9.2.04
Guardian Unlimited | The Guardian | The forgotten protesters
The forgotten protesters
It was barely reported that the IRA hunger strikes of the 1980s involved women. Now a new film is to tell their story
Marina Cantacuzino
Monday February 9, 2004
The Guardian
The 1980/81 hunger strikes were one of the most traumatic episodes in recent Anglo/Irish history. From the outset the then British prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, made it clear that her government would "never concede political status to the hunger strikers". As a result, 10 men starved themselves to death.
It is, however, little known that in 1980 it was not just men who went on hunger strike. Three women at Armagh jail also starved themselves. It was their last-ditch attempt to draw the world's attention to the appalling conditions of Republican political prisoners at that time. The same women had also joined Armagh's much larger dirty protest where, having been refused permission to slop out, the women joined their male counterparts in smearing their excrement on the wall.
As a young teenager born and brought up in Belfast, film-maker Maeve Murphy remembers being puzzled by the British government's refusal to negotiate with the Republican prisoners, but had no idea that women were also involved in the protest until, a decade later, she came across a rare pamphlet written on the subject. "I was shocked not only that there were women on these protests," says Murphy, "but also at the horrific and inhumane conditions in which they were being kept. It was a chapter of history for Irish women that had been hidden away."
The women's strike was barely mentioned in the British press. The journalists at that time were all camped out in Belfast's Europa hotel where the story fixed on the male prisoners. "Male journalists tend to be more interested in men. War is, after all, about men," says Murphy. Politicians were unwilling to bring it up as "there was a feeling that the British didn't want women to die".
On Friday, Murphy's first feature film Silent Grace goes on release in the UK. At its premiere it was received with critical acclaim and tells the story of two women at Armagh jail during the women's dirty protest and hunger strike of 1980. Silent Grace attempts to shed light on the lives of women who believed they had a right to take up arms and defend themselves against the British "occupation".
Sinead Moore has not yet seen the film, but is proud to have taken part in the dirty protest of 1980. As a teenager in West Belfast in the early 1970s, she witnessed the British army enter Catholic neighbourhoods and saw how men and women were interned without trial. It fuelled a sense of communal solidarity among the young and swelled the ranks of the IRA.
Charged in 1976 with possession of two revolvers, she was sentenced to 10 years in jail. In Armagh she shared a cell with Mairead Farrell, one of the three female hunger strikers who, after her release, was shot dead along with two other members of the IRA by the British SAS in Gibraltar. Pictures of Farrell's Belfast funeral in 1988 were beamed across the world when loyalist paramilitary Michael Stone opened fire on mourners at Milltown Cemetery.
Farrell entered Armagh in April 1976, and was the first woman Republican prisoner to be sentenced under new regulations which refused Republican prisoners special category status. When Moore joined her nine months later, she too was categorised a common criminal. Refusal by the authorities to grant special category status, and the privileges that came with it, led first to a "no work" strike (refusal to do mandatory prison jobs) and then to the dirty protest of 1980.
During this time, women prisoners were also forcibly subjected to repeated strip searches as a form of intimidation and humiliation. Heightened brutality at Armagh saw warders conducting raids to seize berets and black skirts, during which women were often beaten, locked in empty cells and refused the use of toilet facilities. This is what provoked 30 women to join the men's dirty protest.
"First we engaged in a 'no work' protest but then the male screws started attacking us," recalls Moore. "We were thrown into our cells and not allowed exercise or to use the toilet or get washed. The windows and spy holes were boarded up and there was no light."
The dirty protest, which lasted for nearly a year at Armagh, saw pots overflowing with urine and excrement emptied out of the spy holes into the wing. Women did not wash or brush their teeth. The stench clung to the cells as the women's health deteriorated. Their hair was infested with lice, maggots crawled over their bodies, many suffered weight loss, and infections spread rapidly.
Moore, who still lives in West Belfast and now works for Sinn Fein, says that "despite living under such appalling conditions morale was fantastic. We were locked in our cells 23 hours a day away from other prisoners but after 9pm, when the screws left, we'd shout at each other out of the windows, do quizzes and play games; and some women gave language classes in Gaelic."
With the authorities refusing to bow to the women's demands, on December 1 1980, Farrell, Mary Doyle and Mairead Nugent went on hunger strike in united action with the men in the Long Kesh H blocks. Like the men, their demands included: the right to wear their own clothing; freedom of association with fellow prisoners and the right to normal visits and recreational facilities.
