"The books we were really interested in were in relation to foreign struggles; Vietnam, Nicaragua, written revolution, Marxist Leninism, Irish history. There was a period after the protest when we were just totally Marxist Leninist; anything else was just not worthwhile. Even if you had a book on anarchists you would have not been taken seriously." Jackie McMullen- Former IRA POW and Hunger Striker. Men of letters, men of arms =================== The Maze prison was a grim symbol of the troubles. But, as Kirsty Scott reveals, it was also home to a remarkable library amassed by IRA prisoners Saturday December 2, 2000 ----------------------------- On Saturday July 8 this year, Yvonne Murphy, head of the political collection at Belfast's Linen Hall library, drove the 10 miles south-west from the city to the gates of the Maze prison. The authorities had been expecting her, and she came away with seven large brown paper sacks stuffed with books. There were more than 1,700 of them. Books that told tales beyond the words they held. Books on politics and revolution, history, literature, language, and sociology. Books with spines split by overuse, pages thumbed thin, corners folded sharp as shirt collars, margins laddered with neat and painstaking notes. This was the library of the IRA. They used to say you could lose your sight if you were long enough at the Maze, so monotonously grey were the walls and wire. This bleak compound has become a headstone for Northern Ireland's agony. From the early internment camp of Long Kesh to the notorious H-blocks, through the blanket protest and the hunger strike to the genesis of the peace process and the final closing of its gates this summer, the story of the Maze is the story of the Troubles. And that story can be followed in the books that found their way into its cells. For the last four months, the books that Yvonne Murphy retrieved have been listed and studied in the depths of the Linen Hall. This week they will be boxed up and returned to the republican ex-prisoners, and Murphy fears they might be lost for ever. She has no doubts about their cultural and political significance "You have this very famous group of prisoners reading this material. For the whole period of the peace process the prisoners were viewed as very important and this was informing what they thought. It is hugely significant. "We had heard there was this unofficial library, this vast resource, in the Maze, so we made contact with the IRA and the prison authorities and got permission to collect and record it." Murphy is desperate to find a loyalist equivalent but has been unable to ascertain if one exists. There have been casually flung rumours that the loyalist collection consisted largely of a stash of pornography, body- building magazines and the biographies of serial killers. Loyalists who served time in the Maze tell a different story; of a passion for books to match the republicans', and a hunger for knowledge in a setting stripped of stimulation. But no evidence of any loyalist library has survived. The IRA collection is almost exclusively paperback; hardbacks hide weapons. They are almost all worn, though not carelessly so. There is little doodling and almost no defacing. There are at least 11 copies of Lenin's The State and the Revolution, one carefully re- covered in a smoothed-out brown paper bag. There are also numerous copies of Marx and Engels' Manifesto of the Communist Party, and works by Freud, Trotsky, Kafka and Mao Zedong. There are biographies of Margaret Thatcher, Enoch Powell and Ian Paisley, and books on Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala, Palestine, South Africa and the Basque separatists. Frantz Fanon's classic anti-colonial text, The Wretched of the Earth, sits beside Henry Pelling's Origins of the Labour Party and works by the Brazilian theorist Paolo Freire. There is a shelf full of National Geographic magazines dating from 1974 to 1997 and a broad range of Irish-language texts as well as numerous works by Irish writers and thinkers. Ernie O'Malley and Sean O' Faolain compete for space with James Joyce and the Irish Feminist Review. There is precious little light reading. Any novels are weighty and worthy; Dickens and Orwell and James Hogg's The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Jus tified Sinner. There are a couple of John Grishams and Wilbur Smiths and the only apparent example of pulp fiction is a fat paperback, whose cover promises the adventures of an SAS sergeant-major and a beautiful Soviet spy, but which contains the text of Who Framed Colin Wallace?, Paul Foot's 1989 investigative work on the jailing of a military intelligence officer. There are works that surprise by their presence and some that shock profoundly. The thin red spine of a book on the Enniskillen atrocity, when an IRA bomb killed 11 people on Remembrance Sunday in 1987, sits alongside Alexander Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago, and Jonathan Glover's Causing Death and Saving Lives: The Moral Problems of Life or Death Choices. And, sometimes, amid the thought and fervour, a flash of poignancy. A parents' guide to epilepsy, a book on child development, a self-help guide to dealing with nerves, a joke book, home wine-making the right