'Barbed wire JIMMY DRUMM’S INTERNMENT DIARY One of the hundreds of men and boys arrested by the British Army during the Internment swoop on the morning of 9 August 1971 was veteran Belfast Republican Jimmy Drumm. He was brought to Crumlin Road where he had been imprisoned as a teenager 33 years previously. Having served that first sentence in 1938, he was immediately interned and remained in the ‘Crum’ and Derry Jail until the end of World War Two. After his first release in 1945, Jimmy married Máire McAteer, a Republican from South Armagh. They had five children to whom they were devoted, but Jimmy was taken from them and interned again from 1956 to 1960. So, he was well into middle age when the British crown forces descended once more on the family home that August 50 years ago, arresting Jimmy and his son Seán. Máire was in Armagh Prison, serving a six-month sentence for encouraging people to join the IRA at a meeting in Turf Lodge a month before Internment.
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Máire Drumm herself highlighted the years Jimmy had spent under British lock and key. Speaking in 1972, she said: “At the present time, I’m a married woman with a husband in Long Kesh who has been interned for 13 years altogether in three different phases of internment without trial. He went back in 1956 and was in until 1960. Now he’s back since August 9 1971. I’ve had three periods of internment in my life in that I’ve suffered internment as a young girl, having a fiancé in prison, then as a young wife with a husband in prison and five children to rear on my own. And now as a middle-aged woman, my husband who’s also middle aged is back in prison again.” Jimmy kept a diary vividly describing his arrest, interrogation, weeks in the ‘Crum’ and then the move to the newly opened Long Kesh Internment Camp. The diary is written in tiny, but fluent, and legible handwriting and records his own experiences and that of his family, the life of the prisoners and the news they were receiving from outside as the conflict escalated.
ISSUE NUMBER 3 – 2021 - UIMHIR EISIÚNA 3 anphoblacht
