The Carceral Network in Ireland

History, Agency and Resistance

Fiona McCann

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9783030421830
• eBook ISBN: 9783030421847
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: Social Sciences

This book examines the forms and practices of Irish confinement from the 19th century to present-day to explore the social and political failings of 20th and 21st century postcolonial Ireland. Building on an interdisciplinary conference held in the Crumlin Road Gaol, Belfast, the methodological approaches adopted across this book range from the historical and archival to the sociological, political, and literary. This edited collection touches on topics such as industrial schools, Magdalen laundries, struggles and resistance in prisons both North and South, Direct Provision, and the ways in which prison experiences have been represented in literature, cinema, and the arts. It sketches out an uncomfortable picture of the techniques for policing bodies deployed in Ireland for over a century. This innovative study seeks to establish a link between Ireland's inhumane treatment of women and children, of prisoners, and of asylum seekers today, and to expose and pinpoint modes of resistance to these situations.

© The Author(s) 2020

F. McCann (ed.)The Carceral Network in IrelandPalgrave Studies in Prisons and Penologyhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-42184-7_8

Begin Abstract

Mairéad Farrell in the Armagh Gaol

Katherine Side¹

(1)

Memorial University of Newfoundland, St. John’s, NL, Canada

Katherine Side

Email: [email protected]

Keywords

Mairéad FarrellPhotographyArmagh prisonMaterial objectsMemory

End Abstract

This photograph of Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA) prisoner, Mairéad Farrell is recognised widely.¹ It is used to retell history and to uphold historical silences; both of these tasks require what literary scholar Marianne Hirsch identifies as considerable ongoing ‘imaginative investment, projection, and creation’ (Hirsch 2001, 5) (Fig. 1).

Fig. 1

Mairéad Farrell in the Armagh Gaol, 1980. (Photograph Credit: Pacemaker Press International. Used with permission)

By the time this photograph was taken in 1980, and it is not clear by whom it was taken, Mairéad Farrell’s name was already widely known across Northern Ireland, and her face was widely recognisable.² Among republicans, Farrell was well-known for her involvement in the Provisional IRA’s armed struggle for a united Ireland; however, her involvement in these same activities was repudiated by unionists, and by the British state.³

In this analysis, I use communication scholar Sarah Kember’s theory of the ‘shadow of the object’, which is about photography specifically, to explore tensions around the loss of material objects and including photographs and their veneration and reproduction as both fetishised and transformed objects (Kember 1996, 157). In this analysis, I define the object as the relationship between the photograph and the building’s physical and contextual setting; the shadow of the object is the political climate through which the relationship between the object and its setting are read and understood. Kember outlines the paradox that results from the photograph’s ‘fading, but always mythical realism’ (Kember 1996, 146). The photograph is accepted as not being ‘real’, in that it is not an unaltered representation of ‘truth’. For example, photographic images can be staged, their subjects can be posed, and their contexts can be selected intentionally. Yet, at the same time, those who collect and reproduce photographs are often concerned with photographic loss. They may be concerned about the loss of its meanings and memories which can be imbued with a mythical status, and paradoxically also concerned about loss that occurs in reproduction, as an ‘image-idea’ of the real (Kember 1996, 145, 146). I use this photographic image as an example to demonstrate how this mythical status extends past the photograph as material object, to also encompass its physical and symbolic setting, in this instance, the Armagh Goal. The image and its location are interconnected in such a way that the meaning of one animates and evokes the other. Despite the obvious and significant differences in their respective materialities—one being a fragile piece of paper and the other being a robust, stone edifice—both of these objects and their connections continue to instigate and occupy space in the present-day ‘territorialisation of memory’ in contemporary, conflict-afflicted Northern Ireland (McBride 2017a, 13).

Seeing Mairéad Farrell

Farrell’s status and performance as a prisoner in this photograph are indisputable. Farrell stands beside a prison cot; she poses for the camera at the far end of the cell. Her presence forces viewers’ gaze down the cell’s tight walls. Similar to Alice Maher’s art work, Cell (1991), installed in a prison cell in the East Wing of the Kilmainham Gaol, this perspective invites a scopic view of the normally private space of the gaol cell and its prisoner (Jarman 2008).⁴ Normally, both prisoner and cell are hidden from sight, behind a locked door. At the height of the building’s occupation, between 1971 and 1986, each cell in the Armagh Gaol (officially Her Majesty’s Prison (HMP) Armagh), housed two prisoners in a confined physical space (Gibson 2011, 1053; McLaughlin 2017). In one scholarly account, the cell’s dimensions are specified as nine feet by six feet (Bloom et al. 2012, 70), and in another account, eight feet by ten feet (Wahidin 2016, 109).⁵ Standing in front of the cell’s heavy, barred door, Farrell gazes directly into the camera lens.

