The support of former prisoners is critical to the fading out of the IRA. As a new scheme to rehabilitate prisoners in the community is due to be launched next week, a group of former prisoners talk to Gerry Moriarty, Northern Editor, about their lives on the outside
The year of the Belfast Agreement in 1998, former IRA prisoner Laurence McKeown won a PhD from Queen's University for his thesis on republican prisoners called "Unrepentant Fenian Bastards". Queen's didn't like the title, but gave him his doctorate.
McKeown should have been the 11th man to die on the 1981 hunger strike. He was determined to maintain his protest, but before he lost all lucidity, his mother Margaret told him, "You do what you have to do, and I'll do what I have to do." When he slipped into a coma she instructed that he be fed intravenously. Tall, serious, considered, he looks in good shape despite the 70 days on hunger strike. He suffers eye and stomach trouble from time to time.
We're around a table in the offices of the umbrella republican ex-prisoners' group, Coiste na nIarchimí, off the Falls Road in west Belfast, with McKeown and three others who did time for serious IRA activity. Between them they served 44 years in the Maze and Maghaberry prisons. We hear "regret" but, as per McKeown's thesis, no overt repentance for their actions.
McKeown served 16 years for the attempted murder of RUC officers. Paddy O'Dowd did 14 years for murdering UDR soldier David Chambers. Rosie McCorley served almost nine years for the attempted murder of an RUC officer. "I was on an operation. We were caught red-handed," she says. Both she and O'Dowd were released in 1998 under the early release scheme of the Belfast Agreement. Carol Ní Chuilín was in Maghaberry for almost five years for possession of explosives with intent.
As a youngster McKeown, from the mixed town of Randalstown in Co Tyrone, had Protestant friends, but when the Troubles started he resented being stopped by some of those same friends then in the UDR. He got on well with his mother but his father was disappointed when he joined the IRA in the early 1970s. His parents were SDLP voters. Before McKeown was jailed, his mother told the judge, "He is my son, I love him." His parents died while he was in prison.
George and Margaret "were from a generation that kept their head down", he says, but there was just one occasion when his father rebelled. That was after a Protestant work colleague who had built a bungalow gave him the plans so he could build a similar home. "The local unionist-run council found 39 reasons why our house couldn't be built, even though there were no objections to the exact same house built three miles down the road by my father's Protestant workmate." When his father employed a solicitor the number of objections declined to three and the house was built.
McKeown was in prison from 1976 to 1992. The early years - the time of the two hunger strikes, the blanket and dirty protests, the faeces-smeared cells - were the hardest. He says he can live with his conscience, while understanding how many people might be appalled at the death and suffering perpetrated by the IRA, which was responsible for almost 1,800 of the 3,600 deaths in the Troubles.
"People who join guerrilla armies have to think much more closely about what they do," he contends. "They do get troubled by their consciences, because they have to go against all they were brought up in, the church and all the rest of it."
At first Paddy O'Dowd, a dark, quiet, guarded man, is reluctant to name the man he killed, but eventually he does. As recounted in the book Lost Lives, David Chambers (34) was a Lurgan man who served in the UDR. He was gunned down by O'Dowd and another IRA man as he arrived for work near Lurgan in June 1984. The IRA was hoping for multiple casualties that day as a 200 lb bomb exploded in a nearby derelict building injuring two policemen as they arrived at the scene. O'Dowd, like Chambers, is from the Lurgan area. Now 41, he was 22 at the time. He feels no guilt, he says.
"I can understand the \ family's point of view, but I am not here to make individual apologies for this, that and the other. I wanted a normal life. What I would say to people who are judgmental is, 'wait until circumstances shape your life'."
O'Dowd says his family were nationalist but "by no means republican". The loyalist pogroms of 1969, the attacks on the Civil Rights movement, how the "state dealt with the situation" played a part in his joining the IRA. The 1976 UVF murders of his uncle, Joe O'Dowd and two cousins, Barry and Declan O'Dowd, also motivated him. The O'Dowd killings coincided with the co-ordinated UVF murders of John, Brian and Anthony Reavey. These murders were in retaliation for an earlier INLA bombing in which two Protestants were killed. The O'Dowd and Reavey deaths in turn precipitated the Kingsmill massacre when the IRA singled out and machine-gunned to death 10 Protestant workmen. And so it went.