way, a pocket Roget's Thesaurus that lists three owners, a collection of Irish love stories. "The first thing that strikes you is the seriousness and breadth of the material," says Richard English, professor of politics at Queen's University in Belfast, who has done a structural analysis of the collection. "The second is the amount of leftwing material. You get a sense of a revolutionary leftist movement and this reflects the period in which the books were put together and devoured. After the hunger strikes there was a very strong leftwing commitment by the republicans. It is an evocation of a particular episode in republican thinking. "The collection also makes it clear they were just desperate for knowledge. The intensity of the material reflects that." Jackie McMullan remembers that desperation. He served 16 years in the Maze for the attempted murder of an RUC officer and was on hunger strike for 48 days. Between 1976 and 1981, during the blanket and dirty protests, inmates were not allowed any reading material apart from the Bible. "You can imagine there was a massive appetite for reading immediately after the blanket protest," McMullan says. "I had a list of about 20 books in my head. At the start it was only religious books we were allowed. But we were flexible enough to turn that into religious novels. Believe it or not, some of them are half decent. After a couple of years we were able to get political books." McMullan's imagined list included John Reed's memoir of the Russian revolution, Ten Days That Shook the World; Wilfred Burchett's Grasshoppers and Elephants: Why Vietnam Fell; and Orwell's Homage to Catalonia. "I got them all and I read them in about three weeks. I'm not a fast reader. I've known guys who can read 600 pages a day. I would read about 200 pages a day but there were weeks where I read three books, one after the other." Rejecting the prison education service, the IRA set up its own education structure in the Maze. The �2 a week they got from the prison authorities was pooled to buy tobacco and set up a book fund. Copies came from friends, relatives and bookstores in Ireland and England. "For us, education was central," says McMullan, who now runs a support group for ex-prisoners. "We used to say, 'You could be here for the next 20 years. You don't want to leave jail exactly as you came in. Put it to good use.' It was a driving force. It was very central to what we were all about. The books we were really interested in were in relation to foreign struggles; Vietnam, Nicaragua, written revolution, Marxist Leninism, Irish history. There was a period after the protest when we were just totally Marxist Leninist; anything else was just not worthwhile. Even if you had a book on anarchists you would have not been taken seriously. If you had got a book in on football you would have got a bit of stick. It would have been like getting a comic. You would have to hide it. "We had just come out of five intensive years of protest. Ten of our friends and comrades had died in the hunger strike. We were pretty serious people at that stage." Danny Morrison, former publicity director for Sinn Fein, who served time in the Maze in the early 1990s, believes the intensity relating to the books reached an unhealthy level in the earlier days. As the inmates struggled to find a focus for their beliefs and used literature and learning to inform and fine-tune their attitudes, their families were dealing with the stark financial and social realities of life beyond the wire. "I think the books are probably a a microcosm of the type of thinking that was going on. There was just this massive drive for a more ideological foundation for their beliefs," said Morrison. "But I believe that the atmosphere was so rarefied that it led to a distortion of the analysis. There was too much emphasis on Marxism and, I thought, too much dependence on the theoretical, particularly of a Marxist bent. It had to be tempered with the practicalities of life." Morrison, now a writer, said the thinking, and the books, began to change with the collapse of communism, a shift that coincided with IRA inmates being paroled and a new generation of republican prisoners arriving. "After the fall of the Berlin wall, the prisoners had to realign themselves and I think it was quite a shock to the main thinkers. They had been out of contact with the outside world and reality. I think after that people fell back into more traditional republican analysis. Certainly a more pragmatic approach started to be adopted. "At that stage the republicans started taking parole. They had been in for 15 or 16 years and they were now getting out for a weekend and that informed their attitudes. Then there were others coming in from the 1980s with a less doctrinal approach." Richard English notes that the IRA's identification with flashpoints elsewhere in the world tracks through the books. "The two places that seemed to be the most telling were the Middle East and South Africa," he says. "There are obvious differences between Northern Ireland and those two, but for the republicans the identification with Palestine and the blacks of South Africa had a resonance that was very important to them. In some way developments in those areas of peace processes meant