Out of Order

Mary Corcoran

• Editorial: Willan
• Año: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134019182
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Scienze sociali
• Categoría: Criminologia

This book provides a comprehensive account of the imprisonment of women for politically motivated offences in Northern Ireland between 1972 and 1999. Women political prisoners were engaged in a campaign to obtain formal recognition as political prisoners, and then to retain this status after it was revoked. Their lengthy involvement in a prison conflict of international significance was notable as much because of its longevity as the radical aspects of their prison protests, which included hunger strikes, dirty-protests and campaigns against institutional abuses.

Out of Order brings out the qualitatively distinctive character and punitive ethos of regimes of political imprisonment for women, exploring the dynamics of their internal organisation, the ways in which they subverted order and security in prison, and their strategies of resistance and exploitation. Drawing upon a wide range of first hand accounts and interviews this book brings together perspectives from the areas of political imprisonment, the penal punishment of women and the question of agency and resistance in prison to create a unique, highly readable study of a neglected subject.

Chapter 1

Violence, laws and commissions: preparing for the detention of women

On 29 December 1972, Elizabeth McKee, aged 19, was arrested during a house raid in Belfast on suspicion of having helped a male Provisional IRA Volunteer to escape from Lagan Valley hospital the previous week (Irish Times 2 January 1973). McKee was taken for interrogation to the joint policy and army holding centre at Castlereagh, along with twelve men and two other women. This first incidence of the detention of women occurred 17 months after the mass arrest and internment of 354 men in response to widespread civil disorder and the escalation of Republican and Loyalist paramilitary violence. The decision to introduce internment had been taken by the Northern Ireland Prime Minister, Brian Faulkner, with the less than wholehearted support of the British Army's senior military advisers in Northern Ireland (Lee 1993: 437). Amongst the tactical dividends that internment was meant to yield were the opportunity for the army to loosen the hold that the Provisional IRA was gaining in the Catholic working-class ghettoes, exploit the element of surprise in capturing its leadership and detain low-level suspects for intelligence-gathering purposes (Kennally and Preston 1971: 122).¹

But if the gamble that was taken at the most senior military and political levels held out the prospect for making marginal gains, these were quickly dissipated by the subsequent activities of the army on the ground. The sweep of 9 August 1971 failed to capture the PIRA leadership, who had been forewarned by the preparatory activities of the army (MacStiofáin 1975: 169–77; Adams 1996: 188). Fewer than 60 detainees were found to have had any involvement in illegal organizations. These failures led both moderates and militants to the conclusion that internment was, in the words of one historian, a ‘colossal blunder’ (Lee 1993: 437), and according to Seán MacStiofáin, then PIRA Chief of Staff, ‘enormously strengthened the very base [of Nationalist support] it was meant to weaken’ (1975: 192). During the following six months, thousands of young men and women were caught up in a revolving door of arrest, interrogation and release (Spjut 1986: 715–16). The overwhelming majority of internees in the first three months of detention was accounted for by civil rights and community activists, students and demonstrators, most of whom ended up perceiving themselves as victims of State coercion rather than lawbreakers or deviants.

Moreover, subsequent reports of beatings, ill-treatment and torture from those who had been detained prompted an investigation into army behaviour by the Compton Committee (1971). Compton acknowledged that ‘tough interrogation techniques’ had been used, but the committee ‘reached the thoroughly unconvincing conclusion that while many of the techniques that had been used on detainees constituted physical ill-treatment, they did not amount to brutality’ (Hillyard 1978: 130). The use of ‘in-depth’ interrogation techniques was reconsidered by the Parker Committee (1972). The majority of that body concluded that the techniques may have been unlawful, but they were justified by the need to obtain sufficient intelligence to combat terrorism. Compton and Parker thus retrospectively sanctioned extra-judicial detention and mistreatment on the grounds of security and the need to restore the rule of law expeditiously.

