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

by Tim Pat Coogan

The five techniques consisted of hooding, sleep deprivation, white noise, a starvation diet, and standing for hours spreadeagled against a wall, ‘…leaning on their fingertips like the hypotenuse of a right-angled triangle. The only sound that filled the room was a high-pitched throb, which the detainees liken to an air compressor. The noise literally drove them out of their minds.’15 These techniques were accompanied by continual harassment, blows, insults, questioning. This treatment usually went on for six or seven days. It produced acute anxiety states, personality changes, depression and, sometimes, an early death. I spoke to a psychiatrist who had the thankless task of trying to rehabilitate some of the interrogation victims (at the behest of the British Government), and he told me that they were ‘broken men’, most of whom did not survive into their fifties.