They continued until December 19, when it seemed their demands were being met, although the agreement was then retracted. Finally, the dirty protest was also called off in preparation for a second hunger strike in the H blocks on March 1 1981. Even though the IRA women in Armagh were passionately committed, there were only 32 of them at the time. Their health had deteriorated after the dirty protest and so it was felt they were in no physical condition to join the men's strike. So it went ahead with men only and with devastating consequences. Ten young men, including Bobby Sands, died.
The fact that few remember the women's involvement in the struggle is a matter of ignorance, says Marie Gavagan, who was sentenced in 1974 to 22 years at Armagh, though she was released in 1979. "We were after maximum publicity but the big story was at H block. It was media-driven and people were dying there."
Gavagan was no stranger to hunger strikes. In 1974 she starved with six other women in protest at the British government's proposals to bring back hanging. When the vote in parliament was lost, the women called off their strike after 21 days. "It was a huge decision for all of us," says Gavagan. "I was terribly worried about how my parents would feel, but I was very clear in my own mind that this was something I wanted to do because hanging is inhumane and can easily lead to a miscarriage of justice. It was always a last resort for us because it was a life or death issue - but no one was forced into it."
Today Gavagan runs a pub in County Wicklow and, like Moore, is fully behind the peace process and hopes no woman will ever again have to go through what they went through. "My three sons have grown up in a very different world. They don't know what it's like to witness violence every day. For us, growing up with troops at every corner was brutal. I was first arrested at 16 for trying to stop a 10-year-old boy being beaten up by a British soldier."
Gavagan became politicised in her teens while working in a cafe where RUC members refused to be served by a Catholic waitress. When she was charged for conspiracy to cause explosions she didn't put up a defence because she refused to recognise the British courts. In prison strong friendships were defined and formed. As Gavagan says, "it was us against the prison system. They would try and undermine us and demoralise us but it didn't work. We held on to our beliefs and if anything it strengthened us."
This is the substance of Silent Grace, which highlights the humanitarian and human-rights issues as opposed to the political circumstances that created them. As Murphy explains, "I wanted to humanise these women and show that in a situation of total deprivation, human beings endeavour to retain their dignity."
She expects some people in Britain to take a swipe. "In Ireland, people are naturally more able to see these women as women, whereas in England, the IRA were so demonised by the media that it is hard for people to see them as people caught up in a political movement they believed in. What I'm trying to say is that even if we hated what the IRA did in Oxford Street or Guildford, this still wasn't the way to treat them as prisoners."
· Silent Grace is released on Friday.
The forgotten protesters
It was barely reported that the IRA hunger strikes of the 1980s involved women. Now a new film is to tell their story
Marina Cantacuzino
Monday February 9, 2004
The Guardian
The 1980/81 hunger strikes were one of the most traumatic episodes in recent Anglo/Irish history. From the outset the then British prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, made it clear that her government would "never concede political status to the hunger strikers". As a result, 10 men starved themselves to death.
It is, however, little known that in 1980 it was not just men who went on hunger strike. Three women at Armagh jail also starved themselves. It was their last-ditch attempt to draw the world's attention to the appalling conditions of Republican political prisoners at that time. The same women had also joined Armagh's much larger dirty protest where, having been refused permission to slop out, the women joined their male counterparts in smearing their excrement on the wall.
As a young teenager born and brought up in Belfast, film-maker Maeve Murphy remembers being puzzled by the British government's refusal to negotiate with the Republican prisoners, but had no idea that women were also involved in the protest until, a decade later, she came across a rare pamphlet written on the subject. "I was shocked not only that there were women on these protests," says Murphy, "but also at the horrific and inhumane conditions in which they were being kept. It was a chapter of history for Irish women that had been hidden away."
The women's strike was barely mentioned in the British press. The journalists at that time were all camped out in Belfast's Europa hotel where the story fixed on the male prisoners. "Male journalists tend to be more interested in men. War is, after all, about men," says Murphy. Politicians were unwilling to bring it up as "there was a feeling that the British didn't want women to die".
On Friday, Murphy's first feature film Silent Grace goes on release in the UK. At its premiere it was received with critical acclaim and tells the story of two women at Armagh jail during the women's dirty protest and hunger strike of 1980. Silent Grace attempts to shed light on the lives of women who believed they had a right to take up arms and defend themselves against the British "occupation".
Sinead Moore has not yet seen the film, but is proud to have taken part in the dirty protest of 1980. As a teenager in West Belfast in the early 1970s, she witnessed the British army enter Catholic neighbourhoods and saw how men and women were interned without trial. It fuelled a sense of communal solidarity among the young and swelled the ranks of the IRA.
