This Troubled Land Voices from Northern Ireland on the Front Lines of Peace

Maze Prison It was a mild summer day when Anthony McIntyre and Steven Rogan bumped into each other outside the Linenhall Library in the center of Belfast. Rogan was shopping; McIntyre was rushing to work. McIntyre saw Rogan first and ventured a smile of recognition. Rogan smiled back. The two men had not seen one another in about ten years; enough time had passed for them to share a friendly conversation and an ironic laugh at their chance meeting. When the Troubles erupted in the early seventies, Northern Ireland authorities were short of prison space, so they threw barbed wire around the perimeter of Long Kesh, a 130-acre disused air force base ten miles from Belfast, and held inmates there. The tin huts that had once served as military barracks were recommissioned as prison cells. It was a stopgap measure that worked for a while until, after a few years, the prison population topped three thousand and the authorities reluctantly conceded that, yes, the Troubles would last for a while and they had better make the appropriate arrangements. Eight H-shaped cell blocks were constructed next to the existing huts at Long Kesh and the compound was christened the Maze prisonthe most modern and secure prison in Europe. In 1978, Anthony McIntyre, having gunned down a Loyalist paramilitary leader outside a Belfast bar, was beginning a life sentence on one of the IRA wings of the H-blocks. He wore his own clothes, could associate with other prisoners, and did not have to work. Those were the allowances made for the prisoners classed as "special-category"jargon for men convicted for political violence. But then the prison authorities decreed that political violence was really only violence and the special category status was being eliminated in favor of a more conventional prison regime. Anthony McIntyre and the rest of his comrades saw themselves as soldiers fighting a war; they would wear their bedsheets before they would wear a gray prison uniform. And it came to that. Each inmate took one of the three blankets he had been issued, folded it in half, and tied it around his waist like a kilt. If it was cold, he took another blanket, cut a hole in the middle, and wore it like a poncho. The prisoners refused to shave or wash. They did not slop out, but instead smeared their excreta on the walls. Officials hit back, putting prisoners under twenty-four-hour lockdown and taking their books and papers. McIntyre and his fellow IRA inmates passed the time alone in their fetid cells by singing songs or shouting Irish language lessons down the prison corridors. A game of chess could be organized with a bit of margarine spread on the cell door and torn shreds of the Mass reading stuck to it as pieces. Little luxuries like the contraband parcels of tobacco that were furtively passed during prison visits were savored. But there was no overlooking the foul conditions, not when McIntyre had to sleep in his own filth with maggots crawling across the floor, or the stupefying boredom that was his life in an eight-by-ten-foot cell. It was a grueling, often humiliating existence, but McIntyre tried to keep his spirits up. The protest was a battle of wills, and any time that Anthony McIntyre felt himself overcome with rage or frustration he took all that emotion, his anger against the brutal prison authorities and every hated screw that paced the corridors outside his cell, and turned it into defiance. At night, McIntyre went to bed and dreamed of splashing in a swimming pool or reading a book. Steven Rogan arrived at the prison the same year that Anthony McIntyre started his protest. The two men were the same age, twenty-one, but instead of a coarse blanket, Steven Rogan wore the sharp blue uniform of a prison officer. It was the money that drew him to the job; Rogan was earning more than twice as much as his friends, but it was exhausting, soul-destroying work. Nine-hour sRucker, Patrick Michael is the author of 'This Troubled Land Voices from Northern Ireland on the Front Lines of Peace' with ISBN 9780345446701 and ISBN 0345446704.