The Troubles: Ireland's Ordeal 1966–1995 and the Search for Peace

by Tim Pat Coogan

I was allowed to pick the two cells I wished to visit at random after a tour of the prison led by the Governor. The Governor placed no barriers in my inspection save warning the two occupants of the first cell I came to that there was to be no conversation…. as if to underline this, two enormous warders, either of whom would dwarf me (and I am not a small man), entered the cell and stood behind the cell’s occupants. They were aged 21 and 22, as I afterwards learned, serving ten and twelve years respectively. When the cell door opened they both looked frightened. They looked anxiously at us for a moment. They were pallid and naked except for a blanket draped over their shoulders. They stood silently, fear hardening into defiance, I felt, as we looked at the cell. It was covered in excrement almost to the ceiling and all four walls. In one comer there was a pile of rotting, blue-moulded food and excrement and the two boys had evidently been using bits of their foam rubber mattresses to add to the decor as we entered. There wasn’t much of a smell but the light was dim and the atmosphere profoundly disturbing and depressing. I felt helpless and angry as I stood and looked at these appalling and disgraceful conditions, prevented by bureaucracy and by history from talking to two of my fellow human beings who had brought themselves and been brought to this condition of self-abnegation. I couldn’t speak for a few minutes after visiting the cell and had to compose myself before ent...