July 1981

SF denies claims on hunger strike deaths
GERRY MORIARTY, Northern Editor, Irish Times

Mon, Apr 06, 2009

SINN FÉIN has rejected the latest claims that the IRA leadership prevented a deal that possibly could have saved the lives of six of the 10 republicans who died in the 1981 H-Block hunger strikes.

These claims follow on repeated allegations that the IRA and Sinn Féin leaderships in 1981 refused to countenance ending the strike in July in order to facilitate the election of hunger strike candidate Owen Carron in August 1981. The election of Mr Carron as MP for Fermanagh South Tyrone, which followed the election of Bobby Sands who died in May of that year, marked the rise of Sinn Féin as a political force.

The Sunday Times reported yesterday that it had seen documents that showed the then British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, despite publicly being opposed to the prisoners’ demands, privately was prepared to make critical concessions.

These reported concessions, including a key demand that prisoners be allowed wear their own clothes, were made in July at a time when Bobby Sands and three other prisoners had died. By the time the hunger strike began to peter out in late August, six more prisoners had died. The last of the hunger strikers to die was INLA member Michael Devine, who passed away on August 20th, the day Mr Carron was elected MP.

The allegation that the republican leadership, driven by Gerry Adams, was prepared to prolong the strike in order to see Mr Carron elected, has been raging for a number of years now.

Four years ago former IRA prisoner Richard O’Rawe, in his book Blanketmen , said the IRA army council blocked a deal that possibly could have saved the lives of six of the hunger strikers. The Sunday Times report quoting documents it received under freedom of information legislation effectively supports Mr O’Rawe’s account of events.

Mr O’Rawe said that in July 1981, when four prisoners had died, the prisoners’ leadership accepted a deal to end the strike but that this was over-ruled by the IRA army council. Mr O’Rawe wrote that a British intermediary effectively conceded most of the prisoners’ five demands. In his book, Mr O’Rawe said that he and Brendan McFarlane, the IRA commanding officer in the Maze Prison at the time, agreed the offer should be accepted.

Both Mr McFarlane and Mr Morrison have repeatedly insisted the claims by Mr O’Rawe and others are wrong.

A Sinn Féin spokesman also said yesterday that the allegations were untrue. He said they emanated from British military intelligence “and ignore completely the actual timeline of events”.

© 2009 The Irish Times

Sourced from The Irish Times

Hunger Strike Deal Must Be Disclosed
Seamus McKinney, Irish News

TRUTH: The 10 republican hunger strikers – pictured on the first day of each of their individual protests at the Maze Prison – and the dates on which they died PICTURE: Alan Lewis/Photopress

The first IRA hunger striker to speak about a possible deal which could have saved the lives of five or possibly six of his colleagues has called for the full facts of the initiative to be made public.
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The Thatcher Intervention
Sunday, April 5, 2009
Anthony McIntyre, The Pensive Quill

Two weeks ago I commented on an interview that appeared on the website of the Bobby Sands Trust. The view of the Trust, my own also, was that the document was valuable in that it purported to shed light on some of the issues associated with the hunger strike era. All such documents, flawed as they may be, are coveted nuggets; the building blocks of historical reconstruction, which whether challenging to or supportive of our pre-existing perspectives, should be welcomed for their ability to enlighten us.

The interviewee was John Blelloch, a key NIO official and alleged MI5 operative. The Trust rightly felt that this placed him on the inside track from where he was pivotally placed to fully understand the governmental processes at play. It would also enable him, were he so inclined, to misrepresent the same processes. At no point did the Trust issue a health warning to indicate that Blelloch’s account, because he was what Sinn Fein had longed termed a securocrat, should be treated with some scepticism. It was sold as a fixed proof of an equally fixed British state position in 1981. No allowance was made for the possibility that it might have been a self-serving fiction aimed to conceal rather than reveal.

For the Trust, Blelloch was presented as confirming that there was no hint of flexibility on the part of the British government during the strike and in particular in and around the time of the death of Joe McDonnell, the fifth striker to die. For my part, I felt the Blelloch document was an important addition to our understanding of how the British five years after the strike were still intent on withholding the truth from us.

Because I had serious reservations about the purpose of Blelloch’s interview and had solid reason to believe that in terms of documents it was not the most important one available to researchers, I concluded my article with the comment that ‘it will hardy even make the 7 day wonder category. 7 days is a long time in politics, long enough to see perspectives turned completely on their head.’

Today, 14 days later rather than the magical 7, the Blelloch perspective would indeed seem to have been turned on its head. The Sunday Times ran with a feature article in its prestigious Focus section which purported to show that the British prime minister of the day, Margaret Thatcher, had made serious overtures to elements within the leadership of the IRA aimed at ending the hunger strike. When informed by those IRA elements that the tone rather than the substance was the obstacle to a resolution Thatcher worked on more appropriate wording.

The Sunday Times based its findings on documentation supplied by the NIO to the journalist Liam Clarke. Because it is contemporaneous it has more weight than the Blelloch interview given five years after the event. Gerard Hodgins, an IRA hunger striker and the INLA leadership of the day both claim not to have been informed that such a settlement was on offer. Had they been aware of it the INLA would have intervened and ordered their volunteers, two of whom later died on hunger strike, to end their fast. Hodgins, for his part, armed with the same knowledge would not have embarked on hunger strike.

Today I looked at the Trust website in the hope that the documents featuring in the Sunday Times would have appeared there. They did not. Perhaps in time they will otherwise the Trust will leave itself open to the same allegation that, like Blelloch, it used his interview with a self-serving motive in mind. The documents available to the Sunday Times might not correspond to the Trust’s reading of events but deliberation on the era they address can not be definitively shaped by any one party with a dog in the fight, neither the Trust nor republicans such as Richard O’Rawe who challenge the official Sinn Fen narrative on the hunger strikes. If public understanding is to grow it needs to be informed – not managed and manipulated to produce stupification in the place of understanding – and all documents of relevance should be made available. There is no need for the Trust to remove the Blelloch document even though its value has rapidly diminished as a result of today’s revelations. It should stay there as a historical trace from one of the most difficult and contentious issues in modern Irish history. But the Trust should add the NIO documents so that people can weigh up for themselves the strengths and weaknesses of two distinct accounts.

The NIO documents reinforce the contention of Richard O’Rawe, author of Blanketmen, that just before the death of Joe McDonnell the British government made an offer which was acceptable to the prisoners. O’Rawe’s claims that the army council figure responsible for the day to day management of the hunger strike overruled the prisoners is now even more weighty than before. For his efforts O’Rawe was maligned, harangued, vilified, and described as having penned a scurrilous book. Par for the course in the suffocating world of Sinn Fein wherever an alternative voice is raised.

Prior to O’Rawe’s book there was one republican narrative of the hunger strike. Thatcher was vindictive and vengeful, alone bearing responsibility for the ten deaths. When the book emerged, the hostile way in which O’Rawe’s critics tried to neutralise him and denigrate his account, caused the pixellation in their own narrative to look a bit blurred. Nevertheless, if somewhat tarnished, it remained the dominant account. O’Rawe was out there but the picture he offered was far from focussed. It would take a lot of time before the mind’s eye could sufficiently adjust itself to take in what was being shown. With each passing gambit in the struggle for interpretation the narrative of the hunger strike has gradually slipped from Sinn Fein’s control and into the hands of O’Rawe. The hunger strike is no longer mentioned without O’Rawe being introduced as an alternative voice; one that increasingly draws more listeners. His critics have sought to depict him as pissing in the well. Others saw him as an anti-pollutant dispersing the mud that had gathered in the well, allowing us to peer into it even more deeply than before.

