Inside H Block

Tags: IRA, Northern IReland, H Blocks, Prisons

For the first time, a jourbalist writes about a visit to H Block in Long Kesh where over 400 republican prisoners are "on the blanket" demanding special category status.

The visitors room for H Block prisoners is large and low ceilinged. Around the walls are 20 small, wooden, numbered cubicles. Each one contains a table and four chairs - two for visitors, one for the prisoner and one for his guard. "

The names of prisoners receiving a visit are called out and the thirty or so waiting friends and relatives are allotted a cubicle number. Most people are there to see remand prisoners or those fortunnate enough to still enjoy political status.

The blanket men rarely take visits.

Those appealing sentences take a daily 15 minute visit and of the rest only those with young families or with sick relatives take advantage of a monthly 30 minute visit. Others like Ciaran Nugent, the first man to go on the blanket, have refused visits for over two years.

We are shown to our cubicle and wait.

Opposite, a blanket man is in whisperred conversation with his parents. He was obviously an H Block prisoner. His face was almost completely covered in hair and he could have been anything between 18 and 30 years old.

The blanket men break their no prison uniform rule for visits but the boiler suits they are issued with have plainly seen better days. His was several sizes too large and a long rip in the trousers revealed a pair of skinny butttocks. His enormous unlaced boots looked as if they would have better suited the burly warder listening in to his converssation.

Eventually our prisoner, handcuffed between two warders, arrives. He is a 24 year old form the New Lodge Road disstrict of Belfast, serving a recommended life sentence for murder. He was connvicted on the basis of a signed "confesssion" and spent over a year on remand before being sent to H Block 3 a few days before the no wash strike started.

What do you say to a man who has spent the last eight months dressed only in an old British Army blanket, and confined virtually 24 hours a day in a cell plastered with his own excreta and swimming in urine? "How are you?" seems a somewhat inadequate greeting. Like the only other blanket prisoner in the room, his hair and beard were long and uncombed and he wore an illlfitting blue boiler suit.

He hadn't washed since March and his teeth were completely yellow. His skin was a cadaverous shade of white and stretched tightly across his cheekkbones. His eyes were sunk deep into dark rimmed sockets and throughout the visit never ceased from wandering.

With his guard never more than three feet away, conversation was necessarily surreptitious, but he did manage to describe life in the H Blocks for himself and the other 370 Republican prisoners presently on the no wash strike. "We refuse to leave our cells for any reason other than visits and Sunday Mass. That means we use our cells for everything. At the beginning we used a corner of the cell for a toilet but after the screws started to throw our blankets in it we smeared the cell walls with shit and poured the piss under the cell door." What about the smell? "You get used to it. It only really hits me when I go back after a visit."

Once a week the cells are steam hosed clean by the warders and the prisoners moved to a cleaner wing of the H Block.

The need to keep one wing of each block for this purpose has created an overcrowding problem. Initially the H Block cells were built to house one prisoner. Now there are two inmates for each cell and there are unconfirmed reports of loyalists in H Blocks 7 and 8, the criminal Blocks, sharing four to a cell. It's during these moves, when wardders make prisoners run to their new wing, that most of the beatings happen.

The prisoner we visited had been moved that morning along with the 24 other inmates of his wing. After they had been rehoused they discovered that one of their number was missing. "His cellmate saw him with his head bleeding and he's probably on the board now." On the board refers to the Punishment or P Block, a twenty four cell conncrete building situated some distance from the the H Blocks.

Prisoners are sent to the P Block for between three and and twenty eight days for offences as different and as petty as speaking back to a warder and smuggling tobacco and messages from visitors. Beatings are automatic in the P Block and the prisoner we visited spoke of a man who had to be hospitallised after 28 days of solitary confineement and attacks from warders.

Life in H Block 3 starts early for the prisoners. "The screws corne around at seven in the morning and wake us up by banging their batons on the steel cell doors. But I'm usually awake earlier than that when flocks of noisy crows leave their nests and fly over the prison. They ask us if we want a visit from the doctor, a priest or the governor. We never accept because that would mean putting on prison uniform. If you're really sick they'll send a doctor in to see you but that can take weeks. As for a dentist there's only one for the whole of Long Kesh."

Breakfast of cornflakes or porridge, a pint of tea and two unbuttered slices of bread follows. If the prisoners suspect that their food has been tampered with it joins the excreta pasting their cell wall. "One day my cell-mate found a dead mouse at the bottom of his mug of tea and we think that sometimes the screws piss into the tea as well."

The prisoners are locked up all the time except for meals. Appeals from Donal Deeny, an Alliance Party councillor and a member of the Long Kesh Board of Visitors, for exercise for prisoners have fallen on deaf Northern Ireland Office ears. Lunch is skimpy and consists of one potato, two thin slices of meat and a spoon of vegetable followed by thin, watery custard. Supper is even more frugal. A pint of unsweettened tea and four slices of bread and margarine.

It's a boring and monotonous routine broken only by regular cell searches. For the prisoners, the idea of warders searching a cell that contains only two foam rubber mattresses and six thin blankets is especially galling. "We're first of all given an anal search and then made to stand outside the cell in puddles of urine while the screws poke through our mattresses. If we make a move other screws jump on top of us."

Anal searches which follow and preecede every excursion from cells are often the cause of violence and are reegarded by the prisoners as petty harasssment designed to break their wills. "I was made to stretch my legs open and was searched twice before this visit. They'll do it twice more before I get back into my cell. How could I get the time and opportunity to hide anything. It's done for badness.

During the rest of the day prisoners either sleep, play chess with sets modelled out of scraps of paper or speak to each other by using the pipes of the block's heating system as a telephone wire. At night time they conduct sing songs or give Irish language classes and lectures shouted through the thick cell doors.

The lecture earlier that week was on the Vietnamese General Giap's theory of "the revolutionary act of people's war". "Whoever gives the class or lecture normally can't speak for days after, so some nights we just sing rebel songs".

The Northern Ireland Office mainntains that prisoners can control the lights in their cells but this prisoner denied it. "Sometimes the screws keep the lights on all night so that we can't sleep. Other nights they bang on the cell doors and shout to keep us awake. I've read that in Stannheim jail they keep the BaaderrMeinhof people in complete silence to drive them mad. Here they use noise."

Apart from his skeletal appearance the health of the prisoner we visited seemed to have withstood the strain of the no wash strike. But other prisoners are entering their third winter in the H Blocks. When they started the protest the prisoners smashed cell furniture and broke windows. The refusal of the Governor to replace the windows means that this winter cells will be open to the elements.

Other prisoners are showing mental stress and at least one of them has been forced to take sedative drugs. All of the H Block men apparently suffer from constant diarrhoea - Long Kesh fever as they call it. With a recommended life sentence in front of him how much longer could he sustain the protest. "From the day I was arrested I was treated as a special kind of prisoner. The R.D.C. extractted a confession from me and I was convicted in a noojury court. None of us here have anything to lose by trying for political status."

With that the visit was over and without being alllowed to shake hands the prisoner was escorted, handdcuffed, back to his cell, a blanket, the overwhelming stench of urine and excreta and an uncertain fate .•