The resurgent Conservative administration, acclaimed by Unionist MPs, was not diverted from its rigid Irish policy following the death of Neave. In July 1980 Thatcher described as ‘disgraceful’ a proposal of the Labour Party’s NEC to investigate allegations of maltreatment in Six County prisons. Although criticized by ex-Prime Minister James Callaghan on the grounds that an enquiry could be misinterpreted as Labour acceptance of republican claims, Kevin McNamara, MP for Kingston upon Hull, Central, and John Maynard, MP for Sheffield, Brightside, urged support. The issue was raised in the context of an imminent Commons debate on a White Paper on devolving power in the North of Ireland. Within months the studied failure in London to address the crisis in Long Kesh, Armagh and Crumlin Road prisons had dire consequences for Anglo-Irish history.230
Confronting the reinvigorated IRA inside Britain’s prisons and cities fell to William Whitelaw who, against expectations, was appointed by the Conservatives as Home Secretary on 15 May 1979.231 Given his background as Secretary of State for Northern Ireland in the most violent years of the Troubles, 1972–73, Whitelaw was well versed for a politician on the nature of the IRA threat in its totality. In July 1972 he had met much of the republican leadership in London alongside Martin McGuinness and Gerry Adams who, by 1979, were both influential in such circles.232 Humphrey Atkins assumed the challenging post of heading the NIO at a time when the implications of the IRA’s ‘Long War’ strategy for the ‘Ulsterisation’ policy were becoming apparent in both Britain and Ireland.233 With over 350 republican prisoners on protest in Long Kesh in the spring of 1979, the priority of Sinn Féin’s ‘Smash H-Block’ campaign in Ireland was clearly determined. In an inversion of standard perspective, the party held out the example of England as a warning of how the situation might unfold in the Six Counties: ‘Remember the lingering deaths in English dungeons of Frank Stagg, Michael Gaughan, Noel Jenkinson and Sean O’Connell? Do not let the British kill any of the heroic “blanket men”’.234
Thatcher’s administration attempted to establish common economic and political ground with the conservative Republican presidency of Ronald Reagan in the United States. Yet, ironically, the administration was eventually pressurised by the Irish American into addressing the situation in the Six Counties. The Irish question perennially troubled progressive forces across the Atlantic. Several key legal test cases taken in the USA during Thatcher’s Downing Street years were impacted by the IRA campaign in England. In August 1978, Pete ‘The Para’ McMullen, an ex-British Army paratrooper from Derry who was wanted in England in connection with the IRA incendiary bombing of Claro Barracks, Ripon, Yorkshire on 26 March 1974, defeated efforts to extradite him to Britain from San Francisco, California. He had entered the country on a false passport in April 1978 following a stint in Portloaise for IRA membership. His lawyers asserted that there was a precedent for rejecting extradition on the grounds that his offence was political in character. The Californian court concurred, noting Britain’s derogation from international conventions arising from the situation in Ireland.235 Any such case in North America, however, distracted attention from the main ‘secondary’ zone of IRA related prison battles: England. By the early 1980s, a wide range of international jurisdictional concerns competed for the finite resources of the non-violent annexes of the Republican Movement worldwide.236
Among the details supplied to defence lawyers in the McMullen case was material collated by Paul O’Dwyer highlighting the ‘brutal assault’ on Fr. Pat Fell and hunger strike deaths of Michael Gaughan and Frank Stagg in English prisons in 1974–76.237 When the definitive ruling on McMullen was given by the District Court of San Francisco on 9 May 1979, it was reported that the case was ‘the first time that evidence has been admitted in an American Court concerning the jail conditions and the brutal treatment inflicted on the eighty-odd Irish prisoners in British jails’. O’Dwyer persuasively argued that extradition to Great Britain would be ‘in contravention of the “cruel and inhuman” provisions of the United States Constitution’.238 American focus on England competed with news from the much more violent Six Counties, yet was stimulated by such events as the annual National Graves Association Field Day at Gaelic Park in the Bronx, New York. Manager J.K. O’Donnell had hosted fundraisers for supporters of IRA prisoners in Ireland and England since the early 1950s in which the Irish Freedom Committee, Irish Republican Aid Committee, Irish Northern Aid and other bodies had generated substantial income. The 24 June 1979 gathering in the south Bronx was dedicated to fundraising for a memorial to the ‘trinity of Mayo martyrs – Sean McNeela, Michael Gaughan and Frank Stagg, who died on hunger strike in Irish and English jails to secure political treatment and a measure of human dignity’.239 Their deaths were annually observed, due in no small part to the common Mayo origins of leading New York lawyers Paul O’Dwyer and Frank Durkan, as well as their occasional client, IRA gunrunner George Harrison.240 Tom Regan of the Clan na Gael descended Terence MacSwiney Club in Jenkintown, Philadelphia, was also a veteran of the War of Independence-era Mayo IRA.241 In Cleveland, Ohio, another major Mayo emigrant destination, left wing INA leader Jack Kilroy hailed from a family which numbered 1940s IRA hunger striker Sean McNeela.242
Parkhurst, 22–24 March 1979
The Parkhurst protest began on the evening of 22 March 1979 when Sean Kinsella, Martin Coughlan, Gerry Small and Eddie Byrne got onto the roof of D Wing along with one non-political prisoner. Expert roof saboteur Roy Walsh, a tiler by trade, could not participate by virtue of being closely confined in the Punishment Block, although the attack by breaking through a skylight had been carefully planned. The men used a purpose-built ladder to get into position and caused extensive damage by stripping off tiles and hurling them to the ground.243 Walsh had advised on an efficient methodology of loosening entire rows of tiles which had not been properly nailed in position and drilling holes in those that were well embedded to maximize the cost and effort of replacement.244 Mick Sheehan had helped construct the ladder in the prison’s engineering workshop and reported sick on the morning of the protest in order to be in position to provide those heading for the roof with blankets and food.245 They acted to raise publicity on the conditions in H-Blocks, as well as the use of long-term solitary confinement against comrades in England.246 Mainstream news reports covered a secondary purpose of highlighting ongoing frustration at the poor quality of meals supplied in Parkhurst, an issue which had led to periodic bouts of fasting by hundreds of men since December 1978. The IRA contingent in Parkhurst were aware that this aspect of the protest ‘went down, very, very well with the other prisoners’, some of whom they assisted with private and legal correspondence.247 The republicans had also mounted seven-day fasts in support of repatriation and political status in February and November 1978.248
On 11 March 1979, the Republican Movement cited British Government statistics to claim 360 adherents were ‘on the blanket’ in Long Kesh while thirty-eight female members participated in Armagh Jail. Six prisoners in England were explicitly identified: Tony Cunningham, Liam Baker, Busty Cunningham and Tipp Guilfoyle in Albany, Mick Murray in Wormwood Scrubs and Punter Bennett in Strangeways, Manchester.249 Tony Cunningham had lost close to 50 per cent of his bodyweight since being imprisoned for IRA activities in the Greater London area.250 If the Parkhurst solidarity stunt was not as well noted as the ‘token protest’ of remand prisoners in Crumlin Road Prison, the incident, nonetheless, received press coverage.251 In a gesture not calculated to assuage the concerns of the Home Office, Sr. Sarah Clarke, banned from entering the Dispersal System, was observed outside the complex ‘waving up’ at the IRA men.252