The hunger strike is now a sharply contested event in the history of republicanism giving rise to sharply divided opinions. Ten men died and the only thing we can be sure of is that Thatcher bears culpability for the deaths of the first four.

Sourced from The Pensive Quill

From The Sunday Times April 5, 2009

Was Gerry Adams complicit over hunger strikers?
Papers suggest IRA snubbed a conciliatory offer from Margaret Thatcher to ensure Sinn Fein by-election win to Westminster

Liam Clarke
Read the documents here

Did five, or even six, of the republican prisoners who were on hunger strike in the Maze prison in 1981 die to advance the political strategy of Sinn Fein?

Did Gerry Adams and other members of the IRA kitchen cabinet snub a conciliatory offer from Margaret Thatcher, then the British prime minister, which met the substance of the prisoners’ demands, just to ensure that Sinn Fein would win a crucial by-election to Westminster?

These are the explosive questions raised for Sinn Fein by papers released to The Sunday Times under the Freedom of Information Act.
Read the rest of this entry »

The IRSP believe that these Downing Street documents, at face value, appear to vindicate Richard O’Rawe in the claims he made in regards to this crucial period of the Hunger Strike. These confidential 10 Downing Street letters, which were written contemporaneous, certainly contradict PSF’s version of events from that period. The IRSP have been investigating similar claims that are contained in these documents for quite some time and will be making their conclusions public after examining the evidence in its totality.

Over the past number of days the IRSP has been speaking to relatives of the three INLA Hunger Strikers, ex-INLA Army Council members who were involved in the Strike at that time and also to the then OC of the INLA prisoners about these particular documents. All have stated that they were not aware of the ‘back-channel initiative’ or of an ‘acceptance of the content of Thatcher’s offer but not the tone’ by the PIRA in July 8th 1981 which these documents clearly indicate.

Both the then INLA Army Council and the INLA prisoners OC have stated to the IRSP that if they had have been made aware of the content of these developments at that time they would have ordered the INLA prisoners to end their hunger strike.

Many questions now arise from these documents which only the NIO, PSF, the Mountain Climber and Brendan Duddy can answer and therefore the IRSP would call on all these parties to reveal all the documentation and information that are relevant to this period. The IRSP, on behalf of some of the relatives of the Hunger Strikers, will be seeking meetings with the relevant parties in the very near future.

Michael Devine Junior speaking this morning to the IRSP has stated that -‘’the families demand and deserve the truth about what really happened during this period. These latest disclosures have added substantial weight to previous claims that the last six hunger strikers lives could have been saved. Did my Father and his five comrades die because a number of individuals didn’t like the tone of Thatcher despite accepting the content of her offer? Why were the families or the prisoners themselves never told about the nature and content of these contacts? I would appeal to SF and the British Government, given their public positions on truth and reconciliation, to tell us the truth and give us closure’’.

Willie Gallagher on behalf of the IRSP Executive 02-04-09

Sourced from the IRSP

Sunday, March 22, 2009
The Blelloch Interview
Anthony McIntyre, The Pensive Quill

A couple of days ago I received an e mail from a friend with a link which took me to the well designed website of the Bobby Sands Trust. Once there I found myself looking at what appeared to be a valuable historical document and one that any researcher of the period in time referred to would want archived. It was an interview recorded by the US academic and author Padraig O’Malley with John Blelloch, a key British official central to events pertaining to the hunger strikes of 1980 and 1981. The interview took place in 1986 and O’Malley was interested in bringing more light to bear on the era of five to six years past. He later went on to write a book about the hunger strike Biting At The Grave, which while dubious in terms of the analytical method used to explore and explain motivation was nevertheless packed with useful insight and information.

Why the interview has just appeared is not explained. Nor are we told who supplied it to the Trust or when it came into its possession. If Blelloch’s side passed it on we are not aware of it. Nor are we sure that it came from O’Malley. It might well have been stumbled upon as so often happens. The Trust has a responsibility to find these things and would be foolish not to seize upon them whenever the opportunity arises and from whatever the source. While knowledge of the pathway from donor to recipient is useful for allowing a more finely tuned appreciation of where the debate is at, for now the matter of origins is a secondary issue. More than a quarter century after the hunger strikes it is inevitable that people will be more forthcoming and the presumption of an underhand agenda on their part may be misplaced. What is important is that the widest possible range of information be brought into the public sphere so that people can arrive at their own judgements. The Bobby Sands Trust is to be commended for placing this important transcript in the public domain.

According to the Trust:

What is important about the interview is that it represents an insight into the psyche of the British at crucial periods in the hunger strikes, particularly at the time of mediation attempts by others, including the Irish Commission for Justice and Peace [ICJP] … O’Malley twice interviewed Blelloch: in September 1986 and again on 23rd November 1988. Below is an unedited extract from the September 1986 interview dealing with the death of IRA Volunteer Joe McDonnell, and is followed by Blelloch’s analysis of the first hunger strike. It is illuminating in that the interview was conducted long before the publication of Ten Men Dead, which reveals the republican analysis, and it shows the intransigence of the British government throughout both hunger strikes.

Having finished reading the interview this morning, like the Trust I concluded that Blelloch – whom the Trust claims was a member of MI5, a view I have no reason to dissent from – sought to present a very unyielding position. What puzzled me is why he chose to conceal the initiative by his sister spook agency MI6 which seems to have been involved in a more conciliatory approach just prior to the death of IRA volunteer Joe McDonnell. Blelloch had to have known of that initiative but restricted his comments to the efforts by the Irish Commission for Justice and Peace, an intervention already well documented. What was not in the pubic domain Blelloch was clearly not going to place there. O’Malley clearly did not know of the MI6 mission otherwise he would have tested the Blelloch perspective against it. Blelloch chose not to enlighten him.

It was not until the following year that David Beresford brought the MI6 role to the attention of the public with his fine book Ten Men Dead. He only discovered it because, according to Richard O’Rawe, a comm from the period referring to the MI6 operative Mountain Climber that was not supposed to make its way to Beresford evaded the Sinn Fein filter. Sinn Fein knew of MI6’s involvement but for its own reasons decided not to make the matter public. We can only speculate that this was because the party felt there was no point in allowing the British to don the mantle of compassion and flexibility when it seemed clear to everyone that they were unbending throughout the period. Indeed Sinn Fein’s most consistent theme has been that the British Prime Minister of the time, Margaret Thatcher, was totally hostile to any bridging of the gap between her government’s position and the demands of the dying prisoners. Sinn Fein, or people close to it, also relied heavily on this inflexible trait of Thatcher in their effort to refute the charge by Richard O’Rawe that the British through MI6 made a substantial offer to the prisoners which the prison leadership accepted but was overruled on by elements within the outside leadership responsible for day to day management of the hunger strike.

In 1986 both Sinn Fein and the British, then on opposite sides of a bitter armed conflict, had their own reasons for wanting to portray the Tory government of Margaret Thatcher as being resolute and determined not to bend in the face of pressure. The British for ideological and then current strategic reasons wanted to maintain an image of a prime minister not for turning as she and the Conservatives set about rolling back the social democratic state. Any suggestion that Thatcher might have wilted in the face of determined republican opposition at the centre of which was the IRA for whom she had a visceral hatred, would have undermined that position. Sinn Fein, for it part, always found it easier to get its message across if its opponent was effectively maligned. In Thatcher it found an easy albeit willing target.

Whether Thatcher was as unbending as has been suggested by Blelloch is called into question by his unwillingness to disclose information that would permit the development of an alternative narrative of the hunger strikes. That narrative has since been developed by Richard O’Rawe in his book Blanketmen and has maintained an elongated stage life despite attempts to force it into the wings. Blelloch’s account does nothing to reinforce O’Rawe’s perspective but at the same time fails to undermine him largely because it declined to trespass on an area then marked ‘prohibited’. By withholding vital information Blelloch has undermined his own ostensible commitment to be forthcoming. Why the Bobby Sands Trust failed to draw attention to this is something best explained by itself.