Farrell’s background in republican activism was not derived generationally. The daughter of a middle-class, hardware-shopkeeper father and a mother who worked in the home, Farrell and her five brothers were raised on the Stewartstown Road, West Belfast. She attended Rathmore Grammar School, a Catholic school in Finaghy, Belfast. Like many women of her generation, she was employed in a clerical position upon leaving school at age 18, in her case, at an insurance broker’s office. She reportedly left her employment for active service as a paramilitary member of the PIRA. In April 1976, Farrell was convicted on charges of bombing, weapons possession, and membership in a proscribed organisation, for which she was sentenced to 14 years in prison.⁶ She served her sentence, over a ten and a half year period in A Wing, Armagh Gaol. Released from the Armagh Gaol in 1986, Farrell returned to active service in the PIRA. In 1988, she was shot and killed by British Special Forces, allegedly while attempting to plant a bomb against British forces stationed in Gibraltar.⁷ Neither her prison sentence, nor her paramilitary involvement made Farrell’s involvement in the context of Northern Ireland’s conflict unique; but, the violent circumstances of her death at the hands of the British security forces have been, and continue to be, magnified symbolically as a form of martyrdom for the cause of Irish independence from British rule.⁸

Farrell’s status as public martyr is contrasted with the private view offered by this photographic image. Photographic images were facilitated by the practice of smuggling cameras and film in and out of British prisons in Northern Ireland. Clandestine prison images were used as a visual means to defy prison (and British) authority. Photographic images were often reprinted in community-specific newspapers to demonstrate prisoner resilience and to build community resistance against the practices of internment and imprisonment. Photographs may also have been passed onto family members as a personal mode of communication, and it is likely that familial safekeeping practices assured the survival of the images and the memories to which they were connected.⁹ Visual media scholar Belinda Loftus argues that clandestine images existed in opposition to [British] state-generated and circulated images that justified the practices of internment and detention as necessary means to maintain security (1980). State-generated images appeared in technologically altered forms, including as cropped images, and with misleading captions and/or out of context, and they were often read by republican communities as a form of state propaganda (Loftus 1980). Republican communities were receptive to images such as this one of Mairéad Farrell because it contradicted dominant state narratives about prison conditions which denied prisoners were kept in poor conditions and/or were mistreated. With reference to this particular image, post-colonial literary scholar Laura Lyons notes,

much effort was made [by prison authorities] to prevent information about those inside the prison, as well as photographs of them from getting out […] This photograph […] acts as contraband evidence of the conditions both within the Armagh prison and those [conditions] under which information about the prison is disseminated. (Lyons 1996, 129)

In the image, the prisoner and gaol’s material conditio...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• Introduction: A Decolonial Approach to Ireland’s Protean Carceral Network
• The Dublin Intermediate Prison System
• Shifting Carceral Formations: A Genealogy of Penal (Re)construction in the North of Ireland
• Rehabilitating the Prison: The Evolution of Strategies for Dealing with Northern Ireland’s Carceral Heritages
• The Prisoners’ Rights Organisation and Penal Reform in the Republic of Ireland
• ‘A Virtually Self-Contained Community’: Unorthodox Containment and Prisoner Autonomy in the Maze/Long Kesh Compounds
• Gusty Spence: Agent of Conflict, Creativity, and Change
• Mairéad Farrell in the Armagh Gaol
• Stories from the Cells: The Role of the Maze and Long Kesh Prison in Peace Time Northern Ireland
• Acts of Survival and Resistance in Industrial and Reformatory Schools in Ireland in the Twentieth Century
• The Room Where Nothing Makes Sense: Historiophobic Space and the Aesthetics of Child Maltreatment
• Incarceration, Disavowal and Ireland’s Prison Industrial Complex
• Back Matter