‘2025 has been an important year for those who devour prison and former prisoner writings,’ says Eoghan ‘Gino’ Mac Cormaic who served fifteen years in jail, including five years on the blanket. In this feature he casts his eye over publications produced by former republican prisoners in 2025.
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IT BEGAN with Roseleen Walshe’s My Internment. New editions also appeared of Gerry Adams’ Cage 11 and of Danny Morrison’s All the Dead Voices. In August two more important titles were published, firstly with the amazing archive that is contained in Paddy McMenamin’s Voices from Inside (the Hidden Journals of Long Kesh) and in the same month the presentation in book form of the series of reflections on the 1980 and 1981 hunger strikes and the prison protests of 1976-81, Guthanna 81/ Voices of 81. Each of these books add immensely to an understanding of republican prison struggle, and indeed they also add to an understanding of the day to day existence, thoughts, concerns, and culture of both prisoners and their families.
And as 2025 drew to a close two more titles—both from established republican historians – arrived to fill in some of the remaining gaps in the prison history. The two books in question: Tom Hartleys The SS Al Rawdah and Laurence McKeown’s And Flowers Grew Up Through The Concrete (a prison memoir 1981-1992) will undoubtedly serve as important sources for future writers and researchers of republican history.
Tom Hartley has a long and illustrious background as a republican activist, historian and author. His histories of Belfast’s graveyards have won high praise and in his latest book he turns his pen to a previously neglected prison epoch, the internment of more than 200 men on the prison ship Al Rawdah moored in Strangford Lough. The book is crammed with information on internment (in the North) in the first forty years after partition recounting the enactment of Special Powers legislation and the use of the range of powers against nationalists from 1921 to 1924, and again in the 1930s, ’40s, ’50s and ’60s.
However, the main focus of the book is on the period between 1938 and 1945 when hundreds of men and dozens of women were interned in Belfast, Derry and Armagh prisons—and for a specific period of around six months between September 1940 and February 1941 when the ship Al Rawdah was requisitioned by Stormont from the Royal Navy for use as a prison hulk. The book contains comprehensive lists, by date of arrest, by date of transfer, in chronological order and in alphabetical order of arrests, detentions, and eventual internments. It is littered with names and surnames of those who were active in struggle (or some who were rounded up in 1938 simply because they had previously been interned in the 1920s, much as some of those interned in 1971 were dragged from their home by the British Army relying on out of date RUC ‘intelligence’.)
The research completed by Tom Hartley for this book is testament to his persistence and diligence, and the short biographies of the prisoners (mainly dates of arrest or transfers) is certainly a valuable starting point for others who in time might add to the story by, for example, providing further details on the death of Jack Gaffney on the Al Rawdah or the premature deaths of around a dozen prisoners in the years immediately after their release, including Volunteers Seán Dolan and Joe McGinley, both from neighbouring streets in Derry’s Waterside and who lie buried less than 200 yards apart in Ardmore Cemetery having died in the months and the year after their release from the barbaric conditions in these prisons.
Hartley’s latest book is focussed mainly on the story of the Al Rawdah but through its publication other fields of interest are opened up including the story of women internees of the 1940s and 1950s, and indeed the internment during the same period of men and women in the Curragh, Arbor Hill, Portlaoise and Mountjoy also call for attention. His landmark study of 1938-45 will open the way to further research.
If Hartley’s book is a launching pad for the 1940s, then Laurence Mc Keown’s memoir of the 1980s in the H-Blocks will definitely lead to further study. I should flag up an interest here, as I have written of specific aspects of imprisonment of both the 1940s and the 1980s in the past, with extensive use of both an unpublished memoir and prisoner minutes of the Cumann Gaelach in the 1940s, and also of prison publications in Portlaoise, Armagh and Long Kesh (Cages and H Blocks) in the 1980s.
But Laurence’s book goes much further than that. Indeed, Laurnie’s book is very much in the style of his initial memoir (covering 1976-81) with a fearless (yet clearly objective) approach to criticising prison comrades where he feels their decisions were less than worthy. It takes up the story at the end of Laurence’s 1981 hunger strike which was in fact at a point when no other hunger striker would die. Dealing honestly and frankly with the dilemma of prisoners on strike and ready to die, with the opposite urge of families seeking to keep them alive, we are engaged immediately with the emotional trauma, the sense of love and duty within a family, and all this told in a brutally unvarnished way. And this is Laurney’s power: that he is speaking in an uninhibited, unrehearsed way. We might all have wanted it to be different. The songwriters might have written about Irish mothers’ willingly giving up their sons and daughters to struggle but the reality was very different. This was heartbreak, this was the heartbreak of the Sands’ family, the Hughes’, O’Hara’s and McCreesh families, the family of Joe McDonnell, Martin Hurson and Kieran Doherty, the anguish of the families of Kevin Lynch, Tom McElwee and Mickey Devine. And of the families who chose to intervene.
Laurney’s prison struggle did not end, however, in the military ward of Musgrave Park where he spent many weeks recuperating. On his return to the Blocks he resumed his fight for political status as the blanket men and women advanced from a 24-hour lock-up, to eventually securing control of their daily lives in the prison wings where their comrades had hungered and blanket-protested for the previous five years. I can hear the rousing sound of O’Neill’s March as Laurence tells of the great escape of 1983 and the campaign to complete the work of 1976-81 as the ‘conditions campaigns’ played out in the prison, as the campaign for lifers led to releases and as the education, creative writing, and communities’ campaigns rolled out. From 1976-91 I shared much, most, of what Laurney is writing about and it is a pleasure to read someone else recalling so many overlooked and forgotten details—and to know we all played a part in breaking the criminalisation policy so emphatically.
If I have a small critique of Laurence’s book, it is the absence of any account of what became of several of the people mentioned. A short biography (good, bad or indifferent) would add to each of the names mentioned, if for no other reason than to add to the overall strength of the book. This is new material, fresh material, unexplored material, and so some information on the more mundane aspects—the ordinary everyday aspects—of life in the wings would also be useful (as Gerry Adams did in Cage Eleven) and perhaps in time Laurence—or some other scribe—might look at that.
It is all part of completing the picture, and these books, Tom’s and Laurence’s are so important to that task. Buy them now: they will be collector’s items in time.
Most of the books are available from these outlets:
An Fhuiseog/The Lark Store, 51/53 Falls Road, Belfast – www.thelarkstore.ie
Sinn Fein Bookshop, 58 Parnell Square, Dublin – www.sinnfeinbookshop.com
An Ceathrú Póilí, An Chulturlann, 216 Falls Road, Belfast – www.anceathrupoili.com/en
