Having
been through four of the North’s prisons coupled
with a brief sojourn in one of its training schools
– all for IRA activity – I was indeed interested
that an author should elect himself as the chronicler
of the Northern Ireland Prison Service; someone
promising to tell the ‘untold story’. Untold stories
in this part of the world are plentiful. And a
nod and a wink consensus, crafted across the lines
regardless of the embitterment that exists in
the trenches of whatever side, ensures that much
has remained untold. Are republicans really serious
about getting to the bottom of British state collusion
in the murder of Francisco Notarantonio? Might
it not expose a senior informer in their own midst?
Does the British state really want to find the
full facts behind ‘the disappeared’? Would that
not jeopardise the peace process?
Small
wonder that the offer of an ‘untold story’ seems
appetising. But like much else posturing as an
oasis of truth in a desert of deceit and denial
Chris Ryder’s ‘Inside The Maze’ quenched no thirst.
Ryder must know from his work on the RUC that
the story of that particular body cannot be told
by largely focussing on Castlereagh interrogation
centre. Nor would it be told by concentrating
most emphatically on those the RUC brought to
book, killed or tortured. Likewise the Maze Prison
and those in its custody tell us much but hardly
all about the Northern Ireland Prison Service.
The
research strategy employed by the author was to
tread the well-beaten path of prison escapes,
protests and hunger strikes - all for the most
part recorded elsewhere. We are told virtually
nothing that is new. The kept rather than the
keepers are the central players in the narrative.
Yet even this is devalued by the absence of any
interviews with prisoners. Ryder compensates for
this by inserting lengthy tracts from an IRA document
penned by an unnamed prisoner supplemented with
an account of daily life within the Maze composed
by the former internee Phil McCullough as a contribution
to an early 1970s left-wing journal. Conversely,
there are interviews with prison staff but the
impression is created that these are there to
‘pad out’ and thus conceal the lack of real research
conducted on the management ‘side of the house’.
My
experience of the Northern Ireland Prison Service
would not gel with Ryder’s account. While he concedes
the existence of brutality he depicts it as if
it were a halting phenomenon rather than it being
the ‘natural order’ as far as prison procedure
was concerned. The jails of the North were the
first places in which I became familiarised with
‘punishment beatings’ – and they were not carried
out by the prisoners. Ryder refers to four prison
staff all whom lost their lives at the hands of
the IRA: Pat Kerr, Brian Armour, Albert Miles
and Bill McConnell. He says nothing about the
brutality of each individual - experienced first
hand by many of us in their custody
A
further disturbing feature of this work is the
ease with which the author accepts the myth that
the prisoners were in some way important to the
emergence of the peace process. Greater endeavour
would reveal that republican prisoners are on
the receiving end of decisions made outside and
that the camp leadership since 1983 has been little
other than a conduit for such decisions. Those
inside have played a crucially important role
in the conflict as prisoners but it was never
as strategic decision makers.
Furthermore,
while the ‘distance reader’ will escape irritation
at the litany of errors produced throughout the
work – it does not disrupt the flow of the story
- those jailed and jailers alike at the coalface
will observe that Brendan McFarlene did not have
his life sentence remitted prior to being extradited
from Holland; Brendan Hughes was not in his fifties
when he began the 1980 H-Block hunger strike;
the assault on a senior prison officer by a later
Gerry Adams bodyguard occurred five years after
an Adams escape attempt, not weeks. The first
H-Block was completed by 1975 not October 1976
– how otherwise did the H-Block blanket protest
begin before October? There are many more errors
of this type.
2001,
being the twentieth anniversary of the hunger
strikes, has naturally created a niche where a
small industry of writers and broadcasters hope
to flourish by capturing the public imagination.
But the public deserves value for money. And in
this work Chris Ryder has jumped the gun in a
bid to head the pack. A good read on a plane or
at a holiday resort. As a serious study the true
story has yet to be told. A tale of quantity without
quality.
Inside
The Maze: The Untold Story of the Northern Ireland
Prison Service by Chris Ryder. Methuen. HB
£17.99.