Blelloch’s account is so flat and delivered in typical British mandarin style, that if it were to be integrated into any assault aimed at exploding the O’Rawe thesis it will produce the blast of a damp squib. It will hardy even make the 7 day wonder category. 7 days is a long time in politics, long enough to see perspectives turned completely on their head.

Sourced from The Pensive Quill

EXCLUSIVE – MI5 on Hunger Strike
March 19, 2009 · Bobby Sands Trust

“There was absolutely no change in the government’s position.”

An unpublished interview with Sir John Blelloch, a member of MI5 who had been seconded to the NIO as a Deputy Secretary at the time of the 1980 and 1981 hunger strikes, has come into the possession of the Bobby Sands Trust. The interview was conducted at the British Ministry of Defence in late September 1986 [where Blelloch was Permanent Under Secretary] by the author of ‘Biting At The Grave’, Padraig O’Malley, professor at the University of Massachusetts, Boston.

Padraig O’Malley [P.O’M]: On the second hunger strike, were there any differences, again the assumptions made, which influenced how policy was made?

John Blelloch [JB]: No, I don’t think so. I’m afraid, of course, that we all, I think, realised that the second hunger strike was more likely to lead to someone dying, particularly as we read, as I read, Sands’ personality. He, having been the leader the first time round, volunteered himself for the second. He did so in a way which left him personally very exposed if only because he went on first himself. I don’t think that was an accident. I think it’s very probable that Sands was determined to put himself in a position in which he did not have to take the decision that somebody else should die, which, of course, was the position that the leader of the first group was in. So, when the second strike was announced, I think most of us felt that Sands personally, and maybe some others, would go through with it, but the issues, I’m afraid, seemed to be what they were before. One response to the new situation was that we continued to be, I think, pretty generous in the facilities that we allowed for third parties to go in and see for themselves and talk to the prisoners and, as you’ve spoken to Michael Alison [Prisons Minister], no doubt he’s talked to you about the Irish Commission for Justice and Peace which I think was the last major effort by third parties to do something about this. But I think the issues were the same.

P.O’M: Let’s talk about that. In fact, if you wouldn’t mind, I might come back to see you again in November sometime because I’ll have this typed up and sent on to you in the meantime and it’ll allow me to get so far because there’ll be some ancillary questions that I’ll have. But that period, I think it was from the 3^rd to the 11^th of July when the Irish Commission for Justice and Peace…

JB: I’m sure you’ve got the dates right. I thought it was slightly earlier than that, I must say.

P.O’M: There was two rounds of meetings, I think. One was in late June…

JB: Well, I remember four meetings, I think, altogether. But, anyway, the facts can be established.

P.O’M: These were the meetings just before Joe McDonnell died and again I think it was a meeting on a Friday which extended well into a Saturday and then the Irish Commission when to the Maze, met with the prisoners and the relatives, came back and met with Mr Alison again and then, according to their version of events, again I think it was you, a senior civil servant, was to have been sent to the Maze to talk to the prisoners. That did not happen. Joe McDonnell died and the talks collapsed. There was suggestions at the time that Mr Alison had been overruled by Mrs Thatcher.

JB: Well, it’s difficult for me to comment. I mean. Again, I suppose I should have refreshed my memory but there were indeed a series of meetings that involved myself, or with a team of officials of which I was one, which supported Mr Alison in, I think, four meetings with the Irish Commission. There was certainly a weekend.

P.O’M: That’s correct. There would have been two before that.

JB: Yes. Well, the first round of meetings were, I’m sure, summarised in a letter that Michael Alison wrote to the Irish Commission for Justice and Peace, an unclassified letter, so the Irish Commission have no doubt got it, sometime in June, I think.

P.O’M: Yes, that would have been in June. There were two meetings in June.

JB: I think there were two more and the problem as always was seeing whether we could find some fresh statement of the government’s position which respected all our, which abided by our principal objectives which we adhered to throughout the hunger strike but nevertheless constituted some sort of opportunity for the prisoners to come off it. As far as I remember the delay on that was actually getting final agreement to the text of what might be said, which was not easy, and in the event McDonnell died before that process could be completed and of course thereafter it collapsed.

P.O’M: But their belief was that – are they mistaken in their belief? – that a prison official should have been sent into the gaol by, was it some time before twelve o’clock the following… I mean, there was a time factor involved…?

JB: I think that to answer this kind of detail, and I’m not evading the question, except to the extent that to answer, at five years remove, questions about what actually should or should not have happened, at the end of very long periods of work, is actually a little unfair. The facts, I’ve no doubt, can be established with the Northern Ireland Office. I know that the Irish Commission at one point were disappointed or professed to be disappointed that at some point when a document was to be taken, yet another of these statements, I suspect they hoped that I might do it and it wasn’t me it was done by somebody else. Why they should have thought it was important that I should do it rather than other officials in the prison department I’ve absolutely no idea, but I am conscious of a memory that there was some disappointment about that. But I think I would like to come back to the fundamentals here. There was absolutely no change in the government’s position on why it stood where it was, what was available to the prisoners and, insofar as one could say this in advance, what would happen as the protest ended. That position remained in all material respects, unchanged. Much of this endeavour was, as I say, to go on restating that in as constructive, as truthful a way that you can, in the hope that the latest restatement would constitute the grounds which would make it possible for the prisoners to stop it. By the same token, we continued to discuss with people so that they were in our minds, and hopefully they were in the prisoners’ minds, to try and facilitate the chance of the prisoners stopping. I have to say that one experience I take away from that process is how impossible it is in that sort of situation for someone to interpose himself between the two parties and remain absolutely uncommitted and neutral. You are bound, it seems to me, if you are any good at all as a human being, to get caught up in a kind of mediation and, of course, in that situation it is always a mediation which requires government, as apparently the stronger party, to stand down. Though I have no doubt they will deny it, I think that is actually what the Irish Commission progressively began to do.

P.O’M: They became a party to it, themselves?

JB: Yes. Maybe unconsciously, maybe unconsciously and in some cases I’m sure unconsciously. I don’t think all, but I think in some. But I think they’d become in a sense drawn into a position in which they believed they were negotiating in a situation which is not really negotiable.

P.O’M: They thought they, in fact, could have arrived at a formula that would, if you wish, become…

 JB: I have no doubt they passionately wanted to arrive at a formula and did so for the best of humanitarian reasons. But I do also believe that in these situations it is very easy for the wish to become father to the thought and for the wish to be assumed to be practical when it may not be, at any rate on the sort of terms and conditions that they have in mind.

P.O’M: Could an accommodation have been reached?

JB: Well, what have you got in mind by an accommodation? I’m not sure what your question means.

P.O’M: Well, at any point did the government believe that this in fact could be settled other than by the hunger strike being broken or that that in fact was the only possible end, that there was no other possible end?

JB: I think the government believed with a good deal of justification that the bridge between the so-called five demands and the government’s own stated position, that the gulf between those two was one that (a) was wide in substance because it was to do with what I said at the beginning, it was to do with setting back government policy, and that (b) the prospectus which the government had laid out really did represent the limits to which it was possible for government to go. If that is saying, did I believe that an accommodation which represented government accepting the five demands then I have to say that I think the answer to that is no.

P.O’M: Or that they could find some variation, some formula which might have involved two and a half demands, or something?