The response from the streets in Catholic areas to internment and the Compton Committee was ‘united and violent’ (Hillyard 1978: 131), instigating demonstrations and civil disobedience campaigns. Hostilities were propelled into further violence after the events of ‘Bloody Sunday’, when soldiers shot dead 13 Catholic men in Derry on 30 January 1972. The subsequent toll of civilian casualties soared as the IRA turned on commercial and civil targets for its bombing campaigns. Reactive Loyalist violence against known Republicans and Catholic civilians also soared (ibid.: 130). In March 1972, the British government prorogued (discontinued) the Parliament for Northern Ireland and transferred the powers of government to Westminster, after Faulkner's cabinet refused to concede direct control for security and law and order to it (Lee 1993: 441).

Internment describes the actions of the Executive in detaining those against whom there is insufficient evidence to support a criminal charge, but who are suspected of having subversive beliefs or intentions, or allegedly aid, advocate or engage in political violence. It is distinguishable from the regular process of pre-trial detention where the suspect must be charged and brought before a court. Internment in Northern Ireland, later called ‘detention without trial’, was ‘an extra judicial form … its essence [was] incarceration without trial or charge’ (Lowry 1976: 169). A form of detention that circumvents the normal judicial process during periods of war or political emergency is also constitutionally permissible. Constitutionalists hold, however, that this should be an exceptional and temporary measure subject to rigorous legal scrutiny and review to avoid the arbitrary violation of civil liberties.

On assuming Direct Rule, the British government, now governing Northern Ireland through the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, determined to introduce some safeguards to the internment system but also to retain powers to detain on ‘security grounds’ (Spjut 1986: 716). Internment was not phased out until 1976 in order to minimize the risk that released detainees would ‘return’ to paramilitary activity. Meanwhile, Westminster adopted a gradualist approach to replacing the blunt instrument of internment with a quasi-constitutional form of detention, which was administered through the euphemistically titled system of ‘internment on remand’. Under the Detention of Terrorists (Northern Ireland) Order 1972, the Secretary of State was empowered to make an interim custody order, which allowed for the detention for 28 days of a person who was suspected of activities in pursuit of ‘the purposes of terrorism’, but this could be extended indefinitely on the recommendations of the Chief Constable of the Royal Ulster Constabulary (Hogan and Walker 1989: 86). These were the ‘reformed’ powers of detention under which Elizabeth McKee was detained. As an additional safeguard, an advisory commission was appointed to hear representations from internees (McGuffin 1973: 135–6). The new commission was limited to an advisory role, which meant that it could recommend, but not authorize, releases. Moreover, just as it lacked substantial powers, it also lacked robust judicial safeguards. Detainees had limited rights of counsel, as lawyers were only allowed to help ‘respondents’ to prepare written submissions, but they could not attend hearings (ibid.: 133). The hearings admitted less stringent standards of evidence than in the criminal law, being satisfied with ‘a high degree of probability’ as grounds for continued detention rather than requiring proof ‘beyond reasonable doubt’. Prosecution evidence was submitted anonymously, and ‘respondents’ were often excluded from all or part of their hearings (Hogan and Walker 1989: 86–7). There were very few successful appeals against detention orders (Lowry 1976: 185).

The longer-term administration of detention was addressed in the Emergency Provisions Act (Northern Ireland) 1973, which adopted the recommendations of the Diplock Commission of the previous year. The Diplock Commission had been set up to consider ‘arrangements for the administration of justice in Northern Ireland … in order to deal more effectively with terrorist organizations … otherwise than by internment by the Executive’ (Diplock cited in Hogan and Walker 1989: 28). In effect, the scope of the powers embodied in the Act meant that ‘terrorism’ became a highly inclusive and elastic legal category which incorporated:

the use of violence for political ends and includes any use of violence for the purpose of putting the public or any section of the public in fear; [A] ‘terrorist’ means a person who is or has been concerned in the commission or attempted commission of any act of terrorism or in directing, organising or training persons for the purposes of terrorism (Emergency Provisions Act (Amended) 1978, in s. 31(1) ibid.: 3).

