Available from www.sinnfeinbookshop.com
Warriors of patience and time
JIM GIBNEY reviews Laurence McKeown’s H-Block memoir In as many months towards the end of last year, six former political prisoners launched books detailing their prison experience and the years spent in the struggle for freedom – as IRA volunteers on active service on the outside and the inside of prison. They were: Jim McCann’s ‘6000 Days’; Seamie Kearney’s ‘No Greater Love’; Eoghan (Gino) Mac Cormaic’s ‘Pluid – Scéal na mBlocanna H 1976-81’ (which will be released in English in April 2022); Gerry Kelly’s poetry collection, ‘Inside and Out’; Danny Morrison’s 'Then the Walls Came Down', and Laurence ‘Lorney’ McKeown, ‘Time Shadows – a Prison Memoir’. All of the prisoners served time in the H-Blocks of Long Kesh and Gerry Kelly also spent many years in various English prisons. Lorney McKeown spent 16 years in jail; 1,621 days naked in a prison cell, 1,079 days without washing, and 70 days on hunger strike. And all of the time on protest, he, along with hundreds of other political prisoners, experienced institutional torture and abuse at the hands of prison guards and the prison system including the women on protest in Armagh Jail. These included governors, doctors, senior civil servants at the Northern Ireland Office and at the very top in 10 Downing Street, Maggie Thatcher approved of and sanctioned the abuse of prisoners. Reading Laurence’s book and Jaz McCann’s, which I reviewed for the Bobby Sands Trust website, I was filled with anger at the casual brutality the prisoners experienced. A former political prisoner myself, I know the feelings of fear expressed in both books when a prisoner comes face-to-face with prison warders and an implacable administration. However, there is no comparison between my experience
anphoblacht UIMHIR EISIÚNA 1 - 2022 - ISSUE NUMBER 1
of occasional assault by a small number of prison guards, while I was fully dressed, and to what is chronicled in Lorney and Jim’s books. The brutality was orchestrated, prolonged, daily - sometimes hourly, systematic, planned but occasionally random. It was psychological terror with a political purpose – to break the will and spirit of the political prisoners in the H-Blocks and Armagh and force them to accept a criminal status and that the cause of Irish freedom was a criminal enterprise with repercussions for the overall morale of the struggle and how the struggle would be perceived internationally. It struck me reading the books that the British government has a legal case to answer for its brutality of the prisoners in the same way that the Irish and unionist governments and the Catholic Church had a case
The brutality was orchestrated, prolonged, daily - sometimes hourly, systematic, planned but occasionally random to answer regarding the sexual abuse of children in various institutions including the ‘Mother and Baby Homes’. One of the north’s leading solicitors, Padraig Ó Muiri, is challenging the treatment of the political prisoners, based on the findings of the ‘Report of the Independent Panel of Inquiry into the Circumstances of the H-Block and Armagh Prison Protests 1976-1981’. That report was commissioned by Coiste na nIarchimi which provides services to former political prisoners. Lorney, now an academic with a doctoral thesis, is a
49
