Jake Mac Siacais learned his Irish in the cages of the H-Blocks in Long Kesh. Ask him and he'll say the language he has spoken fluently for 45 years is his first love. But Gaelic Games come a close second and in the past decade and a half, the two have woven together.
West Belfast, where he comes from, is like no other place in Ireland. It wears its republican identity hard. Unashamedly. Lavishly. In the previous century it might have been symbolic of protest and resistance. Now, it’s part of the fabric, the culture of the place.
Laochra Loch Lao, which means The Warrior of Loch Lao with Loch Lao the ancient name for Belfast, is Antrim’s newest GAA club. Conducting its business entirely through Irish, it plays in Coláiste Feirste, the city’s only secondary level gaelscoil located off the Falls Road.
The Falls is more than a road. It’s a district that begins near the city centre and shoots west from near the Divis flats towards Milltown cemetery and Andersonstown.
Not unlike the loyalist Shankill Road nearby, it’s a jungle of threadbare streets, many of them disfigured and weary to the eye. But there’s richness too. Its energy is always on show.
Mac Siacais, who is part of Belfast’s scarred past and who earlier this year was appointed to a five-member expert advisory panel for Stormont’s Irish language strategy, was involved in setting up Laochra Loch Lao, becoming its first chairman in 2006.
Arrest
Several decades before that, he was arrested as a 17 year old and taken to a Belfast police station. There he was grossly mistreated. It marked the beginning of a road he had taken towards republicanism and a prison life.
Still in his teens, he graduated to Long Kesh in 1977, becoming a prominent IRA member and part of the blanket protest, where they rejected wearing prison uniforms, claiming political prisoner status. For that, 10 would die. It took a toll.
“The trauma did not emerge for me until 2016 under a very deep depression and after two years of counselling. I was suffering from PTSD [post-traumatic stress disorder]. It was during that time the guy working with me would ask, ‘So tell me how that made you feel?’” he says of his first arrest.
“I went ‘Well, what do you mean?’ He’d say, ‘So at 17 years old you were being plunged into a bath, taken out and a wet towel put up over your face and then hung out a window, how did that make you feel?’ I said it’s just the way it was.
“Whatever came your way you took it, and stored it away in a wee box in your head. As you get older that box starts to leak. That happened to me in Springfield Road [police station]. Yep, I went straight into prison after that.”
Sport in prison
Prison didn’t mean inactivity, although during the intensity of the 1980s hunger strikes, there were restrictions. Outside of those bleak years, sport had a place.
In Crumlin Road, it was predominantly soccer and when they were allowed out on to the pitches they played Gaelic football. Handball was also played in the yards with a tennis ball. Mac Siacais would have promoted Gaelic football. But the largely working class detainees from Derry and Belfast, where soccer has always had a strong following, kept with their game.
“I met Bobby [Sands] in cage 11 in Long Kesh. Bobby loved soccer and supported a really obscure club that I can’t remember the name of, maybe Aston Villa. He also played Gaelic. But his main sport was running.
“He was a very keen harrier. He ran for a team that was predominantly unionist and mostly from up around the Lough shore at Rathcoole where he lived.
“He wasn’t able to do that after 1971. But he was a very keen cross-country runner. He did it around the cage. We all walked around the cage but he would have run.”
There were gravel all-weather pitches located in the middle of the cages in Long Kesh. Each cage had access to use them once every few weeks, more than once a month but not as often as every week.
During that time cages from two to eight were internees (men imprisoned without trial), who didn’t mix with other prisoners but did have access to the pitches.
Strict rotation
In the sentenced end the republican cages were from nine up to 15. Those prisoners were also allowed outside and the loyalist cages, from 17 to 22, had access too, always in strict rotation.
“We played GAA matches quite regularly. You weren’t allowed to play hurling because hurls were seen as offensive weapons,” he says. “But inside the cages people predominantly played soccer because if the ball went out over the fence it was a whole hassle to get it back. The cages actually backed on to the pitches. Loyalists down at the football pitch, they’d come to the wire to learn Irish.
"It was common enough. There were people like David Ervine, Billy Hutchinson, Gusty Spence, they all would have learned at some stage or another. They were being taught by republican prisoners. There always was some unionist interest in the language.
"The politicisation of the language by unionism really began during the Home Rule crisis in the late 19th century. When the Gaelic League was set up in Belfast the first secretary was the Rev Richard Rutledge Kane, who was also Grand Master of the Orange Order. There was no idea that they were anything other than Irish."
When Laochra Loch Lao was first set up, he explains the idea was that it would be a club that came together to play in Irish language competitions. They spoke to the Antrim board and established what initially became an amalgamated club. Players from a number of other teams were given permission by the GAA to play for dual clubs.
They started to recruit underage kids directly and that has been going for 10 years now. The amalgamated club has gone since 2016 and they have become a full GAA club. There’s a women’s team and a senior team and more than 250 kids now playing.
Irish language
But the football came with the language and the language came from almost 10 years in prison. As is the way, there is no avoiding the past. Nor does he try.
“It really doesn’t matter who is killed in a conflict or who kills them, the impact is identical,” he says. “The heart is ripped out of a family. I’ll be sitting in on Christmas Eve or Christmas Day and at some point I will remember that all over the country there are empty spaces at tables.
“In no way do I absolve myself or republicanism for our part in that. We inflicted horrendous suffering. We also endured it. But we inflicted.
"The wing that I was on, three people died on hunger strike – Bobby Sands, Tommy McElwee and Kevin Lynch. Kieron Doherty was a close neighbour of mine, Joe McDonnell another close neighbour. I'm 63 years of age and I still don't know if I would have been strong enough.
"I lost good friends on the outside. Wee Joey Surgeoner from the Short Strand, he just left our cage a number of months when he was killed.
“One of my good childhood friends was recruited by the British Force Reaction Unit and he was executed by the IRA when I was in prison. You have to learn to accept your life as it was.”
Prisoners in general, he says, talked about the past or planned the future. Nobody lived in the present. There’s still a touch of that going on even now. He tells a story of the crest on the club’s shirts.
"Lean ar aghaidh were the last words Kieron Doherty spoke when Gerry Adams went in to tell him that the British weren't going to concede," he says. "He said to Adams 'have we got the five demands?' Adams said no and Doherty said 'Lean ar aghaidh.' It means keep going."
After a serious brush with Covid, six weeks in hospital and serene acceptance he would die, with the Irish language and with Gaelic football, that’s exactly what he is doing.