Yet the very vagueness of some of these provisions, enacted to deal with the most serious violent and subversive offences, had implications for encompassing a wider range of activities within its remit. First, it converted many ‘criminal’ activities into ‘scheduled’ (terrorist) offences per se, but it also allowed prosecutors to ‘promote’ criminal charges into scheduled ones to facilitate a less convoluted passage through the judicial process (ibid.: 102). Secondly, it gave wider scope to the army and police to arrest and detain individuals, because the essence of the law was that the context of an arrest could be used to determine whether an offence was scheduled or not. Thus, individuals could be arrested and charged for relatively minor offences such as rioting as if for a scheduled offence, especially if they were also charged with offences such as those against the person or property or the use of petrol bombs. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, the Act was frequently amended and extended ‘to secure more convictions … long-standing and cherished safeguards for the defendants were being jettisoned as inconvenient niceties’ (ibid.: 109). The Act also incorporated the recommendations of the Diplock Commission by establishing juryless courts, presided over by a single judge, for hearing scheduled cases. Confessions were the principal evidence in approximately four fifths of ‘Diplock’ cases, and this promoted a high rate of self-incrimination and ensured greater rates of conviction (Walsh 1983: 72–8; Hogan and Walker 1989: 115).

Operation Petticoat: gendering the custodial strategy

In many senses, the detention of Elizabeth McKee, and the other 30 women who were interned between 1972 and 1975, was predictable (Annual Report of the Northern Ireland Prison Service (hereafter referred to as NIPS), 1977). As far as the military authorities were concerned, the newly reformed and legislatively affirmed basis of detention was a vital support for their renewed phase of counter-insurgency. This was supposed to accomplish the surgical penetration of Nationalist communities and to cut the PIRA off from its support base, whilst avoiding a repetition of previous mistakes (Kitson 1977: 296). The ‘strategic detention’ of women was thus initiated in order to neutralize the women's section of the PIRA, Cumann na mBan (The Women's Society), both as a reserve paramilitary force and as a supply and support network (Telegraph 1 February 1972). Secondly, McKee's arrest (her two female companions were interned six weeks later) was a part of a wider stratagem of thwarting the PIRA's practice of introducing ‘lilywhites’, or new recruits who were not as yet known to the authorities, into the field (Evelegh 1978: 62). The army command subsequently pursued a strategy of general surveillance and intelligence-gathering for the purpose of apprehending younger women involved with suspect organizations even if they were not proscribed, and as a deterrence against their future recruitment by mainstream paramilitary groups. Thirdly, the detention of women and juveniles was defended in wholly unconvincing, paternalistic terms as a necessary course of action for protecting them from the noxious influences of paramilitarism (Irish Independent 3 January 1973; Belfast Telegraph 13 September 1973). Indeed, the dangerousness of these unknowns was deemed to be confirmed by the fact that they had previously escaped the attention of military intelligence. In order to sustain the consistency of this position, a retrospective paramilitary ‘career’ was constructed for these detainees; hence, McKee was claimed to be ‘a high-ranking officer of the Provisional Army’ (Irish News 2 January 1973).

However, the belief that the PIRA was unleashing reserve divisions of operatives was not without some foundation. The significant rise in the arrests and detention of women from 1968 was directly related to mass civil disobedience and rising political violence. Initially, at least, the mobilization of Catholic women had taken the form of ‘defensive’ activism which was most closely associated with exercising control over their homes, streets and communities, protecting them in the process against the incursions of Loyalists determined to ‘sack’ their neighbourhoods, and later, against army and police squads on their way to arresting suspects. In an important sense, the visibility of women in Resistance Councils and the Women's Action Committees merged the private and personal concerns of the domestic realm with those of the public and political domain. These early expressions of ‘civilian’ radicalization were formative in the emergence of prisoners’ relatives as a political force in organizations such as the Relatives Action Committees from 1976 and their successors, the National H-Block/Armagh Committees in 1980 and 1981.

After the initial phase of resistance on the streets, women's participation began to take various but interconnected, directions: through direct involvement in paramilitary combat, through support for PIRA ‘operations’ and through more general political agitation. Cumann na mBan was the women's auxiliary section of the PIRA, with a formally equivalent and separate status, but in practice was a largely domesticated and subordinated element within the Republican structure (Buckley and Lonergan 1984). After internment, some women chose a more directly military role by joining Óglaigh na h-Éireann (Irish Volunteers), which provided the substantial membership of the PIRA's active service units (ASUs). This transition in the role of women from ancillary supporters to active combatants followed the PIRA strategy of attracting recruits of a sufficient calibre to sustain a disciplined and effective paramilitary campaign, and later, of weeding out ‘informers … the hot-headed, disloyal or [those] prone to break under interrogation’ who had been admitted in the first intake after internment (Urban 1992: 32–3). Seán MacStiofáin (1975: 217) had broken with previous Republican orthodoxies on women's roles on the basis that British military strategists had ‘failed to appreciate’ the contribution of women in other colonial struggles ‘because they came from societies in which women's contributions are usually underrated’. In the early 1970s:

a selected number of suitable women were taken into the IRA and trained … on the basis of full equality with men … Some of the best shots I ever knew were women. So were the smartest intelligence officers in Belfast … [I]n support roles, the Women's Action Committees were very effective organizers of demonstrations, early warning networks, and … alarms’ (ibid.: 218).

This was the background for the involvement of women Volunteers in robberies, the planting and detonation of roadside mines and car bombs, kidnappings and assassinations. The majority, however, remained attached to ASUs as auxiliaries involved in transporting and concealing arms and explosives, providing safe houses, monitoring army activities, acting as lookouts and couriers, and removing and disposing of weapons left on the scene by snipers. A less frequent occurrence, but one which invoked the direst anxieties about the amorality of the militant woman, involved the ‘honeypot lure’ where female operatives led unsuspecting soldiers to isolated spots where they were assassinated by the PIRA (Sunday World 6 September 1981). However, it was the PIRA's bombing campaigns against ‘economic targets’ which provided mainly teenaged and young women with the opportunity for ‘active service’ in smuggling and planting incendiary devices in various town and city-centre premises.

At the time, the security forces and newspapers publicly speculated that young women had been selected for these tasks because the PIRA had calculated that they would be relatively inconspicuous in public spaces, would not arouse suspicion at security checkpoints or would be more likely to benefit from judicial leniency if caught. However conjectural some of these observations were, they were a reflection of a society coming to terms with the apparent repudiation of conscience amongst some of its young women, which might be explained either by their essential wickedness or their exploitation or corruption by others. It is also plausible that the instrumental advantages of using young women for certain tasks entered the minds of PIRA leaders, who were no less susceptible to the attitudes and standards of the time than the security forces and the courts proved to be. Furthermore, the propaganda value of these musings provided the context for manoeuvres such as ‘Operation Petticoat’ in August 1977, in which nearly 100 ‘Catholic girls’ were arrested after a number of firebomb attacks on seven towns (Irish Independent 8 November 1977). Operation Petticoat was one of a number of victories claimed by the security forces over the unscrupulous and desperate tactics of those who had ‘no qualms about using teenage girls to ferry guns and ammunition around Belfast’, or commit arson and murder on their behalf (Daily Mirror 13 April 1976).

Yet much of this activity was self-fulfilling, in that the inroads into the margins of paramilitarism delivered the very results that the forces of law and security had been looking for – the existence of hitherto unknown sources of subversion. For example, the tactic of apprehending potential ‘low level’ activists produced defendants with tenuous connections with paramilitary groups at best, and at worst relied on the legal ambiguities and prosecutorial discretion that blurred the distinction between criminal and political offending. In one illustrative case, two teenagers, aged 18 and 15 respectively, were fined for wearing ‘the uniform of the Women's IRA’ [sic] after an army patrol followed and stopped a van returning from a commemoration ceremony for two PIRA men who had been shot by the army. At Newry RUC (Royal Ulster Constabulary) station, they admitted to wearing the uniform of the Wolfe Tone Band after they were ‘shown a photograph of twenty girls [sic] taking part in a parade on the same day’. They had also been charged, but were not convicted, of membership of Cumann na mBan’ (Belfast Telegraph 7 September 1977, emphasis added). At another trial, in which a 19-year-old was sentenced to three years’ imprisonment for possessing explosives and a rifle and membership of the PIRA, ‘the court was told that she had been a courier for six years, but she had now quit the organization’. In passing sentence, the judge had remarked that the court could not overlook the fact that ‘although she was an intelligent girl’, she was ‘easily led’ and had ‘a wide knowledge with arms’ [sic] (Belfast Telegraph 26 September 1977, emphasis added).

But one of the most significant problems that confronted the army and police, the courts, and eventually the prisons, was that of isolating the ‘dedicated woman terrorist’ from an undifferentiated tid...