Twenty-five years ago next week, Bobby Sands became the first of 10 IRA hunger strikers to die in the Maze prison. One of those who survived takes Susan McKay on a tour of the cells
There's a broken chair in the yard outside the crumbling hospital wing of the Maze prison, outside Belfast. Its splintered seat faces the sun. Behind it rise high grey walls of brick and corrugated iron. In front, like ivy, rusting razor wire droops over a door.
Lawrence McKeown remembers sitting in this bleak suntrap in the summer of 1981. He was skeletally thin, and dying.
"I could hear Paddy Quinn in his cell," he says. "The noises he was making were inhuman. He must have been hallucinating. He was talking gibberish in a high-pitched voice and then there was this deep, low moaning and sobbing. I knew he was in great pain. I could hear another voice, too, speaking softly to him, trying to comfort him. His mother was with him."
ONCE A PRISONER was in a coma, power of attorney passed to his next of kin. Quinn had told his mother to let him die: "You either back me or you back Margaret Thatcher." The British prime minister had famously declared, "Murder is murder is murder". Before 1976, the IRA ran its own regime within the prison - the five demands behind its protest included restoring the right of prisoners to wear their own clothes, to organise education and recreation activities and to be exempt from prison work.
Thatcher wished the IRA's violent campaign, which had already claimed many lives, to be seen as a brutal criminal conspiracy. The IRA insisted it was engaged in an armed struggle against a colonial power. This was a potent battle about the IRA's political legitimacy.
McKeown later learned "from a screw" that Quinn's mother had instructed the prison authorities to take him off the hunger strike.
McKeown was 21. He joined the IRA as a teenager and was jailed for life for the attempted murder of a policeman and for causing explosions. He refused food for 69 days. "Four hunger strikers had already died. We had discovered that a few days before you died, your bowels opened. It was a signal. That had already happened to me. My eyesight was gone. I just lay in bed with country and western music on the radio. I hate country and western music, but it was all I could bear to listen to then."
He speaks quietly as we walk down corridors with mildewed magnolia walls. The prison is known to republicans as Long Kesh. That was the name of the internment camp it replaced. The Maze stands, in their eyes, for criminalisation. It is vast, some 364 acres in total. It no longer functions as a prison, but after a campaign by ex-prisoners and others, a 15-acre site is to be preserved. It includes one of the H Blocks, one of the old internment Nissan huts, known as the "cages", a watchtower and the hospital block. A centre for conflict resolution is to be built here.
The place is silent, except for the wind. Scruffy plants have pushed up through the tarmac, and there are tall dead seedheads sticking up out of the grass around each fenced-in compound. The place is overwhelmingly grey. Along some of the roads cherry trees are in full blossom, incongruously beautiful.
INSIDE THE LOW buildings, behind the heavy metal security gates, the cells and corridors are freezing under strings of weak electric light bulbs. The grim site is being redeveloped by the Office of the First and Deputy First Ministers, and tours can now be arranged - though not, as yet, for the ordinary tourist.
"You need a regeneration background," explains the civil servant who drives us into the prison. "Or you have to be a key stakeholder such as Coiste or Epic." These organisations represent, respectively, republican and loyalist ex-prisoners.
McKeown is in the prison to look at the possibility of holding an evening of readings and music to commemorate the hunger strikes. Last year, a small gathering of survivors and families of the hunger strikers held a Mass with candles and lilies in the hospital wing.
He shows me the cell he shared with another prisoner during the "no wash" protest which preceded the hunger strike. "We were next to the cell where the screws carried out the body searches," he says. "We used to hear the thumps as they threw people against the walls. We had no beds, and the windows were blacked out."
The prisoners smeared their excrement on the walls. Maggots turned to flies. McKeown didn't wash from 1978 until the start of the 1981 hunger strike. There is a famous image from this time of Raymond McCartney, painted on a gable wall in Derry's Bogside. With his long hair and beard, wrapped in a blanket, he looks like Christ.
"There had been a sense of hope early on in the protest, but there came a point when you knew nothing was going to happen," says McKeown. "You were going to die. You were exhausted. It was a very lonely time."
