No room to manoeuvre in hunger strike – NIO
IT would have been impossible for the Government or the IRA to compromise during the 1981 hunger strike, according to a previously unpublished NIO assessment of the protest.
The internal NIO document — written six years after the event, in 1987, and recently handed to the News Letter — makes no reference to the unsuccessful secret contacts between the IRA and the Government during the period.
The document was written by the then senior NIO civil servant Brian Palmer, who had been involved in NIO attempts to resolve the strike,
A June 1987 cover note to the inch-thick assessment said that it had been drawn up to record “the events of the 1981 hunger strike as seen from the perspective of NIO at the time”.
He added: “This is a necessarily brief resume given the time available but I hope it is of some value to colleagues to have a short factual account on file.”
In a “conclusions” section of the paper, Mr Palmer wrote that the nature of the protest had produced in the prisoners strong feelings of common suffering and group cohesion.
He added: “Lack of communication and personal hostility between staff and IRA prisoners on protest only served to strengthen these impressions.”
He added that once the hunger strike began “no concession short of the ‘five demands’ could have stopped it”. He said that the reason attempts by humanitarian bodies to bridge the small gap between the prisoners and the Government failed was that “the difference between the two sides was one of principle, not an argument about humanitarian prison conditions”.
“Both sides had worked out their position before the hunger strike began and those positions had the support of the top personnel on both sides.
“There was no room for manoeuvre and both sides knew it.”
He said that the “battle lines for the final confrontation” between prisoners and the prison authorities had been drawn even before the protest began.
“Both sides clearly understood the other’s position and in the end one side would back down.
“[Bobby] Sands was determined that it would not be the prisoners. He was certain that it would not be him.”
Papers from the time of the hunger strike released last month under the 30-year rule record that many Government officials believed that the IRA leadership outside the prison was controlling the hunger strike and that the hunger strikers were being used for Sinn Fein’s political purposes.
However, in a view which contradicts those opinions, Mr Palmer said that in his view the IRA probably did not plan for the hunger strike to lead to the emergence of Sinn Fein.
He acknowledged that the strike had “entered Irish republican mythology”, that it was largely seen as the event which gave birth to Sinn Fein’s political success, to increased recruitment for the IRA, to greater political and more financial support for the IRA from the US.
However, Mr Palmer argued: “It is highly unlikely that any of these consequences was either planned for or even foreseen.”
But, elsewhere in the document, Mr Palmer said that during the period from June 11-18 “it was now believed by the prison authorities that outside direction of the hunger strike was strong”.
Another entry said that a statement by the prisoners on June 30 had been “evidently produced outside the prison”.
It also said that Kevin Lynch, who died on August 1, had medically deteriorated in early July and had told a doctor: “I am finished.”
The document also describes the death of hunger striker Joe McDonnell — which it is now known led to an abrupt break-off in secret contacts between the IRA and the Government — as having come “unexpectedly quickly”.
Mr Palmer also said that IRA allegations that the Government had reneged on a deal to end the previous hunger strike in 1980 had been “wholly without foundation and were simply a PIRA smoke screen to obscure the failure of the hunger strike”.
He said that after the Government made concessions to prisoners following the ending of the hunger strike the effect on prison officers’ morale had been profound.
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Tuesday 29 May 2012
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