JB: Ah well, we heard a lot about that. I mean, at various stages we heard about how we might sort of have a fuzzy kind of free association but my own view is that that would have been a self-deception on our part. It seemed to me quite clear what the prisoners wanted. They wanted the conditions that applied to special category status. In this particular context, that included the freedom to operate within the confines of a compound which was complete freedom. We would have been absolutely kidding ourselves if we had thought that there was anything else they wanted or that by making a perceptible move towards that, we would do anything other than stimulate pressure to get the whole lot. Now, I believe that to be the position.

P.O’M: On the role of the IRA, did the NIO believe that the IRA was coercing or influencing the families not to medically intervene?

JB: I’m not sure I can answer that. I don’t really know what the IRA may or may not have been doing. I prefer to talk about things that I did know about. It would seem to me, on the whole, given the IRA’s record in this sort of thing, pretty surprising if the families had not come under a good deal of pressure to, as it were, back up those of their members that were involved in the hunger strike. That said, that is not to say that there were not those in the families who believed passionately that what their members were doing was right and justified. Many of them may well have done so. So I think it would be an over-simplification to suggest that all families’ support for the hunger strikes stemmed from IRA or INLA pressure. I think that would be an over-simplification. I find it, however, difficult to believe that there was not some pressure applied to that kind to maximise support through the families.

P.O’M: Yes, I suppose what I’m asking, did NIO have any direct intelligence estimates of what the level of coercion or whether or not that kind of coercion was going on?

JB: Well, if they had, they were not made available to me.

P.O’M: Would you see any difference in the decision-making process as it unfolded in the second hunger strike and what it was in the first hunger strike?

JB: Well, I think the short answer to that would be no. I think that, of course, the pressures plainly were higher because people were dying, outside the prisons as well as in, and therefore the pressures on the decision-makers to do something about it were correspondingly greater. But the issue was the same.

P.O’M: But in effect there was nothing you could do?

JB: Yes.

P.O’M: So, in that sense, I might put words in your mouth, if you like, your government too was entrapped by the decision made by the hunger strikers in terms of the options that it had open to it?

JB: Yes. I’m not sure that I would buy the word ‘entrapped’. The government had a very clear and, in my own judgement, a very rational and well-articulated position about why it believed what it did, what it would do in certain circumstances, which, incidentally, it did do. Now, the position the government was put in was one of people saying, I’m sorry but the prospectus is unacceptable and we are going to use extreme methods to try to make you change it. Now, if you say that’s entrapment, that’s your word. I don’t think I really saw it as entrapment myself in a sense of being sort of enclosed. It seemed to me that there was here a collision of principles, if you like. Certainly, a collision of interests and objectives where government had moved as far as it could, had deployed its case as best it could and on which government ultimately simply had to stand. Now, I don’t actually call that entrapment.

P.O’M: Okay, I’ll leave it there. Thank you.

John Blelloch had been seconded before the announcement of the first hunger strike in 1980 from the Ministry of Defence to the NIO in Belfast. As a Deputy Secretary he was one of two who answered to the Permanent Secretary. He was in charge of three divisions: security policy, the prisons department and the criminal justice department. In the first part of the interview he revealed how at the end of the first hunger strike the British government believed that giving the prisoners their own clothes “would have only postponed the final confrontation”.

P.O’M: Could you tell me a bit about the role you played in the first one, particularly in relation to the talks between Mr Atkins and Cardinal O’Fiaich and Bishop Edward Daly?

JB: Well, I think my role on that was simply that of any civil servant tendering advice to a Minister. I would be doing no more and no less in respect of the issues that came up in discussions with the Cardinal and with the Bishop than any other civil servant would have been in tendering advice to the Minister. There was nothing special in my role except in the sense that the Cardinal and the Bishop had decided to take an interest in the hunger strike and conducted a series of meetings both with Humphrey Atkins and with my predecessor in the period leading up to the announcement of the first hunger strike…

P.O’M: I suppose what I would like to get at in our talk is the nature of the decision-making process and what assumptions were brought to bear by different constituencies and their behaviour. For example, maybe I’ll start in the middle. Was there an assumption on the government’s side that the hunger strikes were about the five demands or was there an assumption that they were about something else?

JB: I think that I would have to answer that by saying what I remember about the position – because, after all, it’s six years ago now – and what my assessment of the position was. It seemed to me at the time and has seemed ever since…

P.O’M: This is in 1980?

JB: In 1980. It seemed to me at the time and has seemed to me ever since that the hunger strike was all about an objective on the part of the people in the Maze prison (and I’m for the moment drawing a distinction between the people in the Maze prison and the high command of the Provisional IRA outside it) to set aside that complex of government decisions which had the effect of ending special category status and instead treating everybody convicted of crimes in the same way in terms of the prison regime. Not of course in the same way in terms of sentence imposed, but the same way in terms of the conditions in which they were then imprisoned. So, the five demands as they were expressed, in my view were a shorthand way of expressing the differences between a conventional prison regime of the kind that we operated in the Maze for everybody, on the one hand, and the regime that operated for the special category status prisoners who had been sentenced but then dealt with as special category prisoners under the regime prevailing before that. Hence, the influence and the importance in the five demands or what came to be called free association but which simply meant that prisoners could move around within the confines of their hut or their compound virtually at will with prison staff simply limited to keeping supervision from the perimeter. So, to get back to the basics of this, I think the key assumption here was that the hunger strike was the culmination of a process of protest about the application of the government’s policy for dealing with terrorist crime which goes all the way back to the first man imprisoned after the ending of special category status who refused to wear prison clothes. In other words, in my view, there’s a straight continuum from the blanket, via the dirty, to the hunger strike as a determination on the part of the prisoners inside the Maze to set aside that decision of government about how crime or how acts, be they acts of murder or wounding or whatever, should be dealt with in terms of the prison regime whenever those acts should be prosecuted as crimes before the law so that murder remained murder regardless of motive; a determination to set that aside and return to the old special category status. Secondly, the determination to set that aside seemed to me to go very, very much deeper than simply a view that special category status was something rather more comfortable than the normal prison regime – although that is certainly true. It goes much wider than another thing that I know worried the prison authorities and, I suppose, worried me quite a bit, which was that special category status made it very easy indeed for the chain of command outside the prisons to be extended to within it. If you in effect push your prison guards to the periphery, it then becomes very much easier for a highly determined paramilitary command structure outside then to get its way with perpetuating that command structure inside. But above all, I think what lay behind this was a concern that the activity of the IRA, and the Provisional IRA, should by all means possible be seen as a kind of war, a just war in which the forces of the British and the RUC, a war which ultimately would be won and at the end of which prisoners of war would be released. There was that element of hope in that situation. There was always that element of, if you like, justification for what was being done by having it regarded as war rather than as crime. And I’m sure at the time you would find many, many references in ‘An Phoblacht’, and others, to the criminalisation policy of the British and I, if I were a senior commander of the Provisionals, would not like that because it would seem to be saying rather a lot about how what they were doing was viewed, as it was, crime. So, getting back to what you said about assumptions, I had it as a pretty firm assumption that that was where the springs of the increasing level of protest came from and because that’s where it came from, the demands could not be met. I also happen to believe, though obviously I cannot know, I also happen to believe that senior people in the IRA and elsewhere understood that very clearly as well. Earlier on I drew a distinction between those people in the prison and those outside it. Again, I don’t know this, but I’ve always suspected that the command structure outside the prisons did not want a hunger strike because the protest that was already going on was, from their point of view, an extremely effective propaganda platform. The dirty protest was an appalling thing. It was fairly easy to represent it as if it were the fault of the British authorities and to arouse very understandable sympathy about the conditions in which these prisoners were being expected to live. I’m bound to say, it seemed to me likely that the IRA authorities would have been happy to have seen a continuation of that situation almost indefinitely and that by going to a hunger strike, while, of course, there must, I suppose to some, have appeared the possibility that it would be successful, that is to say, that the government would actually concede a return to special category status, the possibility must always have been present that it would not be, in which case there was no other level of protest in the prisons left. Now, of course, the hunger strike having been declared, there could be no question then that the whole apparatus of the Provisional IRA and the INLA was swung in behind to support the hunger strikers and that’s how it emerged.

