyed it to the Provisional leadership waiting in Belfast, who relayed its contents to the hunger strikers in the Maze. The strike was called off at the eleventh hour, and no one died. But that was only the beginning of the tragic story. When families and relatives subsequently arrived at the prison carrying their loved ones’ clothes, the prison authorities would not let them put them on. There was a total breakdown in communications. Brendan was desperate, as he knew what the consequences would be. ‘It fell apart because the language of the prison governor and prison warders was quite different from the language of the Republican prisoners.’ The prisoners thought they were getting political status, but they weren’t. The prison authorities did not share Oatley’s and Stowe’s flexibility, and apparently the government was not minded to force the issue, as it depended on the cooperation and goodwill of the prison administration and officers to run the gaol.
Brendan was thrown into even deeper despair when he heard that there was to be a second hunger strike, as he knew that this time there would be no compromise, and it would be to the death. He had no illusions about Mrs Thatcher’s determination: ‘The British government had moved away from thinking of any form of agreement in Northern Ireland. They thought they were on the winning trail. They felt, “The IRA is beaten, and we’re going to hammer this.”’ Perhaps the government thought it was going to finish rolling up Roy Mason’s tube of toothpaste.
Brendan was right. Matters were now out of his hands. The epic second hunger strike began on 1 March 1981, led by the IRA’s new Officer Commanding (OC) in the Maze, Bobby Sands. Nine of his comrades subsequently joined the protest, which became the second great watershed that transformed the conflict, Bloody Sunday being the first. From the outset it was clear that if the British did not give in to the prisoners’ five demands, Sands was prepared to die.m As the days went by and Sands grew weaker, media interest in his condition and the reasons for his determination to give his life for the cause he believed in became huge. The hunger strike became an international story, with camera crews flying into Belfast from all over the world. It became an even bigger story when in a by-election held on 9 April, forty days into his hunger strike, Sands was elected as Member of Parliament for the Fermanagh-South Tyrone constituency. This was a momentous political event, as it appeared to give the lie to the long-established government spin that the IRA were a bunch of murdering terrorists with no popular support. Sands died on 5 May, the sixty-sixth day of his hunger strike. Around 100,000 mourners came to his funeral, which became a global media event. The implications for the future evolution of the conflict, and the inexorable rise of the IRA’s political wing, Sinn Féin, were immense.
In the weeks and months that followed, nine other hunger strikers followed Bobby Sands to their graves.n Mrs Thatcher, known not without reason as ‘the Iron Lady’, accused the IRA of playing their ‘last card’.