The studied and damaging detachment of the CPGB from the ‘Irish Question’ resulted in the PAC picketing their offices in King Street, London, on 16 June 1978.139 The SWP, NCCL and Connolly Association were also criticized for their perceived failure to rally behind the PAC/ Sinn Féin driven campaign on political status and amnesty.140 The Labour Party, similarly, was generally indisposed to back radical proposals from its TOM membership. This reflected sensitivity on the block votes cast by several craft and engineering unions which supported the minority opinion of their Unionist membership in Ireland. This position shifted towards a more pro-Irish Labour Party stance in late 1981 in the aftermath of the H-Block hunger strike.141 Amnesty International, frequently criticized by Irish republicans for their silence on the maltreatment of political prisoners in England, published findings on torture in the North of Ireland in June 1978 after a seven-month investigation.142 Shocking reports of the ‘blanket protest’ in the H-Blocks, and the severity of interrogations in Castlereagh distracted English radicals from the local brutalities of the Dispersal System, but even this sense of exigency failed to stimulate left wing unity in Ireland. New ‘H-Block Committees’ in Oxford and elsewhere in Britain, and a dedicated TOM demonstration in London against the Castlereagh abuses represented further, if logical, redirection of English political energy towards problems in Ireland.143
British counter-insurgents, meanwhile, gradually substituted the crude psychological and physical methods used in Castlereagh to extract ‘confessions’ with ‘supergrasses’ whose unsupported testimony was used to convict scores in the juryless Diplock Courts.144 The Brehon Law Society of New York, an organization comprising Irish-American and humanitarian practitioners of the legal profession on the East Coast of the USA, described the new Diplock proceedings that matured in the early 1980s as ‘show trials’.145 The allusion to Stalinist-era extremity in the Soviet Union’s legal system was intentional and geared towards aggravating socially conservative Irish-Americans. The tactical use of informers and agents in court, surprisingly, was never utilized against the IRA in Britain, possibly owing to attention it would have brought to bear on the conduct of certain jury trials and the statutory requirement to air ‘accomplice evidence’ in front of a civilian panel. Commitment to the jury tradition, as the numerous miscarriage of justice cases affirmed in the 1990s, provided no guarantee of fair or appropriate verdicts in trials where forensic evidence was vitiated. There were, moreover, no IRA prisoners in England willing to compromise in such a manner in the 1980s.146
The Campbell case at Strasbourg
The European Commission of Human Rights on 9 May 1978 decided to admit the test case taken by Sean Campbell alleging breaches of the European Convention by the British authorities in relation to Irish prisoners in England. The breakthrough signalled that the Commission in Strasbourg believed there was a prima facie breach of Article Six arising from the refusal of the Home Office to permit Campbell to consult with his lawyers between October 1976 and March 1977. This essentially reasserted the Golder v UK (1975: 1 ECHR, 524) judgement of February 1975. Another element of the complaint focused on the conduct of the Board of Visitors who had punished the Tyrone man with solitary confinement and loss of remission. However, this potentially significant advance was tempered by the failure of the Commission to accept claims from Campbell and others that Article Three had been breached by the violence inflicted by staff on the Albany prisoners.147 The case was still under consideration in March 1982 when Campbell was released and deported, having served all but a few months of his full sentence.148 Prisoners could petition the Home Secretary for restoration of forfeited remission under Prison Rule 56 (2), but IRA members rarely pursued this theoretical option. Campbell evidently did not elicit the support of the various adjudicating bodies who had imposed sanctions and who enjoyed in doing so the capacity to make restoration under Order 42 (a) of Prison Standing Orders (1977). This directed: ‘Where a prisoner’s institutional behaviour has shown a significant improvement, indicative of a genuine change of attitude (as opposed to staying out of trouble), and the improvement is likely to be maintained, a governor or Board of Visitors, depending upon which adjudicating authority originally awarded the forfeiture of remission, may restore part of the remission a prisoner is forfeited if restoration will bring forward the earliest date of release’.149
Movement in Strasbourg revived the waning issue of Irish prisoners in England. The Times of London observed that the presence of over 100 persons regarded as IRA personnel in the Dispersal System had exacerbated pressures arising from overcrowding.150 In January 1978, the official tally of those ‘connected with the IRA’ was ninety, of whom seventy-eight were Category A. There were fifteen Loyalists of whom six were Category A.151 The Home Office acknowledged the general problem when pressed by the Irish Times, and a spokesman honestly conceded that the IRA ‘obviously caused additional strain on prisons and prison officers’.152 Given the comparatively small numbers involved, the real difficulty was posed by the perceived necessity of applying labour intensive restrictions which collaterally stressed long-term prisoners accommodated in England’s maximum security wings by virtue of disproportionate resource allocation. Such men were on occasion discommoded by being obliged to share the lot of the Irish militants in their midst or, more typically, granted more consideration than IRA members sharing the Category A designation. The presence of republican women in H-Wing, Durham, warped the experience of all those contained in the annexe and it could not be concealed from informed parties that the administration of IRA prisoners had displaced many of the most dangerous men in Britain from the SSUs. This unusual admission of Irish exceptionalism in London came very close to conceding the consistently denied existence of political prisoners. Relating republican ‘behaviour’ to their typically long sentences, and supposed enmity with other prisoners, obscured the characteristic dynamic of political assertion and culture of resistance fostered in the IRA cadres. The airing of such matters, however guardedly, coincided with a bid by Hull prison officers, articulated by Kenneth Daniel of the POA, to register their objection with the Home Office to suspension of members due for trial arising from the 1976 riot.153
An Anti-Repression Conference convened by Capuchin Fr. Piaras Ó Duill in Dublin on 19–21 May 1978 attracted numerous activists engaged with the political prisoner question in Ireland. Belgian, French and Basque legal experts formed part of a panel of inquiry which convened in Liberty Hall, Dublin.154 They received reports from various expert contributors, including solicitor Alastair Logan and Jackie Kaye of the PAC, who addressed the situation in England. It was claimed that the panel ‘found the plight of Irish political prisoners in England most disturbing … they are discriminated against in a racist fashion, beatings and solitary confinement being the usual punitive measures’.155 Young Derry republican Micheal MacLochlainn, who had been held in four English prisons prior to 23 December 1977, contributed a statement in which he described the collusion between criminals and Brixton staff in the potentially fatal attack on Eddie O’Neill with boiling water in November 1974.156