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Silent Grace

"It was barely reported that the IRA hunger strikes of the 1980s involved women. Now a new film is to tell their story...

...The 1980/81 hunger strikes were one of the most traumatic episodes in recent Anglo/Irish history. From the outset the then British prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, made it clear that her government would "never concede political status to the hunger strikers". As a result, 10 men starved themselves to death.

It is, however, little known that in 1980 it was not just men who went on hunger strike. Three women at Armagh jail also starved themselves. It was their last-ditch attempt to draw the world's attention to the appalling conditions of Republican political prisoners at that time. The same women had also joined Armagh's much larger dirty protest where, having been refused permission to slop out, the women joined their male counterparts in smearing their excrement on the wall.

As a young teenager born and brought up in Belfast, film-maker Maeve Murphy remembers being puzzled by the British government's refusal to negotiate with the Republican prisoners, but had no idea that women were also involved in the protest until, a decade later, she came across a rare pamphlet written on the subject. "I was shocked not only that there were women on these protests," says Murphy, "but also at the horrific and inhumane conditions in which they were being kept. It was a chapter of history for Irish women that had been hidden away."

The women's strike was barely mentioned in the British press. The journalists at that time were all camped out in Belfast's Europa hotel where the story fixed on the male prisoners. "Male journalists tend to be more interested in men. War is, after all, about men," says Murphy. Politicians were unwilling to bring it up as "there was a feeling that the British didn't want women to die".

On Friday, Murphy's first feature film Silent Grace goes on release in the UK. At its premiere it was received with critical acclaim and tells the story of two women at Armagh jail during the women's dirty protest and hunger strike of 1980. Silent Grace attempts to shed light on the lives of women who believed they had a right to take up arms and defend themselves against the British "occupation".

Sinead Moore has not yet seen the film, but is proud to have taken part in the dirty protest of 1980. As a teenager in West Belfast in the early 1970s, she witnessed the British army enter Catholic neighbourhoods and saw how men and women were interned without trial. It fuelled a sense of communal solidarity among the young and swelled the ranks of the IRA.

Charged in 1976 with possession of two revolvers, she was sentenced to 10 years in jail. In Armagh she shared a cell with Mairead Farrell, one of the three female hunger strikers who, after her release, was shot dead along with two other members of the IRA by the British SAS in Gibraltar. Pictures of Farrell's Belfast funeral in 1988 were beamed across the world when loyalist paramilitary Michael Stone opened fire on mourners at Milltown Cemetery..."

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from "Stone Cold: The true story of Michael Stone and the Milltown Massacre" by Martin Dillon:

"...Stone's wish to distance himself from the imprisonment of the housewife in her car, again falls into line with his habitual tendency to portray himself as a man with respect for women, as a 'chivalrous' man with basic human values. Prepared to kill men for a 'cause', women were sacred, and he firmly believed that the killing of a woman, or violence towards them, stood in contradiction to his self-image as a man of honor. It may have related not simply to his personal values, but in general to a society where killing was tolerated, provided women did not become targets. Throughout the history of the conflict, killer gangs rarely selected women. On both sides of the divide women represented motherhood. One Irish writer has remarked that men in Ireland love their mothers too much, and as a consequence find it impossible to love other women fully and well. Within Stone resided a preoccupation with motherhood, and equally, a desire to represent himself as a man who loved and respected all women. To maintain that as a part of his character he insisted that he would never kill women, even when they were known members of the IRA...

In general this view of women has pervaded the conflict. The Provisional IRA, likewise, was imbued with a desire to remove women from it's targets lists. Throughout IRA history, women who played a role were revered. The term 'Mother Ireland', which featured prominently in republican ideology and literature, testified to the thesis Stone propounded: in only a few instances have women been deliberately selected as targets..."

(And he does list exceptions such as Bernadette (Devlin) McAliskey, Susan Bunting and Miriam Daly...

I do find it interesting that both sides fall into that delusion that only shooting women is hurting women, within the conflict. They seem to overlook that killing women's children is worse than killing the women themselves. And everyone who is killed is some mother's child. - Iðunn)

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From "The Dirty War" by Martin Dillon:

"...The IRA always recognized the deadly capacities of it's female members but traditionally refused to permit girls and women to play a prominent role in the expression and execution of terror. The supportive role of women in IRA history until 1971 mirrored the role of women in Irish society. The male adopted the dominant, overt role, while the female was subservient. Women were only allowed to act as couriers or to help move guns and explosives. It was unthinkable to the IRA that women should be in the front line of the war killing soldiers. The image of Leila Khalid hijacking a plane over London on 6 September 1970 may well have been a signal to the Provisionals that the time had come for women to play a prominent role in guerrilla warfare. It was also a time when well-educated young women such as the Price sisters were joining the Provisionals and asserting their right to be at the forefront of the conflict. It was younger women within the IRA who recognised that the 'honeytrap', the use of sexual entrapment, was a way of luring soldiers to their deaths..."

I made a thread on one of the most notable exceptions, Countess Markievicz, from that:

"Most women in the movement participated in the '16 Rising as nurses or by running messages through the streets between groups. Not Countess Markievicz. She had earlier joined Connolly's Citizen Army, and was second in command to Michael Mallin in St. Stephen's Green. She supervised the setting up of barricades as the rising began and was in the middle of the fighting all around the Green. At one point, when a young girl was wounded with several bullets and undergoing surgery, Markievicz left the room, returning in a minute to tell her, "Don't worry, Margaret, me dear, I got the wretched blighter for you." It was during the fighting, moved by the faith of many of the men around her and that faith's connection to the long struggle for Irish independence, that she first contemplated conversion to Catholicism.

Mallin and Markievicz and their men would hold on to Stephen's Green for six days, finally giving up when the British brought them a copy of Pearse's surrender order."

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Also from "The Dirty War" - Dillon

Code of Conduct (Issued in 1987):

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And the eight reminders

1. Talk to people politely.

2. Be fair in all business dealings.

3. Return everything you have borrowed.

4. Pay for anything you have damaged.

5. Don't beat or bully people.

6. Don't damage crops.

7. Don't flirt with women.

8. Don't illtreat prisoners of war.

...some of the guidelines expected of members:

3. Republicanism stands for equality and an end to sexism. Male Volunteers who mistreat or exploit their partners are flying in the face of this principle. Volunteers must practice domestically what the Movement teaches publicly.

And off topic but interesting, these next guidelines:

4. Anyone promoting sectarianism or displaying sectarian attitudes should immediately be disciplined.

5. Republicanism has an international dimension which means respecting as equals other nationalities and races. Anyone who pays lip service to international solidarity and then slips into mimicking the racist attitudes of an imperialist mentality should be immediately upbraided. All people are equal and everyone has an international duty to oppose racism and oppression from wherever it emanates.

Number 6 is a push for return to Irish culture, particularly to learn Gaeilge.

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'The best of times and the worst of times'

"This week, a feature film, based on the struggle of republican women prisoners in Armagh Jail for political status, has been running in Dublin. Although conceding the good intentions behind the project, women POWs who were in Armagh have criticised Silent Grace's portrayal of their part in the prison struggle. Here, former POW Sinéad Moore, Mairéad Farrell's longtime cellmate, tells JIM GIBNEY what it was really like..."

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