|
One
of Britain’s Royal Family arrived here yesterday
to see a few subjects, offer a couple of platitudes,
sip wine, eat caviar and go back to the type of world
where those whom she visited yesterday have already
escaped the memory. Princess Anne’s reason for
visiting ‘the colony’ was to tell the Northern
Ireland Prison Service that she would never forget
them although most likely, as I write, she already
has.
Viewed
as a form of auxiliary arm the Service has never managed
to push its way through to the big hitting league
in terms of how it is perceived in relation to the
British state’s war against the IRA. Its members
were often perceived as little more than mercenary
types - bounty hunters eager to live off the fat which
others in the RUC, British Army and UDR died to create.
Such a depiction is somewhat ungracious, given that
29 members of the prison service died as a result
of attack. Although only one ever died officially
on duty the rest were doubtlessly killed because of
their line of work. 27 died at the hands of republicans
while loyalists claimed the lives of the other two.
Up until yesterday, apart from a book by the journalist
and author Chris Ryder, which ultimately concentrated
more on the prisoners than their guards, nobody seemed
to take much notice of the Northern Ireland Prison
Service.
Republicanism
is going through a form of remembrance culture these
days with its events, gatherings, monument building
and the construction of commemorative gardens. So
it would ill behove us to complain about it when the
Prison Service and their families do likewise. And,
for sure, there is a majority of people in this country
who would, in my opinion, wrongly view the IRA volunteers
being honoured as little more than thugs with airs.
Nevertheless, there is a form of historiography in
the making which elevates certain experiences, surrounds
them with particular myths, marginalises other accounts
and seeks to establish as ‘truth’ one specific
history.
Watching
the gathering of the Northern Ireland Prison Service
and relatives to receive their honour, I listened
to one young woman who gave her name as Dawn Ferguson.
She spoke sensitively about the father she had lost
in 1988. He was a devoted ‘daddy’ who would
always be loved and missed. Foolishly, I cast my mind
back to 1988 trying to recall what prison staff had
died around that period and who had the name Ferguson.
It never occurred to me that Ferguson may have been
the name assumed by Dawn when she married. I knew the
name of one prison warder notorious for his violence
but it was not Ferguson. Another was called Griffiths
but he had died in 1989. He had served on the prison
medical staff and had been killed by an IRA booby
trap bomb, for what reason nobody in the prison seemed
certain at the time. Perhaps a case of mistaken identity
resulting from a logic that because a man may peer
daily under his car before setting out to work that
he must have a reason to fear being bombed and therefore
merited a bomb being placed beneath his car. What
logic governs such decisions is not always discernible.
Not
long into the interview with Dawn Ferguson, it was
revealed that her father was Brian Armour, a senior
member of the Prison Officers’ Association. While
I do not doubt for one minute that the ‘daddy’
depicted by Dawn Ferguson was everything she felt
him to be, the experience of the blanket protestors
of H-Block 4 was remarkably different. Brian Armour
was a brutal man with a sadistic bent. From the circle
of H4 despite being a basic grade officer - with no
rank - he rather than the block’s Principal or
Senior officers ran the show and framed the type of
regime that prisoners would have to endure. Quite
often, screws who were more humane in approach, while
not actually joining in his violence, would acquiesce
in the regime he imposed. Anyone openly dissenting
would quickly be ostracised in the screws’ mess
or have ‘IRA’ or something similar scraped
on their car.
Brian
Armour’s crimes against prisoners occurred with
such frequency that it would take books to catalogue
them. But amongst those that stand out as illustrating
the malevolence of the man were regular beatings,
degrading treatment, soaking, scalding and verbal
abuse. On occasion he deprived those in his custody
of food and tea. There were two obnoxious activities
which he relished: during force washing he would vigorously
scrub a prisoner’s testicles and buttocks region
with a hedge hog type prickly brush normally used
for cleaning toilets until blood, detergent and water
mixed and flowed into the bath at the feet of some
unfortunate; and during the mirror search he would
finger a prisoner’s back passage and then use
the same fingers to carry out an internal search of
the mouth.
Christmas
morning 1979 saw myself, Seamy Finucane and Micky
Fitzsimons retuning from mass, each of us wearing
only the prison trousers without which we could not
have attended the weekly service. On entering the
double cell at the top of the wing to disrobe and
pull on a towel for the short journey back to our
cells, I, fortunately was told to ‘clear off’
while my two fellow blanket men were kicked down into
a squat position over the mirror and then beaten and
anally searched. Most screws, the worst included,
would not have bothered on that day. It was simply
Brian Armour’s way of saying there was no rest
day out of the 365 inflicted on us each year in that
humanitarian desert.
When
Brian Armour died in 1988, blown apart by an IRA bomb
placed beneath his car, it left me cold. I merely
felt that had a passer-by covered his body with a
blanket it would have been fitting, symbolising both
the potency and victory of our essentially passive
protest over the futility of his violence. That coldness
remained with me up until I saw his daughter on television
yesterday. During the blanket protest I often wondered
if he had children and if so would he be capable of
showing love to them? Could a being so devoid of human
compassion and motivated by sheer sadism abandon that
persona when he took off the prison uniform at night?
Dawn Ferguson obviously thought so. She knew a different
person. I moved on to forget him, she can not. For
that reason alone her loss wasn’t worth it. And
on reflection the contrast between her experience
and mine brought to mind the observation of Oscar
Wilde: ‘the prison system - a system so terrible
that it hardens their hearts whose hearts it does
not break, and brutalises those who have to carry
it out no less than those who have to submit to it’.
Index: Current Articles + Latest News and Views + Book Reviews +
Letters + Archives
|
