A rather depressing statistic about the "peace process" is hidden away at the back of Chris Ryder's worthy, if slightly dull, history of the prison service in Northern Ireland. He points out that £4.3 million (sterling) of public money has gone to helping ex-prisoners' groups. In the same time the victims of violence have received £2.8 million. It's a funny old world.
The disparity in funding derives from cold, ugly Government policy. The ex-inmates have been looked after in order to ensure they don't resort to their old tricks. At the end of his history of the prison service Ryder refers to a number of these cruel tricks that the peace process has played on the North's real victims. There is the former woman prison officer, now in her mid-40s, who was blown up by the IRA when she was 26 and left paralysed. She received a tiny amount of compensation and was left to fend for herself for years until the prison officers' association found her and helped improve her life with voluntary assistance.
Widows, several of whom saw their husbands shot dead in front of them and their children, receive paltry pensions and live in poverty. Sandra Peacock, whose husband was the last of 30 prison officers to be murdered, faced humiliation in court as her compensation was calculated with deductions for the savings made in no longer having to feed or clothe her husband. Another widow has the experience every week of seeing the man who killed her husband, as he benefited from the early release scheme.
There is an account of the viciousness of an IRA prison leader who was caught trying to escape. He had his prison bodyguard beat the offending officer, who caught him with an iron bar, permanently injuring the man. This was followed up with a bomb attack on the man's home from which his wife and three children had a miraculous escape. We all remember Bobby Sands, but who remembers Pacelli Dillon, the basic-grade prison officer who was shot dead in front of his wife and five children - one child blind and crippled from birth? Pacelli Dillon and his ilk tend not to figure in the several quasi-republican works that have been produced about the Maze, some of which come straight from the Walter Macken school of Irish history. The best, so far, have been David Beresford's Ten Men Dead and the stunning narrative accounts of the hunger strikes, Nor Meekly Serve Our Time.
Despite its catchy title, Chris Ryder's book is actually a history of the prison service in Northern Ireland from the first goals through penal reform through the Troubles to the present. It is full of big chunks of official reports and takes 83 pages to reach the point where the Ulster Gliding Club is ousted from the former RAF aerodrome at Long Kesh so that an internment camp can be built in 1971.
There is an abrupt end to the account of the hunger strikes, when the author tells us there were other important developments such as the conversion of the old borstal at Millisle into the prison service training college. I just bet you didn't know that. And, goodness, by 1976 there were 6,579 books in the prisons library service. There are other awkward bits. The comparison, in the intro, between the Maze and the Nazi concentration camps and the Russian gulags, should be reconsidered. The battles and human tragedies of the Maze aside, Ryder shows that Northern Ireland has a progressive and quite decent penal system.
Jim Cusack is an author and the Security Correspondent of The Irish Times
