THE “PREGNANT” BOMBER

We are prepared to fast to the death, if necessary, but our love for justice and our country will live forever.

—Mairéad Farrell, Margaret Nugent, and Mary Doyle, hunger strikers, Armagh Prison, December 1, 19801

We are actively involved in the struggle at all levels raising the issues of sexism, violence against women, and discrimination, women must fight for their freedom.

—Mairéad Keane, Director, Sinn Féin’s Women’s Department, July 1990²

SIOBHAN

Siobhan³ sat by herself staring out the window of a bus full of tourists and holidaymakers en route to Belfast International Airport. Her rosy cheeks were flushed with both nervousness and excitement. She was wearing denim overalls, the kind that pregnant women often wear, and concealed underneath them fifteen pounds of Semtex explosives strapped to her waist. Her mission: to plant the explosives at the airport and wait for the Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA) to make its warning call to clear the premises. In her mind, she could accomplish this task without any civilians getting killed. However, the economic reverberations of such an attack would be huge: tourism in Northern Ireland would grind to a standstill and make it too expensive for the British government to remain and maintain its presence. By attacking a high-value site like the airport, the PIRA would also show that no target was beyond its reach. Siobhan’s mission took the PIRA’s use of female bomb smugglers to a new level. In a weekend of heightened bombing activity, with nine bombings and shootings all over the province that very day, in Lisburn, Newry, Derry, and Strabane, Siobhan’s ruse—pretending to be an expectant mother—might enable her to successfully carry out her mission without anyone ever suspecting her real identity.4

At Templepatrick, near Newry, the airport bus started to pull away from the border customshouse and then jerked to a stop. Without warning, several uniformed police officers boarded the bus. They scanned the faces in the crowd and made a beeline for Siobhan. The other passengers looked on quizzically, not yet alarmed, as patrols often boarded the buses to check ID and travel papers. When they began to question Siobhan, the passengers may have assumed that something had happened to the baby’s father or that there was some emergency. She looked at them with big blue eyes, trying to appear calm, but they asked her for her identification papers and immediately escorted her off the bus. When they were on the curb, one of the police officers quickly frisked her. The patrol did not yet know what they were dealing with. He undid the metal buttons fastening her overalls and the bib dropped to her waist, exposing the bomb strapped to her midsection. The officers escorted Siobhan to another area and instructed the driver to move the bus as the passengers looked on with horror. The young woman was not pregnant at all, but carrying a bomb. No one had ever seen anything like this before.

Siobhan was loaded into a police car and driven to the station for interrogation. The special explosive unit defused the bomb slowly and carefully and destroyed it with a controlled explosion. Curiously enough, An Phoblacht/Republican News, the official newspaper of Sinn Féin (and the PIRA’s mouthpiece according to critics), claimed that the attack was successful, writing in its war news a few days later that an IED had exploded at the customhouse, without mentioning that Siobhan had been caught before her mission was complete. An Phoblacht never even mentioned her name.

The Belfast airport bombing by a woman feigning pregnancy did not happen that day. When a Sri Lankan woman emulated the tactic the following year, she managed to blow up herself and former Indian prime minister Rajiv Gandhi in Sriperumbudur in Tamil Nadu, India, on behalf of the Tamil Tigers. History records that Gayatri (Thenmuli Rajaratnam) was the first female bomber to feign pregnancy when, in fact, the women of the IRA had been smuggling explosives in their panties and under the guise of pregnancy for years; they just hadn’t been suicide bombers.

Siobhan was sentenced to fourteen years on May 21, 1990. The judge tried to convince her to recognize the authority of the court, take a guilty plea, and throw herself on the court’s mercy. After all, she was so young, she could have pled to a lesser charge as a minor. She refused. The authorities and even the defense lawyers then tried to pressure her parents to get her to consent and work with the authorities. Siobhan recalled with a smile that her parents had told them where to go, and how to get there.

THE RISE, FALL, AND RISE OF THE IRA

Religious and sectarian violence began in Ireland as far back as the twelfth century, but it culminated in the 1970s during the Troubles. The Emerald Isle had been invaded by Vikings, Romans, and Normans, but the invaders that stayed were the English. Beginning in the twelfth century, the English began to assert their control. Gaelic Ireland was completely defeated by 1691, at which time thousands of Scottish and English settlers were brought in to farm its rolling green hills. The Gaelic Irish were Catholic and their new masters were Protestant. This religious divide had both economic and political ramifications, with Irish Catholics banned from becoming members of parliament under the Penal Laws, even though they constituted 85 percent of the population. All economic and political power rested in the hands of the Anglo-settler community for two hundred years and land distribution and access to resources varied depending on people’s religion.