that there was an echo of the kind of changes happening in the republican movement and a kind of reinforcement of that shift." The fall of communism was deeply unsettling for the republican inmates, and McMullan says the collection reflects the reorientation taking place beyond the prison walls. "It did have an effect," he says. "Not to the extent where people would say, 'That's it, we can forget about it.' People adapted. In the late 80s more would have got into feminism, ecology and environmental issues." He says the 1,700 books held at the Linen Hall library are representative but are only a fraction of the entire IRA Maze collection, which he estimates at 16,000 works. Most were taken home when the prisoners left. There is talk of setting up a lending library with the remaining books, but McMullan is still wondering what to do with the part of the collection that the Linen Hall librarians have yet to see; five boxes full of the IRA's own works from the Maze - essays, theses, notes, letters and memos. They include a history of the prison in 24 chapters, a notebook titled Scenarios for a British Withdrawal, a five-page handwritten essay on Morality of the Armed Struggle, another notebook titled The Guerrilla Fighter, and letters from solicitors and politicians. McMullan believes it is priceless. Richard English has seen the collection and believes that the seeds of the peace process may lie in the level of serious reflection infused in the documents and papers. As with the books that the Linen Hall has already studied and listed, the material in McMullan's boxes maps out the shifts and developments in republican think ing over the years: a thorough exploration of ideology. Frankie Gallagher, however, might think it was propaganda. Gallagher, who works with loyalist ex-prisoners in east Belfast, says they felt no need to create an archive from the Maze or publicise their reading matter. "The loyalists were very much a reactionary force," he said. "They were husbands, fathers, grandfathers who reacted to the bombs and the killing, the republican violence. And it was done in the background of what they saw as the government they were trying to defend imprisoning them. So it was not an ideology, a struggle for loyalists. It never came to that. That is why the loyalists didn't have the central plank of organising things or keeping things for posterity. They weren't into propaganda." But they were into books, according to Martin Snodden, who served 15 years in the Maze for murder and is now director of EPIC, a support group for UVF ex-prisoners. "Books were almost in a sense like a life's blood," he said. "It was information. There was a hunger with regards to knowledge that existed within the prison itself from books to the quality papers like the Sunday Times and the Observer. They were scanned in great detail and there were waiting lists to read them. The Sunday Times would come in and it could be the following Wednesday before you got a look at it. "There was no library as such. You have to understand that in the loyalist wings people more or less had their own books and they were passed between us. My experience was that if someone had a book in there were about 20 people waiting to read it. There were Irish history books, and other books on politics and social injustice." Snodden's colleague at EPIC, Tom Roberts, who spent time in the H-blocks, said he and many of his fellow loyalist inmates took full advantage of the education service offered through the prison, and he dismisses the rumours that the loyalists' private collection was mostly made up of pornographic and weightlifting magazines. "I can assure you that was not the case. Everybody had their own taste. There were a lot of history books, Irish history, English history and a lot about other conflicts in other parts of the world. There was a lot of educational reading went on, because many of us did degrees. "I am not denying that people would have read whatever they would like to read and that includes the republicans. I think prisoners are like every cross- section of society. There is a wide variation in tastes." Yet for all their differences, the books that filled the Maze show that those divided by politics and prison partition were linked by a common thread - a need to learn and an abiding love of literature. In the days when books were still banned, Jackie McMullan managed to get hold of a smuggled copy of Robert Tressell's passionate defence of socialist ideals, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. He read 100 pages before it was confiscated and had to wait five years to finish it. It has stuck with him ever since. Across in the loyalist block, Martin Snodden, too, had a book that had gripped him and stayed with him during his time inside - The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. "The shared interests on the opposing sides have become clearer now they have left the Maze," says Richard English. "And we see there is a human community around all of these people. They did some appalling things but there is a poignancy on all sides. The whole thing looks tragic and frankly rather futile now. There is just a terrible sadness to it all." ================================================== (c) The Guardian