P.O’M: So, the assumption would have been that at the time of the first hunger strike, it was a hunger strike initiated by the prisoners themselves?

JB: Yes, that certainly was my own view, that the thrust for the first hunger strike, and subsequently the second, came decisively from inside the prison. As I say, it’s my own assumption. I don’t know this because I’ve not talked to the people concerned about it, but my assumption certainly would have been that the wellsprings for this came from inside the prison. It’s very easy to understand why it should have, because after all it was they who were having to support these conditions, it was they who could see that over a period of years it wasn’t actually getting anywhere in terms of satisfaction of the demands and one could quite see why from within the prisons there should have been a mood which said that we must raise this level of protest and bring it to an end. It also seems to me quite possible for the prisoners inside the Maze to have misjudged how the British government might react. It is conceivable that they were deliberately misled on that though I don’t know, but I can certainly see how it would be easier for them to have misjudged it.

P.O’M: In terms of the first hunger strike there was a forewarning. I mean, again Cardinal O’Fiach’s three weeks and Bishop Daly had said that the prisoners were planning to go on a hunger strike and my understanding from talking with them and reading newspaper accounts of the time that they were of the view after talking with the prisoners, those on the dirty protest at that point, that had the demand to wear their own clothes been met, that the situation would have been defused.

JB: Yes, I’m well aware of that view, of both those views. As to the first, that a hunger strike was coming, it was not, of course, the first time in the history of the dirty protest that hunger strikes had been threatened. In this particular case, the Cardinal and the Bishop were right. I had only, as I say, literally been there about two or three weeks by the time this broke and therefore I don’t know that my opinion as to whether or not a different judgement should have been taken by the NIO is worth anything. But all I would say, however, is that I myself would not have been surprised if the view had been held that a hunger strike was unlikely for precisely the reasons I’ve given you. That it was a final throw, which of course carried with it the possibility that it might win; but clearly also carried the possibility that it might not, and that the consequences – I don’t like talking about winning and not winning in these circumstances, so forgive that – but the possibility was clearly that that form of extreme pressure would be resisted and the consequences for the IRA and INLA of that happening were in fact quite serious. Therefore, it always seemed to me a wholly rational view to take, that a hunger strike would constantly be threatened but never actually put into effect. Now, in fact, it was put into effect very shortly after I arrived, so that raises a second question. Would the whole thing have been avoided if the British government had conceded the wearing of own clothes? I have to say that on that I simply disagree with the Cardinal and the Bishop because I feel myself that while the wearing of own clothes had enormous symbolic importance in all this, it was one, but only one, and arguably by no means the most important of the five demands. I personally would rate the demand for free association as being of much higher importance. I believe, therefore, that if the British government had said, “Alright” – at the time the hunger strike was threatened – “you may have your own clothes,” against the background of the case for the amelioration of prison conditions having been quite decisively thrown out by the European Court, there were no humanitarian grounds for this change whatsoever, for the British government to have conceded own clothes in those circumstances would, in my view, not only not have brought a final end to the prison protest – because I believe the prisoners would have still wanted free association and the other appurtenances of special category status – I believe myself that the prisoners might well have been encouraged to believe that by threatening further hunger strikes they would have got the remaining demands. So, my own judgement would be that at the very most, the granting of own clothes would have, on the whole, encouraged the prisoners to believe that their confrontation would be successful. In the meantime, it would have run the risk in the rest of the Northern Ireland community that, confronted with this sort of threat, British governments will always back down, which would then encourage other people to make the same kind of threat. Now, I’m putting my judgement against those of the Cardinal and the Bishop and that is a presumption because they know the province. But that would be my answer and those would be my reasons for giving it.

P.O’M:  From the moment the hunger strikes began, this is in 1980, from October 1980 until December 1980, were there any attempts to negotiate – I’m using that word very loosely – a settlement?

JB:  No, there were not. There were a number of opportunities taken, if you like, or even created, to remind the prisoners and everybody else who might be interested as to what the prison conditions were that were available to them should they come off the protest. And I can think of at least one very extensive handout that was made available to the press and to the prisoners and to everybody spelling out in very great detail what the regime in the Maze was and what would happen, what the position would be if they came off. But negotiating in terms of sitting down with the prisoners or anybody else for that matter and saying, “Well, if you do this, we will do that”, no. Because it wasn’t – and I think this is also quite important – a negotiating situation in the sense that, say, an industrial dispute is a negotiating situation. I certainly did not see it in those terms and I don’t think anybody else in a responsible situation did either.

P.O’M: Well, did the government deal with intermediaries as to… ascertain what the prisoners might find an acceptable compromise, or was it simply accepted that the prisoners would not compromise?

JB: No, I think again, two answers to that. I think the government’s position was to lay out very clearly what was available, which, I may say, many of the people on the dirty protest had never actually experienced. They’d been on protest from the moment they came in and therefore were subject to various kinds of forfeit of privileges and so on. The government’s position was consistently to remind people what the facts were about the conditions in the Maze because there was a great deal of misrepresentation about the H-Blocks being a hell-hole. Quite the contrary. The conditions that were available – there are no comfortable prisons – the conditions there compared immensely favourably with prison conditions anywhere else in the UK. There was a major effort made to make sure that everybody who ought to know, and preferably who wanted to know, did know what the conditions were like and therefore what was available to prisoners should they come off the protest. Secondly, and perhaps rather more controversially, the government quite deliberately took the position that people of genuinely goodwill should have access to the prison, not as negotiators or interlocutors or intermediaries or anything like that, but simply so that independent persons of high-standing should themselves have a chance to talk both to us in government and to the prisoners and to that extent, therefore, be in a position to represent views of the one to the other, but not to act as negotiators. Now, of course, to the extent that the prisoners talked to whoever it was – the Red Cross or any other body who went in – we would always take a great deal of trouble to be debriefed on what they had to say and we would listen extremely carefully and in particular for any sign that there was anything we could do cosmetically or otherwise to make it easier to bring the hunger strike to an end. But there was no question at all, either of direct or indirect negotiations with the prisoners – that wasn’t the name of the game.

P.O’M: The first hunger strike, in fact, collapsed quite suddenly when Sean McKenna, his eyesight began to fail. Let me go back and tell you what some of the prisoners that I’ve talked to have said. That somebody came from the Northern Ireland Office with a document, even though the document was the same document that was released later by Humphrey Atkins, that assurances were given that once the hunger strike was over that the government would be conciliatory.

JB: Well, I don’t know who they’re talking of. They’re probably talking about me. I went down to the prison, the only Northern Ireland official, I think to do that. I’m now trying to remember how many times I did go down there and when. I think the only Northern Ireland Office official that went down to the Maze in the context of the first hunger strike was myself. I went down and saw the seven and I had with me the text of the document describing really just what I’ve said to you about the conditions in the prison.

P.O’M:  Is this the document that would have been released…?

JB: It’s about December, isn’t it? It’s a very long press statement.

P.O’M:  December 19^th?

JB: No, it’s a very long one.

P.O’M: December 4^th?

JB: It’s that one, I think.

Blelloch reads through the document.

JB: No, I don’t think it was, funnily enough. There were so many. This was, I think, produced very early in December. The one I’m talking about is slightly earlier than this. This is a press statement that was – I mean, it says what it says – that’s what was released and it was, in fact, put into the prisons on the Thursday night which, I think, actually was the night they called it off. Isn’t that right?