In 1798 Wolfe Tone, influenced by ideas from the French and American revolutions, led the Irish Rebellion against English rule. The rebellion possessed some of the worst characteristics of a civil war. Sectarian resentment, fueled by the Penal Laws, resulted in even more repression. Rumors of atrocities and massacres multiplied on both sides. Executions of Protestant Loyalist prisoners were answered by the massacres of captured Catholic rebels. The 1798 rebellion was the most concentrated episode of violence in Irish history, and resulted in thirty thousand deaths over three months.

As a result of the rebellion, the English employed a divide-and-rule strategy, using the sectarian conflict to whip up nationalist sentiment among Protestants. In 1801, in the Act of Union, the United Kingdom formally annexed Ireland, making it part of Britain’s colonial empire. While King George III had vetoed emancipation of Catholics, in 1829 his son George IV signed into law the Catholic Relief Act, which sanctioned their participation in parliament. This mitigated the source of conflict, but Ulster, in the north, where most of the British had settled, remained the center of the violence between Catholics and Protestants. Elsewhere, tensions had an economic cause, as a growing divide between landowners and tenant farmers resulted in social unrest. Land allocation and socioeconomic status were often highly connected to religious affiliation and so hostility between the two religions remained high.

Most Catholic families had only enough property to plant a single crop: potatoes. When a blight hit the island, the potato crop failed, and much of the population went hungry. The tensions in the countryside reached a crescendo during the Potato Famine of 1845–49, which resulted in one million deaths and another million Irish emigrants to America, Canada, and Australia. The famine profoundly impacted the political, economic, and social development of the island. The situation became catastrophic when epidemics of typhoid, cholera, and dysentery devastated the population. Most of the little food produced on the island was exported to Great Britain, leaving hundreds of thousands of Irish people starving to death. The growing communities of Irish emigrants living abroad helped found the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) in 1858, a secret society whose goal was the independence of Ireland. This and comparable nationalist groups funneled arms and money to the conflict until the 1980s.

Beginning in the 1880s, a series of “home rule” bills was introduced in the British parliament. Some would have allowed Ireland to govern itself independently from Britain while others called for repeal of the Act of Union. Thousands of Unionists, led by Sir Edward Carson, signed the Ulster Covenant of 1912, pledging to resist home rule. The threat of a civil war loomed large and led to the creation of local militias like the Ulster Volunteers, who resisted home rule, and the Irish Volunteers, who supported it. In small villages in County Cork and County Kerry, Catholics began to organize their opposition. These early groups provided the inspiration for the terrorist organizations that would emerge in the twentieth century. The Irish Volunteers were the forerunner of the Irish Republican Army (IRA), and the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) gave rise to half a dozen Protestant militant groups.

Conflict between north and south reached a crisis in the 1916 Easter Rising in Dublin and the subsequent guerrilla campaign. During World War I, the British were pressured by the Woodrow Wilson administration to resolve the Irish problem. The Treaty of Versailles, which formally ended the war, recognized the principle of self-determination for all peoples. However, even with the landslide victory for Sinn Féin, the political party representing Irish republicanism, in the 1918 British general election, Ireland did not achieve independence. Although many in the British political establishment believed that it was time to get out of Ireland, they could not leave because they owed allegiance to “kith and kin” in the north, the Protestant majority, who considered themselves to be British.5

Between 1918 and 1921, the Irish Republican Army waged a highly successful guerrilla campaign against British security services in Dublin and police and troops in both the north and south of the island. The insurgency was led by Michael Collins and Eamonn de Valera.⁶ In response, the British government reinforced its garrisons in Ireland and began to recruit auxiliary forces, including the dreaded Black and Tans, mostly veteran servicemen, criminals, and mercenaries from World War I. The British prime minister, Lloyd George, sought a compromise. The Government of Ireland Act (1920) partitioned Ireland, creating two states, one for the six northern counties (Antrim, Armagh, Derry, Down, Fermanagh, and Tyrone) and one, the Irish Free State, for the remaining twenty-six. It also allowed for the possibility that at some future date, the island could once again be united. The settlement satisfied neither side.

