The British Government and subordinate Home Office was understandably anxious to prevent public sympathy accruing to their Irish republican opponents in English jails. In January 1978, Merlyn Rees responded to a question on the numbers of IRA members either convicted or beaten in custody by denying any such subcategory existed. Rees sidestepped Sheffield MP Joan Maynard’s query in the Commons, as well as the declared raison d’etre of the Prevention of Terrorism Act (PTA), by claiming that ‘there is no separate offence of terrorism in our criminal law’, and it was therefore impossible to collate the desired data.32 Despite this disavowal of any form of tailored protocols adopted in relation to republicans, the IRA intuited that the Home Office was devising a fresh approach to pressurize its most vulnerable imprisoned comrades. It was alleged that Wakefield had retained an anomalous place in the Dispersal System after the official closure of the Control Unit in late 1974. Trainee Assistant Governors reportedly received courses in Wakefield in the psychological dimension of long-term maximum-security detention. This reputedly encompassed the controversial theories of Fields Medal recipient Rene Thom, whose ‘Catastrophe Theory’ straddled mathematics, singularity theory, philosophy and biology with a penological application in the 1960s.33 ‘Sociobiology’, another alleged Prison Service area of interest which republicans found sinister, was defined in a 1975 American publication by Edward O Wilson. Insights into biological determinants of social behaviour and adaptation also offered potentially pertinent guidelines for those running penal institutions.34 Despite parliamentary privilege, Rees declined to comment on whether he believed Prison Regulations met European Convention standards on the distinctly evasive grounds that the question was then ‘under consideration’ in Strasbourg.35
Persons connected with republican prisoners held in England require neither Home Office admissions nor Strasbourg rulings to confirm the routine discrimination meted out to Irish republicans within the Category A population. Civil Rights advocate Fr. Denis Faul enlisted the aid of Sr. Sarah Clarke in January 1978 to answer queries posed to him on the subject by Lord John Kilbracken (John Godley). The republican nun was attached to the La Sainte Union Convent in Highgate Road, London, and worked with the city’s Irish Chaplaincy. Her primary endeavour was at the hub of a discrete circuit of contacts that extended welfare assistance and legal liaison to Irish prisoners in England. Prior to going to England the Galwegian had taught at the prestigious Our Lady’s Bower in Athlone, County Westmeath. Fr. Faul learned that often-fraught family visits provided the clearest evidence of policy differentiation of prisoners assigned an identical security rating by the Home Office. In her briefing to Kilbracken Sr. Clarke explained:
The visits esp[ecially] in Albany are limited. The Irish prisoners have visits in a special area. Three small rooms are set aside for them. One of these rooms is for closed visits, i.e. behind glass & wire etc. Two rooms have a large table and there are two screws behind the prisoner & two screws & a police woman or security woman in civilian dress behind the visitors. A large table is between the prisoner & the family. All other than Irish Cat[egory] A prisoners have visits in open rooms, well heated [and] comfortable at coffee tables with free access to canteen facilities. There are approx 12 Irish prisoners in Albany … The Irish visitors however cannot visit when it is convenient for them, they must come when one of the two rooms mentioned above is not being used by other prisoner’s visitors. Nobody wants a visit in the ‘closed’ room.36
The basic situation outlined by Sr. Clarke, who had assisted prisoners’ dependents from the early 1970s, described the unacknowledged existence of a ‘special’ Category A cohort of Irish republicans.37 She also ascertained that visitors to IRA prisoners in Albany in late 1977 and early 1978, who frequently arrived at the complex at the same time as others calling to see criminal inmates, were not permitted to use the Waiting Room. Being required to stand outside the main gate imposed hardship on the elderly and the young during winter months, some of whom travelled to the remote Isle of Wight from as far as Donegal. It was obvious to all but the most hardened cynics that this physical dislocation inflicted, possibly intentionally, psychological harm on the families of the imprisoned. This, in turn, discomforted the prisoners. However, scenes of this nature were replicated across the Dispersal System, as Sr. Clarke knew well on the basis of constant interaction with the families her network conveyed to and from England’s many prisons and airports.38 The Prisoners Aid Committee (PAC) astutely regarded such aggravating policies as ‘a kind of “political status” within the Brit prison system’.39
Kilbracken had sought precise information from Longford in the light of reading Faul’s disturbing In prison in England pamphlet, circulated in December 1977.40 This consultation was intended to assist him in framing a parliamentary question for the House of Lords which was aired on 7 February 1978. Writing from his home address in Killegar, Cavan, Kilbracken claimed to be ‘personally in favour of Irish prisoners being transferred to Ireland’, but felt that the objective could not be fruitfully addressed as the ‘UK Gov[ernmen]t have clearly set their minds against this’. His well-intentioned intervention did not enlist support from republicans as it envisaged a proposal to concentrate Irish Category A prisoners in a ‘convenient’ location for family visits. Wormwood Scrubs in London was posited as the best option for this purpose; it was a prison designated the Lifer Assessment Centre for southeast England in January 1975.41 This resembled a superseded line of argument in the Mountbatten Report, albeit one substituting humane visiting conditions in lieu of security considerations as the underlying justification.42 The Ministry of Defence appreciated the importance of family contact and made elaborate arrangements vis à vis accommodation, allowances and communications for dependents of soldiers serving in the North of Ireland under ‘Operation Banner’.43
Sr. Clarke, who furnished much of the original data drawn upon by the campaigning Ulster priests, reviewed the Kilbracken letter on behalf of Fr. Faul. In her draft response she wrote: ‘Rees, when I spoke to him … said something about [why he] could not return them [to Ireland. It was] because they would have to enjoy political status’.44 If this viewpoint was accurately recalled, Rees admitted that the key reason for opposing the repatriation of IRA prisoners was their subsequent entitlement to political status in Long Kesh, site of the H-Blocks. His own Labour Government, however, was moving purposefully to eliminate the last vestiges of this much-resented vestige of internment in Belfast, Derry and Armagh, a process that led to an uncompromising republican reaction in 1976–81. This historic policy shift may well have been a critical element in shaping Home Office attitudes towards the republicans it retained in England. On 7 February 1978 Lord Harris deflected the central thrust of Kilbracken’s representation by claiming ‘there simply are not enough facilities in any one dispersal prison to take up to 100 IRA prisoners who at the moment are serving sentences in this country’.45 The prisoners in question,