In Learning Behind Bars, academic and author Dieter Reinisch sets out how IRA prisoners moved away from “Marxist Esperanto” and their hope of a “Tet offensive” in Northern Ireland and, as his book’s subtitle says, helped shaped the peace process.
It is clear that, without the support of the prisoners, Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness could not have sold the huge compromises that the Provisional republican movement was forced to swallow.
But in making those concessions the prisoners had to face up to difficult truths. Reinisch delineates how, after Libyan leader Muammar Gadafy sent over shiploads of high-grade explosives and arms in the 1980s, many prisoners had an expectation that the IRA would launch the equivalent of the “Tet offensive” in the Vietnam War to drive the British out of Northern Ireland.
Looking to Moscow and Cuba many were also convinced that a great egalitarian 32-county socialist republic would follow.
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But with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, as the foremost republican propagandist Danny Morrison told Reinisch, a “lot of [prisoners] got their eyes opened, and there was a move away from this purist ideological approach to a more pragmatic form of politics”.
Many had to jettison what Morrison witheringly described as “Marxist Esperanto”.
Reinisch, an Austrian, who is a postdoctoral fellow in the school of political science and sociology at the University of Galway, deals with all the big issues that affected the republican prisoners in Ireland North and South, primarily in the Maze and Portlaoise: internment, the protests, the hungers strikes, the riots, the deaths, and the fight for special status – and with much of that story contextualised in how the left-wing dream had to be abandoned with education serving the “purpose of facilitating the shift of the Provisionals from armed struggle to parliamentarianism”.
When the Maze prison finally closed in 2000, its library had amassed some 20,000 books illustrating how prisoners placed such an emphasis on education.
Reinisch argues that “political education was a form of resistance to the criminalisation of the prisoners” and that through education “republicans found a way of showing the outside population that they were not the same as ordinary criminal prisoners”.
Learning Behind Bars is an interesting, informative and scholarly work that demonstrates how prisoners did make a crucial contribution to ending the Troubles. It also reminds us how in the Republic as well as in Northern Ireland the issue of paramilitary prisoners was a constant challenge that sorely tested the authorities.