The Irish parliament, the Dáil, voted 64 to 57 in favor of the treaty in January 1922. This rift over the partition of the island had parallels within the IRA, and Northern Ireland was born amid bloodshed and communal disorder. The pro- and anti-treaty allegiances thrust the island into a bitter civil war that lasted until 1923. Ironically, more Irish killed each other during the civil war than had been killed by the British during the preceding War of Independence. Collins himself was shot and killed by one of his former allies in his native Cork. Sinn Féin reorganized under de Valera and reemerged to contest the 1923 elections.7

In the 1930s widespread riots in Belfast and the towns of Larne, Portadown, and Ballymena, some of which involved the IRA, caused yet more deaths. The violence peaked in 1935 when twelve people were killed and six hundred wounded. In the southern Free State, former IRA members were absorbed into state bodies, and the organization was officially declared illegal in 1936. The sectarian violence faded as the economic situation improved, and the organization had virtually disappeared by the 1940s. During World War II, Ireland remained neutral; de Valera officially refrained from joining either the Allies or the Axis.⁸

For much of the 1940s and 1950s, the IRA was virtually absent from the political scene on both sides of Ireland’s north–south border. The acronym IRA came to signify the much-touted and contemptuous slogan “I Ran Away.”⁹ The dreadful failure of an IRA offensive from 1952 to 1962 owed more to apathy than to the competence of law enforcement. The last gasp of resistance ended with a communiqué stating that the IRA would abandon the military struggle altogether and concentrate on political-socialist objectives.

The denunciation of armed struggle seemed to guarantee that the 1960s would be free from Republican violence, but it led instead to a new iteration of sectarian violence with the emergence of a charismatic religious leader (and founder of one of the Protestant paramilitary groups), the Reverend Ian Paisley, among the Protestants in the north.¹⁰ Radical voices within the Protestant Unionist movement outlawed the colors of the Irish flag, and flying the tricolor in West Belfast provoked a riot in 1964. Ian Paisley was head of the Free Presbyterian Church and the Protestant Unionist Party and played the leading role in demanding the removal of all symbols of Irish nationalism or independence. Paisley was opposed to any political reconciliation with the Catholic community.

The response was civil rights marches, beginning in 1968. Catholics, seeking equal employment, good housing, and equality under the law, found themselves at loggerheads with state authorities. The civil rights movement demanded an end to discrimination in jobs and housing, the disbandment of the B Specials (the Ulster Special Constabulary), and an end to the gerrymandering of voting districts. The Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA) called for one man, one job, and for one family, one house.11 Their most important demand was “one man, one vote.”¹² In the Northern Ireland parliament, known as Stormont, Catholics remained a minority even though they outnumbered the Protestants in the general population. Without a peaceful and legal framework to achieve civil rights, Catholics believed that they had no alternative but to take to the streets. The success of the civil rights movement in America suggested nonviolent protest as a means to achieve their political goals, but the government’s ban on peaceful demonstrations allowed militant voices to emerge and take over the movement.

The campaign became much more radical in 1969. The riots in Belfast in August led to the resurrection of the Irish Republican Army and a political split between the Official Republicans, who believed in nonviolence, and those who came to be known as the Provisionals, who advocated the use of force. The group deliberately used the word “provisional ” to emphasize that they were the real heirs to the the Irish provisional government (Rialtas Sealadach na hÉireann) of 1922 and to emphasize that this was a provisional decision until such time that the full General Army Convention could formally vote on the split. The Provisionals maintained the principles of the pre-1969 IRA, and considered both British rule in Northern Ireland and the government of the Republic of Ireland to be illegitimate. The official reason for splitting the IRA was a disagreement that emerged from their annual conference over whether to recognize the Irish or British parliaments. Since partition, the Republican movement had followed a policy of abstentionism. The new policy was to take their seats if they were elected. The Provisionals walked out of the conference, set up their own organization, and called themselves the Provisional Sinn Féin and Provisional IRA. The first Provisional Army Council, composed of Seán Mac Stíofáin, Ruairí Ó Brádaigh, Paddy Mulcahy, Sean Tracey, Leo Martin, and Joe Cahill, issued its first public statement on December 28, 1969:

We declare our allegiance to the thirty-two county Irish republic, proclaimed at Easter 1916, established by the first Dáil Éireann in 1919, overthrown by forces of arms in 1922 and suppressed to this day by the existing British-imposed six-county and twenty-six-county partition states.13