P.O’M: That’s correct.

JB: I think that’s right. I can’t now remember how that document was got into the prison but I think it was just delivered down to the prisons for issue to the prisoners. This is on the night that McKenna, that it was called off. No, I’m talking about an earlier document which I think pre-dates that by a week or ten days. It was freely available and it was published and my memory is that it was a very full statement about the conditions in the prison and how the government would approach a post-hunger strike situation. I went down to the prison to talk to the seven prisoners who had had that document for some hours before I arrived and I was there, really, to say to them, look, if you’ve got any questions about this I’ll answer them. To make absolutely sure that there was no question of private assurances, my memory is that the prison governor was present throughout as was one of the warders, so there was absolutely no question of my or anybody else from the NIO going into corners to do deals. Of course I was asked how would the government behave and I said, well, it’s in there and I am here to try to persuade you to take up this offer. As to the government being conciliatory afterwards, the first thing that of course did happen after the strike was over was the government implemented a decision which it had been working on ever since the announcement was made, actually to get into the hands of the prisoners the civilian-type clothing which had been agreed – not that they owned, that we owned – that we should get into the prisoners’ hands the civilian-type clothing that government had already decided should be introduced and which we had been procuring over the months of the strike. So, in terms of being conciliatory, at least that gesture was made and made very promptly.

P.O’M: I suppose, what I’m getting at is, there was a period between the 19^th December and the date on which the second hunger strike was announced, that would be the 7^th February, when there was uncertainty, some confusion at least on the prisoners’ side. I think on the 23^rd January a number of relatives handed in clothing which was accepted and then, it was on a weekend, the prisoners weren’t allowed to wear it and those that had become conforming smashed the furniture in their cells and became un-conforming again. I suppose my question would be that since after the ending of the second hunger strike the issue of clothing was conceded, why could the government not have made that gesture after they had effectively won on the first hunger strike? Could the second hunger strike have been avoided?

JB: Well, I’ve given you my answer to that. I think the answer to that is no. The second hunger strike could not have been avoided in my view by anything the government did on clothes. That is my personal judgement because I think the contents of the five demands comprehended a great deal more than that. The comment, I suppose you would get is, well, yes, but if the government had been generous at that time, then, you know, public sympathy would have swung behind the government and all the rest of it. It probably would, but I don’t think it would have done so permanently. I think that had the government done something more about the issue of civilian-type than it did then I am quite sure that the impact of that would have been temporary and a hunger strike would then have been mounted, as I think it would, for the remainder of the five demands. Then, as I said earlier, we should have been in just as difficult a position as we were in October 1980, or, arguably, more difficult because a concession on one of the five demands having been made, then what are your grounds – moral, practical, whatever – for resisting the others? As to the difference between January 1981 and October 1980, again there was a very complicated sequence of events at both periods. But my memory is that there was indeed a period of confusion within the prison as to what the precise circumstances were in which the first hunger strike had been brought to an end, and I have no doubt that there were those with a very strong vested interest in putting it about that the government had made some kind of sub rosa [secret] deal here which the hunger strike having been ended, they were now reneging on. I personally find that an extraordinarily, implausible position because it’s a renege that was so obviously going to be transparent if it had occurred. What instead we found ourselves in, as I recall it, was a situation in which the first hunger strike had been called off, the government had implemented what it had said it was going to do about the issue of civilian clothes, civilian-type clothes, that it was always the position that the wearing of own clothes was a privilege and not a right, to be available to prisoners who were conforming with the regime, and while people did come off the dirty protest at that stage, they were still not conforming. In particular, they were refusing to work. Now, what we tried to do in January and early February was to take a series of carefully graduated steps to see whether we could wind the level of protest down and accompany that with relaxations of the level of punishment imposed, mainly to do with relaxing the number of days forfeit. Our objective in this was to try to move the protesting population from a condition of protest to one of conformity by very easy steps. Maybe we were wrong to do that, but that’s what we did and we got to the point at which the next move would have been for the prisoners to conform by agreeing to work on the Monday which would then have entitled them to wear own clothes. Now, what I would like to have done…

P.O’M: To wear their own clothing in the evening?

JB: Yes, but the wearing of their own clothing in the evening, as I recall it, was a privilege, not a right, and it was a privilege afforded to fully-conforming prisoners, withdrawn as part of the complex of punishments available. At the stage that we are talking about my memory is that while we had succeeded in winding down the level of protest, we had not wound it down to the point at which the prisoners had agreed to work in particular and therefore become fully conforming. My memory also is that the previous weekend – the first opportunity when this would have occurred, I think, would have been the Monday – and my memory is that on the previous Saturday, fairly well arranged, a number of prisoners’ families brought with them their own clothes which were deposited in the prison. But the prisoners were not allowed to wear them because they were not conforming prisoners and, of course, then they did, in fact, refuse to work. Now, at that point, they smashed up the furniture and, in effect, the protest was fully back on again. My recollection is that at the time, we put out a series of notices directed mainly at the prisoners, explaining very carefully what was going to happen next and why. But the key element of this was that the wearing of own clothes still remains under the prison regime a privilege, not a right, and a privilege afforded only to prisoners who are fully conforming. I’m pretty sure that it was a tactic of the prisoners to try to get into a position in which they actually could lay their hands on their own clothes, would then put them on, invite us to remove them by force, but at the same time refuse to work and that was a confrontation that we were anxious to avoid. It’s all a bit complex, but the interesting thing about that January period, as I say, is that it was our initiative, not the prisoners’, which sought to try to wind down the protest and it failed.

Sir John Blelloch, who retired from public life in 2007, was Permanent Under Secretary of State at the Northern Ireland Office from 1988 to 1990, having previously served as a Deputy Secretary in that Office from 1980 to 1982, while resident in the Six Counties. Between these appointments he held the posts of Deputy Secretary (Policy) and then Second Permanent Under Secretary at the MOD. After the Belfast [Good Friday] Agreement he sat as Joint Chairman, alongside South African lawyer Brian Currin, of the Sentence Review Commission which was involved in the release of political prisoners, including former hunger strikers and hundreds of former blanket men.

Sourced from the Bobby Sands Trust website

O’Rawe and the Derry Journal
April 18, 2008

FAO Those following the hunger strike controversy: As noted yesterday, the Derry Journal had carried a rather confused piece quoting Richard O’Rawe’s cellmate, Colm Scullion, in the wake of the claims by Eamon McCann. Today, they refer to complaints made by O’Rawe and carry an instant rebuttal from Greg Harkin.

The heart of the matter comes down to semantics over the words “deal” and “offer”, as Harkin writes, “Mr O’Rawe’s entire argument rests on what constituted a ‘deal’ or ‘offer’”.
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1981 hunger strike – an offer, a deal or what?
Published Date: 18 April 2008

Richard O’Rawe has made a number of complaints regarding the assertion by Colm Scullion in the Journal two weeks ago that no deal was made with the hunger strikers before Joe McDonnell died in July 1981.

Among other things Mr O’Rawe states the Journal should know “that Bik McFarlane, who was OC of IRA prisoners during the hunger strike, has always denied that any offer of any sort was ever made by the British at any point (see UTV Live, 1 March 2005,
in reply to question from reporter Fearghal McKinney).”
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Hunger Strike Controversy Has Not Gone Away, You Know
April 17, 2008

Eamon McCann’s Belfast Telegraph article and Radio Free Eireann interview about Richard O’Rawe’s account of the prisoner acceptance of a deal which would have saved the lives of six hunger strikers has created more questions than answers. McCann’s pieces were firm in his conviction that “Richard O’Rawe is telling the truth”, based on confirmations he had from the “Mountain Climber”, former prisoners on the same wing and Richard’s cellmate. Richard’s cellmate, Colm Scullion, was then quoted by the Derry Journal – in a confused piece, which, for example, referred to the Derry based INLA hunger strikers as being IRA, and also ran without a by-line – saying there was no deal but agreeing there was an offer. This was followed by a letter from Scullion to the Irish News, which Richard O’Rawe has answered today.
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‘There was no offer to end hunger strike’– ex-prisoner
Date: 08 April 2008
By Staff reporter

A CLAIM that the lives of six IRA Hunger Strikers including Derry men Michael Devine and Dungiven’s Kevin Lynch could have been saved by a British deal has finally been dispelled.