"I very much regret the fact that during this conflict people lost their lives," says O'Dowd. "I wish no one ever had to. As I view it I took the only path that was available at that stage. The reality is that the conflict grew up around me, and I grew up in the conflict. What I am doing now is seeing that this conflict comes to an end."
O'Dowd was allowed out a number of times on parole before his formal release in 1998, and it was during one of these periods that his wife, whom he married before he was imprisoned in 1984, conceived the first of their two children.
He is happy that their marriage has survived. "It was not about blind loyalty or anything like that. The reality is she was married to me because we were in love. I am not saying we had anything special; there were all sorts of strains, but we were lucky we lasted the pace," he says.
Coming out of prison to a wife and child was a shock to his previously incarcerated but ordered routine. "Inside my whole life was debating, and talking about this, that and the other. Then suddenly you find yourself in a house with a child all day. My God, you say, what's this! It was a whole new transformation."
"It's easier to be a republican than a father," chips in Rosie McCorley, lightening the mood.
She was in Maghaberry from January 1990 to October 1998, but joined the junior wing of the IRA much earlier - in 1972, when she was only 16. "In a very simple, childish kind of way I wanted a united Ireland." A reflective woman, she says - like the more outgoing Carol Ní Chuilín - the worst feature of being a woman in prison was the strip searches. They both use the same descriptions: "It was a violation; it was like being raped; an assault."
McCorley was divorced before imprisonment. It made it easier that they had no children.
"I think women with children feel it harder, maybe because children look to their mothers more." Ní Chuilín understands this feeling from personal experience. "I never suffered actual black depression in prison, to be honest with you, but sometimes you had particularly hard visits from the kids, and you wished you were somewhere else." Her marriage broke down while she was inside.
She was 24 when she was jailed in Maghaberry in 1989, and her children, Cliodhna and Eamonn, were only three and two. From time to time Cliodhna and Eamonn, who were raised by Ní Chuilín's family, reproached her for not being there for them when they were young.
She says she, like other prisoners, "over-compensates" for the time away by trying to give them more time now. The two are typical teenagers. "You are constantly negotiating over tidying up, meal times, staying out late, stuff like that . . . We do sit down and talk about things I could never have talked about with my parents, about their boyfriends, girlfriends, about feelings . . . I don't know if that is a legacy of my separation from them, but I think it has a lot to do with it."
She believes Cliodhna and Eamonn are too "burnt out" to be closely interested in what passes for politics now. They remember the house raids of years ago but can't quite figure the on-again, off-again nature of Stormont.
"This process is fairly sophisticated after all. It's like Lanigan's Ball, now it's on, now it's off. It's hard enough for adults to keep abreast of, let alone teenagers."
Curiously, all four prisoners interviewed studied Social Science Open University degree courses while inside. "I think personally, politically and emotionally I developed as a result of my experience in jail," says Ní Chuilín.
McCorley, additionally, found a new partner in prison, the then IRA OC (officer commanding), whom she doesn't want to name. McCorley says there is a special camaraderie among former prisoners. "These are the people you feel most comfortable with."
Next week the IRA ex-prisoners group Coiste na nIarchimí is launching the Processes in Nation Building scheme, designed to allow former prisoners reach out to the general community and also to loyalist ex-prisoner groups. Funded by the EU to the tune of £420,000 Coiste na nIarchimí director, Mike Ritchie, says the aim now is to help build trust in wider society.
Like the vast majority of the 15,000 former republican prisoners McCorley, Ní Chuilín, O'Dowd and McKeown support the peace process and endorse how Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness are leading the republican movement. Without that support there would have been no Belfast Agreement. There's expectation of another quantum leap from the IRA shortly - the so-called Big Bang. With some minor qualifications these four at least are maintaining faith in Adams and McGuinness.
"When push comes to shove the leadership has to lead," says McKeown. "I think the whole republican movement has had one of the most courageous leaderships it has ever had. There is a history in republicanism of splits and all the rest of it. I think they have done an amazing job. If unionism had any sense they would want to ensure that the IRA sticks around for a long time, because they have ensured a very disciplined approach to the peace process."