Charged in 1976 with possession of two revolvers, she was sentenced to 10 years in jail. In Armagh she shared a cell with Mairead Farrell, one of the three female hunger strikers who, after her release, was shot dead along with two other members of the IRA by the British SAS in Gibraltar. Pictures of Farrell's Belfast funeral in 1988 were beamed across the world when loyalist paramilitary Michael Stone opened fire on mourners at Milltown Cemetery.
Farrell entered Armagh in April 1976, and was the first woman Republican prisoner to be sentenced under new regulations which refused Republican prisoners special category status. When Moore joined her nine months later, she too was categorised a common criminal. Refusal by the authorities to grant special category status, and the privileges that came with it, led first to a "no work" strike (refusal to do mandatory prison jobs) and then to the dirty protest of 1980.
During this time, women prisoners were also forcibly subjected to repeated strip searches as a form of intimidation and humiliation. Heightened brutality at Armagh saw warders conducting raids to seize berets and black skirts, during which women were often beaten, locked in empty cells and refused the use of toilet facilities. This is what provoked 30 women to join the men's dirty protest.
"First we engaged in a 'no work' protest but then the male screws started attacking us," recalls Moore. "We were thrown into our cells and not allowed exercise or to use the toilet or get washed. The windows and spy holes were boarded up and there was no light."
The dirty protest, which lasted for nearly a year at Armagh, saw pots overflowing with urine and excrement emptied out of the spy holes into the wing. Women did not wash or brush their teeth. The stench clung to the cells as the women's health deteriorated. Their hair was infested with lice, maggots crawled over their bodies, many suffered weight loss, and infections spread rapidly.
Moore, who still lives in West Belfast and now works for Sinn Fein, says that "despite living under such appalling conditions morale was fantastic. We were locked in our cells 23 hours a day away from other prisoners but after 9pm, when the screws left, we'd shout at each other out of the windows, do quizzes and play games; and some women gave language classes in Gaelic."
With the authorities refusing to bow to the women's demands, on December 1 1980, Farrell, Mary Doyle and Mairead Nugent went on hunger strike in united action with the men in the Long Kesh H blocks. Like the men, their demands included: the right to wear their own clothing; freedom of association with fellow prisoners and the right to normal visits and recreational facilities.
They continued until December 19, when it seemed their demands were being met, although the agreement was then retracted. Finally, the dirty protest was also called off in preparation for a second hunger strike in the H blocks on March 1 1981. Even though the IRA women in Armagh were passionately committed, there were only 32 of them at the time. Their health had deteriorated after the dirty protest and so it was felt they were in no physical condition to join the men's strike. So it went ahead with men only and with devastating consequences. Ten young men, including Bobby Sands, died.
The fact that few remember the women's involvement in the struggle is a matter of ignorance, says Marie Gavagan, who was sentenced in 1974 to 22 years at Armagh, though she was released in 1979. "We were after maximum publicity but the big story was at H block. It was media-driven and people were dying there."
Gavagan was no stranger to hunger strikes. In 1974 she starved with six other women in protest at the British government's proposals to bring back hanging. When the vote in parliament was lost, the women called off their strike after 21 days. "It was a huge decision for all of us," says Gavagan. "I was terribly worried about how my parents would feel, but I was very clear in my own mind that this was something I wanted to do because hanging is inhumane and can easily lead to a miscarriage of justice. It was always a last resort for us because it was a life or death issue - but no one was forced into it."
Today Gavagan runs a pub in County Wicklow and, like Moore, is fully behind the peace process and hopes no woman will ever again have to go through what they went through. "My three sons have grown up in a very different world. They don't know what it's like to witness violence every day. For us, growing up with troops at every corner was brutal. I was first arrested at 16 for trying to stop a 10-year-old boy being beaten up by a British soldier."
Gavagan became politicised in her teens while working in a cafe where RUC members refused to be served by a Catholic waitress. When she was charged for conspiracy to cause explosions she didn't put up a defence because she refused to recognise the British courts. In prison strong friendships were defined and formed. As Gavagan says, "it was us against the prison system. They would try and undermine us and demoralise us but it didn't work. We held on to our beliefs and if anything it strengthened us."
This is the substance of Silent Grace, which highlights the humanitarian and human-rights issues as opposed to the political circumstances that created them. As Murphy explains, "I wanted to humanise these women and show that in a situation of total deprivation, human beings endeavour to retain their dignity."
She expects some people in Britain to take a swipe. "In Ireland, people are naturally more able to see these women as women, whereas in England, the IRA were so demonised by the media that it is hard for people to see them as people caught up in a political movement they believed in. What I'm trying to say is that even if we hated what the IRA did in Oxford Street or Guildford, this still wasn't the way to treat them as prisoners."
· Silent Grace is released on Friday.