A former blanket man from County Derry has hit out at claims in Belfast newspapers in recent weeks claiming that he was witness to a deal six weeks after the death of another Derry hunger striker Patsy O’Hara.
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O’Rawe’s account confirmed: Hunger Strikers Allowed To Die
Friday, March 28, 2008

Eamon McCann verifies Richard O’Rawe’s account of the 1981 hunger strike in which he alleges that six of the hunger strikers need not have died as the prisoners had agreed to accept an offer from the Mountainclimber, only to be over-ruled by Gerry Adams.

Evidence which has now become available helps clarify a dispute sparked three years ago by the assertion of former IRA prisoner Richard O’Rawe that terms for ending the strike, accepted by the prisoners’ leadership in the Maze/Long Kesh, were rejected by IRA commanders outside. The implication is that the lives of six of the hunger strikers might have been saved if the prisoners hadn’t been overruled.
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Will IRA ever admit truth over hunger strike?

Eamon McCann, Belfast Telegraph,
Thursday, 27 March 2008

New light has been shed on reported republican reaction to a British offer which might have ended the 1981 hunger strike after four deaths. Ten men were to die before the strike ended.

Evidence which has now become available helps clarify a dispute sparked three years ago by the assertion of former IRA prisoner Richard O’Rawe that terms for ending the strike, accepted by the prisoners’ leadership in the Maze/Long Kesh, were rejected by IRA commanders outside. The implication is that the lives of six of the hunger strikers might have been saved if the prisoners hadn’t been overruled.
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Risking the Lives of Volunteers is Not the IRA Way

Brendan Hughes • Irish News, 13 July 2006

In a recent BBC documentary Bernadette McAliskey stated that she would have let Sean McKenna die during the 1980 hunger strike in order to outmanoeuvre British brinkmanship. Implicit in her comments was a criticism of those senior republicans who decided against pursuing the option favoured by Bernadette. As the IRA leader in charge of that hunger strike I had given Sean McKenna a guarantee that were he to lapse into a coma I would not permit him to die.

When the awful moment arrived I kept my word to him. Having made that promise, to renege on it once Sean had reached a point where he was no longer capable of making a decision for himself, I would have been guilty of his murder. Whatever the strategic merits of Bernadette’s favoured option, they are vastly outweighed by ethical considerations.
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Richard O’Rawe, PSF, and Events in 1981

“It only becomes the truth when it is officially denied.”

Gerard Foster, The Blanket • 8 July 2006

I imagine from the title of this article it would be natural to think I am writing about O’Rawes’ book, Blanketmen. Nothing could be further from the truth. I haven’t even read the book, though no doubt I will eventually get around to getting a copy of it.

I am more interested in the Provisional Movements’ Leadership’s (PML) reaction to the book and that of a few others, like Danny Morrison. I had, of course, heard about O’Rawes’ claims, but felt that they were only his opinions and he would have no way of backing them up. It was a non-starter and people would soon forget about his claims that the PML outside the prison let the last 6 Hunger Strikers, including 2 INLA Volunteers, die to promote their own political agenda. Let’s face it, this claim was so serious I did not believe it; I was wondering what agenda O’Rawe was working to, and the release of the book coming up to the 25th anniversary of the Hunger Strikers deaths smacked of commercialism.
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Salvaging History from Deceit

Some disguised falsehoods represent the truth so well, that it would be bad judgement not to be deceived by them
– Francois de La Rouchefoucauld

Forum Magazine Editorial • June/July 2006

Throughout February 2005 the airwaves and print columns were dominated by the gangland-style murder of Robert McCartney. Two months into Sinn Fein’s centenary celebrations, party spokespersons had hoped to be questioned about “the legacy of one-hundred years of resistance”. Instead they riggled like eels under a sustained media inquisition and were haunted by the ubiquitous image of the McCartney sisters, a group of articulate young women whose decency and courage could not be dismissed as hooey or yet another securocrat plot to undermine the peace.

Later that same February, UTV commissioned a report on a controversial new book written by Richard O’Rawe. Although few would have guessed it at the time, Blanketmen was about to radically alter the conventional republican perception of the 1981 hunger strike.
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June 8, 2006

An Phoblacht

Top Stories

O’Rawe refuted: Danny Morrison publishes H-Block comms
Claims fatally undermined

“At present the British are looking for what amounts to absolute surrender. They are offering us nothing that amounts to an honourable solution.”

Richard O’Rawe 1981

Unsupported claims made by a former republican prisoner Richard O’Rawe, and widely reported in the media in recent weeks and months, that the IRA leadership had allowed several republican Hunger Strikers to die in 1981 has been fatally undermined this week.

Former Sinn Féin Publicity Director Danny Morrison, who was a key liaison person with the Hunger Strikers during 1981, has produced secret communications written by O’Rawe during the period and which prove that the allegations are without foundation.
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* See also Expanded Timeline 29 June – 12 July 1981

Morrison: Hunger strike deal didn’t exist
Daily Ireland

Danny Morrison
07/06/2006

In a forthcoming BBC documentary Richard O’Rawe once again will be claiming that the republican leadership rejected a deal from the British government shortly before the death of Joe McDonnell on July 8th 1981. Richard is a former blanket man and PRO in the H-Blocks. Whilst in jail Richard never raised his claims with the leadership in prison or the leadership outside. After Richard’s release he worked with me in the Republican Press Centre for a year and never mentioned the allegations he now makes.
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O’Rawe Told Me His Concerns

Brendan Hughes • Irish News, 19 May 2006

IT is not my intention to take sides in the ongoing debate over the claims made in the book Blanketmen by its author Richard O’Rawe.

I am not in a position to speak authoritatively on the matter.

I was in the same block as Richard O’Rawe at the time of the events he refers to but not on the same wing.

However, there has been some attempt to present O’Rawe as a person who made no effort to tell any former prisoner of his suspicions over a 24-year period. This is simply not so.
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‘The Blanket’ meets ‘Blanketmen’

All truth passes through three stages.
First, it is ridiculed.
Second, it is violently opposed.
Third, it is accepted as being self-evident
– Arthur Schopenhauer

Anthony McIntyre speaks with Richard O’Rawe • 16 May 2006

Q: This month marks the 25th anniversary of the death of Bobby Sands, Frank Hughes, Raymond McCreesh and Patsy O’Hara. How has it been for you emotionally?

A: Terrible. It has been terrible.

Q: Can you elaborate?

A: Bob has been in my thoughts all the time. He left from our wing. The others were in different blocks. And I just get this vision of him. I see him in the wing canteen for mass just before he went up to the prison hospital. He was smiling at me. He knew he was going up there to die. I knew it too. It was just so unbelievably heartrending and it has never left me. That smile has been with me for over a week; that smile of pathos. I went over to his grave and just looked around me. There was Joe and big Doc, Bryson and our Mundo, wee Paddy Mul, Todler and all the dead volunteers. It was just horrific.
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Former Blanketman Speaks Out Against ‘Vitriolic Attack’

Richard O’Rawe, Irish News • 15 May 2006

A fellow republican said to me last week that over the period of Bobby Sands’ anniversary, the republican movement had done everything except paint the Star of David on my windows and daub Juden Raus on my front door.

