In recent months the centuries-old Irish struggle against British rule has reached one of its periodic peaks of intensity, spurred by the deaths of hunger-striking Irish Republican Army (IRA) prisoners. Last summer Daniel Berrigan visited the Long Kesh prisoners, and he recently returned to Ireland to attempt to visit Bobby Sands. The following are Berrigan's reflections written a few days after Sands' death. Since that time the hunger strike has continued, the British government has remained intransigent, and prisoners have continued to die.--The Editors
The bitter life of Bobby Sands came to a halt, as all the world knows, on May 4, 1981. A short life, a long dying; 27 years old, one-third of his life spent in prison; his last prison sentence 14 years for possession of an unloaded gun.
A week before Sands' death, Ramsey Clark and I had gone to northern Ireland at the request of Bobby and his family. We were, as expected, denied access to Long Kesh prison and the prisoner. The explanation: "The visit would serve no useful purpose." Alas for us, we had thought that in accord with the canons of a civilized society, the visit to a dying prisoner by a lawyer and priest of the prisoner's choice would serve a purpose not only useful, but humane and compassionate as well: to wit, the solace of the dying.
Sands is the first prisoner to die on hunger strike since the trouble erupted in the North on Bloody Sunday, when British troops opened fire on peaceful Catholic civil rights demonstrators in 1972. Acquainted with the systemic violence of Ulster against Catholics, his family driven from their home, Sands was inducted with ease into the ranks of the IRA. No job, no possibility of college; Sands was first rounded up by the police at age 18.
In Long Kesh, Bobby and the other political prisoners enjoyed "special status," which is to say, they wore their own clothing, freely associated in the prison compound, received parcels and letters in modest number, and were free from prison work. Instead, they studied Irish history and language, performed military drill, and in effect orchestrated their own lives under lockup.
In 1976 this relatively pleasant arrangement ended. Sands, released and once more arrested and convicted, found himself and others now referred to as "ordinary decent criminals" (sic). In reaction, Sands and some 370 other prisoners refused all cooperation and undertook what has come to be known as the "blanket protest." They claimed that a British decree changed not a whit their status as respected before March 1, 1976.
Up to and including Sands' death (and the imminent deaths of others on fast), the claim to political status has been pre-emptorily denied in London. Still, many facts would seem to justify their claim. The Emergency Provisions Act defines terrorism as "the use of violence for political ends." Similarly the Diplock Report: "Terrorist acts...we take to be the use or threat of violence to achieve political ends."
Another fact is ominous, implying as it does the self-defeating nature of the Emergency Act and its consequence. Prior to the last decade of troubles, northern Ireland had the lowest prison population per capita in Europe. Eleven years later, the situation is simply reversed; the prison population is now the highest on the continent. Can it be that something sinister is at work here, beyond mere stepping up of "law and order"?
The prisoners on the protest refer to themselves, with an edge of irony as "criminalized" by their loss of status, rather than by any prior illegal activity. The term, given the political situation in their country, has a certain tragic rightness--which is to say that with a fractious, unyielding youth arising among an occupied people, the urgent necessity arises, if the status quo is to be maintained, of creating a criminal population. New laws must be forged, and the laws applied in draconian fashion.
The youth are seized randomly, in their homes, on the streets (always in accord with the law, the Emergency Provisions Act followed by the Prevention of Terrorism Act). The accused are held for seven days, without charges; they are questioned rigorously, night and day; when required, a measure of coercion, known here and there as torture, may be applied. In any case, keep the prisoners awake, keep them off balance. Let them taste the fear of prisoners everywhere, the tread of boots outside their door summoning them to who knows what? More, make it a provision of law that no outside evidence be required for serious charges to be leveled; nor need a civilian jury be summoned for conviction. The times being dangerous, and the presumption ominous, let a confession of the prisoner, however exacted, suffice.
In this way, the entire judicial process under which Bobby Sands and hundreds of others were sent to Long Kesh after 1976 must be regarded with grave misgivings by all concerned with the vanishing terrain of civil rights. Indeed, a crime is a crime is a crime, as Ms. Thatcher frostily insists. But who defines a crime, and by what process is it punished?
I sat in the small, impeccably neat parlor of the Sands family in Belfast, a guest of honor in a time of sorrow. The 60th day of the fast was near; Bobby was clinging to life like a spent swimmer in a vicious tide. The family spoke calmly of their son and brother; we sipped tea and ate scones. And in our hearts, the passing bell tolled. An Irish wake of the dead was already under way, as we well knew--not only for Bobby, but for the other three fasters; shortly, but for a most unexpected intervention, all would be reduced to ghosts.
Ghosts not only of the once-living, but of hopes deferred and politics debased. Ms. Thatcher seems determined, for reasons which defy reason, to hold fast. Whether her intransigence will prove politically useful in the face of world revulsion at the prisoners' deaths remains unclear.
Clearer by far is the sorrowful fact that more deaths impend in the North, and that, like it or not, any solution to the Irish impasse hangs, like a sword from a thread, on the fate of a few indomitable and powerless prisoners of state. At present writing, Joseph McDonnell, serving 14 years for possession of an unloaded gun, has replaced the dead Sands on the fast. There will be more, and yet more, of this; the prisoners are in long supply. More, they have little to live for, and their history gathers a glory around the act of death. Lord Mayor of Cork, Terence McSwiney, dying on the fast during an earlier cycle of troubles, wrote: "The future belongs not to those who can inflict the most, but to those who can endure the most."
Daniel Berrigan was on the editorial staff at Sojourners when this article appeared.
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