Unlike the leaders of 1916, who were elite, fairly well-educated men who spoke for all of the people of Ireland, the new generation of leaders were children of the Belfast and Derry ghettos. Most were from urban backgrounds and had suffered from sectarian discrimination. The Provisionals or “Provos” would differentiate themselves from the other Republicans through a campaign of armed and violent resistance: they would employ the language of the gun. After the split, the Provisional IRA began planning for an “all-out offensive action against the British occupation.”¹⁴

The civil rights organization People’s Democracy (PD) unilaterally decided to march from Belfast to Derry in January 1969, emulating the Selma to Montgomery marches in the United States, even though the government had outlawed peaceful demonstrations of any kind. The marchers were met with violent opposition at Burntollet Bridge, and this event, along with the emergence of the Provos, destroyed the campaign of nonviolent protest in Ireland. The most strident voices and those with weapons now set the agenda.

Back in Britain there was a change in government in 1970. Harold Wilson’s Labour government had implemented some civil rights reforms. In May Labour was replaced by a new Conservative government, led by Edward Heath, who had close links with the Unionists in Northern Ireland. The new British government decided that the answer to Northern Ireland was not more reforms, but punitive military action.

Catholics in Belfast soon felt that they were under siege. To complicate matters, Catholic and Protestant communities lived side by side, intermingled, so a Catholic community would be physically next to a Protestant one. The main Catholic neighborhood was located along the Falls Road. Next to it was an area, known as the Shankhill Road, which was the main Protestant working-class community and headquarters for many of the Protestant militant organizations associated with the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF). Both the IRA and the UVF had a slew of offshoot organizations from these neighborhoods that engaged in ever-increasing levels of violence.15 The red hand was the symbol of the Protestant vigilante groups, many of whose members were policemen during the day and killers at night. Because Protestants were the majority in some neighborhoods of the north, and because there was complicity with the security forces, they were able to inflict more damage on the Catholic community than vice versa.

The army, in trying to control events, made matters much worse. Its use of CN (tear) gas and CS (chlorobenzylidene malononitrile) gas, which permanently damaged the heart and liver, dramatically escalated tensions. The Catholics living behind the barricades in their neighborhoods believed that the British government meant to destroy them as a people. As a result, the logic of oppression, responding to the pressure exerted by violent protesters, led to the gassing of civilians, the massacre on Bloody Sunday, mass arrests, and hunger strikes, all of which became powerful recruiting agents for the Provisional IRA. People became convinced that violence was the only answer and young people joined the Provisional IRA in droves.

In July 1970, a year known as the time of the Falls Curfew, the army fired 1,600 canisters of CN gas into the densely populated Falls Road. The violence escalated even more on January 30, 1972, when British forces engaged in an affray with the Catholic community in Derry. During a civil rights march led by the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association, attended by ten to twenty thousand men, women, and children, soldiers chased stone-throwers and, within minutes, shot thirteen marchers dead, seven of them teenagers. A fourteenth victim died days later. In total, twenty-seven civil rights protesters were shot that day, five of them in the back.

Bloody Sunday, as the day came to be known, was a watershed. It united the Catholic community of Northern Ireland, and British authority completely collapsed. World opinion condemned the shootings while the British tried to whitewash the events despite journalistic accounts and eyewitness reports.16 According to Bishop Edward Daly, “What really made Bloody Sunday so obscene was the fact that people afterward, at the highest level of British justice, justified it.”¹⁷ It was unquestionably a terrific recruiting tool for the PIRA. Their leaders, men such as Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness, found themselves having to turn people away, so many wanted to join.¹⁸

Bloody Sunday became a clarion call to Catholics throughout Northern Ireland, summoning them to resistance. What started as a small battle in a single Catholic community became a war that spread throughout Northern Ireland, and was the turning point in the Irish struggle.

MAIRÉAD FARRELL

In Mairéad Farrell’s Belfast neighborhood, murals depicting the Irish struggle stand next to images of Picasso’s Guernica, paintings of Palestinian refugees, and graffiti calling for freedom and human rights. For Republican nationalists, the connection to the American civil rights movement is clear.