I laughed when he made that analogy but when I had time to think about it, I don’t think he was too wide off the mark.

The recent attempts to demonise me from on high, the vitriol, raw hatred and the ferocious endeavours to destroy my integrity have, in terms of sheer viciousness, been unprecedented within the republican family.

The same republican pointed out that Freddie Scappaticci had not received such a ‘battering.’

Sinn Fein’s silence on the question of this super-tout contrasted sharply with their crazed attacks on my character. An agent, it seems, is better thought of than a blanketman. Scap apparently had both the republican movement’s blessing and its promise of ‘omerta’ as he made haste from Dodge, his saddlebags full of Brit money.
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Tragic period clouded by ‘set of proposals’

(Jim Gibney, Irish News)

The protest for political status in Armagh Women’s prison and the H-Blocks of Long Kesh lasted for five years between September 1976 and October 1981.

At no time before the first hunger strike in October 1980 did the British government try to end the protest by any means other than brutalising and degrading the prisoners.

The first hunger strike involved seven men in the H-Blocks and three women in Armagh jail.

It lasted 53 days.
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An Phoblacht, Top Stories: “The Hunger Strike will never, ever leave me”
Remembering 1981: Former H-Block O/C Brendan McFarlane

Brendan ‘Bik’ McFarlane was Officer Commanding (O/C) the H-Block prisoners during the 1981 Hunger Strike. Last Friday, 5 May, on the 25th anniversary of the death of Bobby Sands, McFarlane spoke to An Phoblacht’s ELLA O’DWYER about the journey that brought him to undertake one of the most difficult challenges ever faced by an Irish republican.

A noticeable feature of Brendan McFarlane’s personality is the comprehensive way in which he looks at things. Observant and lateral thinking, he sees the bigger picture. In terms of awareness, he has an edge. This awareness carried him through his prison sentence and, no doubt, impacted on his selection as O/C during the 1981 Hunger Strike.
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Thatcher’s ‘offer to hunger strikers’
Former priest reveals how IRA spurned PM’s compromise deal to save prisoners’ lives in 1981

Henry McDonald, Ireland editor
The Observer, Sunday 30 April 2006

Margaret Thatcher offered a compromise deal that would have ended the 1981 hunger strike early and saved six of the remaining prisoners who went on to die, according to the man who maintained a secret link between successive British governments and the Provisionals.

Denis Bradley, the link in Derry for more than two decades between MI5 and the IRA, claims that the IRA leadership had been handed a deal in early July 1981 – which eventually the prisoners did accept, but only after six more of their comrades had starved to death. Bradley’s account contradicts claims by loyal supporters of Gerry Adams that there had been no offer on the table in July that could have ended the hunger strike after four prisoners died.
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The Conflict Encapsulated

Blanketmen – An untold story of the H-Block hunger strike
By Richard O’Rawe

Book Review

David Adams • The Other View, August 2005

In Blanketmen, Richard O’Rawe claims the IRA leadership in the Maze Prison was prepared to accept a substantive offer from the British Government that would have brought an early end to the 1981 hunger strike.

Supposedly, that offer was made before a fifth hunger-striker died – Joe McDonnell – but the IRA Army Council overruled the prison leadership and the strike continued.
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A Salute to Comrades

Book Review

Dolours Price, The Blanket • 18 May 2005

After reading ‘Ten Men Dead’ I swore that I would never again read about the Hunger Strike of 1981. I cried at every page and my husband eventually hid the book. I bought another.

My levels of sadness rose at the same rate as my levels of anger. The targets for my anger were the usual ones: those identified by the Republican Leadership as responsible for the death of Bobby Sands and his comrades. Top of the list was Margaret Thatcher, then came busybody priests, political opponents, an uncaring Free-State Government and more and more.

Hunger-striking, the last resort of the brutalised political prisoner. The ultimate weapon, one’s own body. As a Republican I have always maintained that just as I could not be ordered to undertake a Hunger-Strike, then the control and ultimate decision as to where that hunger-strike might lead was also a matter for myself, the individual prisoner. That is not to say that guidance from comrades and particularly the leadership of my movement would at all times be of paramount importance in where that Strike would end for me, be that living or dying.
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Dramas out of crises
Two new books offer compelling material to potential dramatists
Henry McDonald
The Observer, Sunday 1 May 2005 02.33 BST

Two hundred and ninety-two years separate the Siege of Derry from the second hunger strike in the Maze. Books out this year concerning these two key events not only shed new light on our history but also provide a challenge for screenwriters and television producers.

Carlo Gebler’s The Siege of Derry is a masterful and meticulously structured account of the 105-day struggle against the besieging Jacobite armies in 1689, while Richard O’Rawe’s Blanketmen gives a painfully honest insider’s view of the 1981 death fast. The one thing the two works have in common is the dramatic tension contained in the narratives, which are full of tragedy, sacrifice, endurance and political opportunism.
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A Spartan’s Story

Anthony McIntyre • Fourthwrite

Richard O’Rawe has come out from under a blanket of political and literary obscurity to pen arguably the finest book crafted by any living former republican prisoner. With no shortage of good authors, the competition has been formidable; Pat Magee, Laurence McKeown and Ronan Bennett to name but three. Blanketmen is the end product of three years writing. It is also the only logical terminus for its author to arrive at after two decades of internal turmoil resulting from the H-Block blanket protest and subsequent hunger strikes. Either he brought his journey to an end or he could circle endlessly around the totem of established wisdom, shouldering with him the baggage others, in his view, had expected him to carry in order to spare themselves unnecessary burden.

To write this book O’Rawe must have drawn on the depths of reserve that made him one of the H-Blocks’ 300 Spartans. He is aware of the history of threats and violence against those not of the dominant party persuasion in West Belfast where he lives. For all the put-downs that he sprang this book on an unsuspecting republican community, O’Rawe has revealed to Fourthwrite that over a year ago a senior figure in the republican hierarchy paid a brace of visits to his home making inquiries about it. Despite current allegations from that hierarchy that O’Rawe did not inform the families of dead hunger strikers of his decision to commit his reflections to paper, the senior republican was concerned only about the potential discomfort that Gerry Adams might face. The families were never mentioned.
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Thursday, April 07, 2005

A bizarre tale with a ring of authenticity

Blanketmen
By Richard O’Rawe
New Island Books • £Sterling 9.99

Reviewed by John Cooney
Western People

During the 1981 hunger strikes in the H-Block of the Maze Prison a regular visitor was the Dungannon priest, Father Denis Faul, whom the prisoners nick-named “Denis the Menace” because of his campaign with the prisoners’ families to end their fast.

Recalling their ordeal in one of the most gruesome episodes of the Troubles some 24 years later, Fr Faul, then chaplain to the prisoners, says that he felt at the time that there was “a political dimension” that made his humanitarian campaign more difficult.
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Dead Men Talking …

Blanketmen
By Richard O’Rawe
New Island, stg£9.99

Book Review

Maurice Hayes

This is a really gripping book, and an important one too for an understanding of the dynamics both of the 1981 Hunger Strikes and of the rise of Sinn Fein as a political force. It is the first account written by an insider, and it is as near as you will get to hearing dead men talking about their concerns, their dreams and the relentless loyalty to a cause that drives them to their deaths.

Ricky O Rawe was the Communications Officer in the H-Block, and one of only two people in the prison to be fully in the loop between the IRA command and the hunger strikers as they faced death, one after another. The story is told with a stark honesty, which discloses the author’s mental agony at the moral dilemmas he faced then and which have clearly stayed with him since.
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