His family was sent for. "My parents weren't republican people. That was the preserve of a very small number of families then. They were SDLP voters. The only crime my mother ever committed was to smuggle tobacco into the prison. She stood by me. She said to me, 'You have to do what you have to do, and I have to do what I have to do.'"
When her son lost consciousness, Mrs McKeown instructed that he was to be fed. He woke up on a drip in the Royal Victoria Hospital in Belfast. "I was neither happy to be alive, nor sad," he says. "I knew I existed." He was returned to the Maze for another 11 years. "It was different, because we'd won. That dispelled a lot of ghosts." he says. His mother, still a young woman, died in 1983. "The hunger strike killed her," he says.
According to Bernadette McAliskey, the prison protests nearly killed a lot of people. "It was relentless, from 1977 to 1981. The trauma of it destroyed people. It was like a surreal game of poker. The stakes are people's lives and everyone knows there are no aces in this pack. We were living on sandwiches and adrenalin and stress." McAliskey was one of the leaders of the Smash the H Blocks campaign. One by one, her colleagues on the committee were murdered by loyalist paramilitaries.
The police advised her to leave the North. "We were fugitives," she says.
AFTER THE FIRST hunger strike ended, inconclusively, in December 1980, the family moved back to their Co Tyrone home. When it became clear a new hunger strike was looming, the assassins arrived. McAliskey was critically injured. She came straight out of hospital and back into the campaign. Her formidable oratory was a key factor in getting Sands elected as MP for Fermanagh-South Tyrone. Unlike many, she did not think Thatcher would back down at that point.
"We knew Bobby Sands was going to die, but we thought he would be like the ritual sacrifice and that would be the end of it," she says. "After that, it was one long funeral. By the end of it, people were heartbroken."
McAliskey now runs an advice centre for immigrant workers. She will not be taking part in any of the dozens of events organised by Sinn Féin to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the hunger strikes.
"I don't hold with this idea of glorious sacrifice and moral victory," she says. "We were defeated. Ten men died. And for what? So we could go to Stormont? For dodgy diesel and stolen cigarettes? To live off the public purse and complain that foreigners are coming in and taking our jobs? We paid very dearly for very little."
In an RTÉ Hidden History documentary to be screened next Tuesday, former UUP leader David Trimble says unionists saw the dirty protesters as "bestial, less than human" and that the support nationalists gave the hunger strikers showed them to be "deeply sectarian".
Hundreds of people were killed in the conflict during and after the period of the prison protests. Prison officer Dennis Waterworth worked on the H Blocks during these years.
"A lot of people couldn't stand the stench of shit, and the ammonia from the urine cut your eyes," he says. "I had no feelings for them. They were thieves and murders, there was no war. They were killing us and sending parcel bombs to our families. Many of my colleagues committed suicide." He denies prison staff were brutal to prisoners. "That's the biggest load of shit of all," he says. "They threw scalding tea over us, and urine. There was digging matches - if someone kneed me in the groin, I'd put them down, but there were no beatings."
He doesn't agree with the restoration of the Maze. "Put the bulldozers in and grind it into the dust," he says. "We live too much in history. Remember 1690, remember 1916, remember the hunger strike. No. Let's forget it all."
AT SINN FÉIN'S Falls Road headquarters in Belfast a double-decker bus pulls up to allow tourists to photograph the smiling mural of Bobby Sands. In the photograph from which this iconic image is taken, Denis Donaldson has his arm round Sands's shoulder. Donaldson was murdered by persons unknown earlier this month after admitting he was an informer. Sands's sister, Bernadette, feels Sinn Féin sold out. She is married to Michael McKevitt, currently in jail for leading the Real IRA.
The tourists probably don't recognise the man lifting bales of copies of An Phoblacht into a car parked under the mural. He is Bik McFarlane, who took over as OC when Sands went on the hunger strike. It was a watershed, he says.
"It moved the republican movement into electoral politics and led to last year's laying down of arms. We are talking about struggle. Those 10 men died in agony for it," McFarlane adds. "The least we can do is keep it going until we achieve what was set out in the Proclamation in 1916."