Releasing prisoners will allow a psychological break with the war

On December 21st 1973 the principal officer came into Cage 2, Long Kesh, with a clipboard and read out a list of names. Mine was second last. "Pack your gear," he said. "You're going home." Over a two-day period 65 of us were let out of internment in the first unconditional releases since September 1972. Then, as now, the prison releases were aimed at consolidating a settlement.

The putative settlement was the Sunningdale Agreement and the party needing a sweetener for its community was the SDLP, smarting from republican accusations that it had broken the nationalist consensus that there should be no talks until internment was ended. Not for the first time were prisoners used as pawns in the political process, and over Christmas 1973 I was the happiest pawn alive.

At the end of all wars captured combatants are unconditionally released.

It happened in Vietnam, it happened at the end of the second World War, and it happened at the end of the Civil War following the IRA's May 1923 ceasefire announcement. Even the unionist government at Stormont was quick to give early release to internees and convicted republicans without any surrender of IRA arms once the largely ineffectual 1956-62 border campaign had been called off.

In the nationalist community the issue of prisoners, from internment in 1971, to the documented ill-treatment of suspects in custody, to the double standards in the non-jury Diplock courts, to the blanket protest, to the hunger strikes, and to the future of the prisoners in 1998, has had major political repercussions. The prisoners issue has often shaped nationalist attitudes to the state, its forces and institutions.

The release of prisoners will allow people to psychologically draw a line through the past, a line potentially representing the closure of the war - and the very thing that David Trimble claims he wants to hear when he asks the question; "Well, Mr Adams, is the war over?"

The prisoners coming home to their families to rebuild their lives and contribute to society will further consolidate peace. Other relatives of those small number of prisoners belonging to organisations still committed to physical force, will almost certainly lobby for a ceasefire, as will a number of those prisoners themselves.

The impact and the influence of republican prisoners on their parent organisations has been incalculable. Their sufferings - the blanket protest, the hunger strikes - aroused sympathy for the prisoners which fed into support for the IRA and offset to an extent in the nationalist mind the heavy suffering that the IRA also inflicted.

The election of Bobby Sands in 1981 gave Sinn Fein the opportunity to move into electoral politics.

The contribution of the prisoners to the developing ideology of the movement, their support for the evolving politics of the republican movement, moving away from simple militarism, allowed Sinn Fein to end its abstentionist policy towards Leinster House in 1986. The prisoners made it easy for the IRA to call its two ceasefires. And the support of the IRA's longest serving prisoners, the Balcombe Street Four, on weekend release from Portlaoise, helped the ardfheis to vote overwhelmingly in favour of the party entering the new Assembly and elected members taking ministerial office.

We are expected to believe that it was the appearance of Hugh Doherty & Friends at the ardfheis which sparked the explosion in moral outrage and really got the debate going on the release of prisoners. I bet.

But what if Bertie Ahern had not released those men for that occasion and the only spectacle that week had been the tumultuous welcome given to loyalist killer Michael Stone at the UDA's Ulster Hall rally. Do people really think David Trimble would have chosen that incident as his launching pad for linking prison releases and Sinn Fein taking executive power to his hobby-horse of IRA decommissioning? I think not.

What he lost at the negotiating table David Trimble is now trying to regain in the battlefield of Westminster. But Tony Blair, though he has pandered somewhat to Trimble, cannot give in to these demands without himself reneging on the Belfast Agreement and destroying hard-earned faith in the political process.

In the debate about prison releases the unionist parties, the RUC and its Police Federation, and much of the media have tended to concentrate on IRA prisoners and the anger and dismay their release will cause to the relatives of those whose loved ones were killed. What is completely ignored, of course, is that in the case of over 400 families in the North they will never even be in the position to experience such anger and dismay because the people who killed their loved ones - these people in the British forces - never served a day in prison in the first place, and they have been and still are protected by the very figures shouting loudest.

Another fear opponents have raised is the prospect of all these prisoners rejoining an intact, heavily armed IRA. But over 30 years, even when the jails were full, there was never a time when the IRA failed to recruit. The unionists either cannot see or choose not to see that the IRA has a will to peace.

The position of the Garda organisations that oppose early release for those guilty of garda killings signals only a narrow desire for retribution. But there can be no "hierarchy of death" in which some victims of violence are more important than others.

The fact that little or no objection has been formally made by the Garda organisations to the release of IRA men convicted of killing RUC men represents a clear double-standard. One of the most encouraging signs in the North and in Britain is that there is a groundswell of support for the release of the prisoners among relatives of the dead.

These relatives, the ones unionists prefer not to hear, appear determined that the victims will not be used in a way that undermines the prospects of peace and stability. I'm thinking of the parents of Tim Parry, and Pte Stephen Restorick, killed by the IRA, and Mrs Brid Brady whose son Kevin was shot dead by Michael Stone.

In this context I recall a studio discussion, I participated in earlier this year. One of those on the panel, Robin Livingstone, editor of the Andersonstown News, is the brother of 12-year-old Julie Livingstone who was killed by a plastic bullet. He made the point that through accident of circumstance he was the relative of a victim of violence. But this gave him no more right to use her death or his feelings to advocate support either for violence or for peace than anyone else. We can only speak for ourselves.

A few days after I woke up with a brilliant hangover in early January 1974, the British army came to re-intern Danny Morrison. In Springfield Road barracks they realised that my father wasn't me and let him go.

Between that day and this, given all that has occurred - the killings, the bombings and shootings, the attempted settlements, the centrality of prison life to the politics of the street - I have never believed until now that peace and progress were possible.

The people who made war, who went to prison, many in their youth, have also been victims of circumstances, of a legacy of failure by previous generations. Their influence has advanced the peace process. Their coming home will copperfasten that peace.

Danny Morrison, the former director of publicity for Sinn Fein, served fiveand-a-half years in Long Kesh. He is now a full-time writer