Violence was all around Mairéad. As a child, she had to pass through military checkpoints and endure curfews. Her mother recalled that her daughter used to ride her bicycle to school. But on the Blacks Road, Protestant children would try to pull the Catholic kids off their bikes, so Mairéad had to start taking the bus. Soon the bus too was attacked on the Blacks Road, so the driver had to make a four-mile detour to get to the school. Such episodes contributed to Mairéad’s radicalization.19

Feeling that the Catholic community was constantly under siege, Mairéad joined the IRA when she was only a teenager. She vowed that she would do anything necessary to get the British out of Northern Ireland and end the occupation. She was captured while on active service, planting bombs at the Conway Hotel in Dunmurry, on April 5, 1976. When the three five-pound bombs exploded, they demolished the hotel, started a fire, and caused thousands of dollars worth of damage. No one was hurt because the PIRA had called in a warning fifteen minutes ahead of time and Mairéad and her conspirators had made sure everyone had evacuated the building before detonating the explosives. Within an hour of the blast, she was in police custody.

At her trial, Mairéad refused to recognize the court, give evidence, or make any statement. The judge sentenced her to fourteen years for causing three explosions, possession of three bombs and a Colt 45, and for being a member of an illegal organization. In the women’s ward of Armagh Prison, she was weighed, washed, and presented to the assistant governor (warden), who asked her what work she wanted to do while in jail. She refused to do any work, insisted on wearing her own clothes, and demanded her rights as a political prisoner. Mairéad served ten and a half years in Armagh’s A Wing. While in jail, she became a leader of the female prisoners and their official Officer Commanding (OC). She also became the PIRA’s poster girl for opposition to the British “occupation” of Northern Ireland.

The British legal system reversed the principle of “innocent until proven guilty” for Irish political prisoners at this time. Women arrested had to prove their innocence and since most Republicans refused, as Mairéad had done, to recognize the legitimacy of the British court, their conviction rate rose to 94 percent. The number of women in Armagh multiplied exponentially. According to Father Denis Faul, one of only two priests who were allowed access to the women jailed at Armagh, the prisoners were subjected to the most deplorable conditions.20

It was a prison out of Hollywood movies, characterized by iron bars, gray concrete walls, and humorless guards. It was old and falling apart. Each cell housing two prisoners was no more than six feet by nine.²¹ It contained two iron beds with the bedsprings soldered to the frames so they could not be detached. The beds were covered with a thin foam rubber mattress, a gray blanket, and a pillow sometimes made of straw.²² There were no amenities and no luxuries or comforts to speak of. Unlike the other wings of the prison, the A Wing had no educational or recreational facilities. As the numbers of incarcerated women increased, overcrowding worsened and the tensions between the prisoners and the guards intensified.

Mairéad had been arrested at the worst time for Irish political prisoners. In 1976, “special status” for political prisoners was arbitrarily rescinded. Women sentenced after March 1 of that year were thus denied the privileges granted to women sentenced a day earlier. Inmates in Armagh Prison’s B Wing enjoyed special status in recognition of the fact that they were political rather than criminal prisoners. They could wear their own clothes; were exempted from prison duties; received a weekly visit, letter, or package from their families; and had access to educational materials. Teachers instructed the women in a variety of subjects, including the Irish language, mathematics, geography, dressmaking, art, music, typing, and even physical education. The women could also sit for their high school equivalency tests.

The women without special status who, like Mairéad, refused to do any prison work were locked in their cells twenty-three hours a day and deprived of any mental and sensory stimulation. They were not allowed to watch television, listen to the radio, or get reading materials. They changed their clothes once every three months: for ninety consecutive days they had to wear the same jeans, sweaters, and underwear. The authorities did not bother to put sheets on their beds.23

During their time in jail, the women learned to suppress their feelings to avoid having a mental breakdown. They communicated with one another by tapping on the pipes and during their one hour of exercise in the yard. Given their isolation, they struggled to find ways to keep their sanity. They came up with different activities: bingo, trivia quizzes, singsongs, even the occasional political debate. Their singing was infectious—sometimes even the guards would hum or whistle along. Every night at 9:00 P.M., Mairéad would announce it was time to say the rosary, which they would all recite in Irish.²⁴ The women survived by forming strong friendships with one another. One woman recalled to me: “It was us against the system. They would try and undermine us and demoralize us but it didn’t work. We held on to our beliefs and if anything it made us stronger.”25

According to her prison mates, Mairéad became a skilled negotiator as the Armagh OC. She knew when to accept clean blankets or lice- and flea-free mattresses that would ensure the women stayed healthy, and when to turn down concessions intended to divide the women from the male prisoners in H Block and from each other. During her years there she maintained unity among the women. Typically, the spirit of every woman arriving in prison had been almost entirely broken by what she had endured during capture and trial. The police had forced most of them to sign some sort of confession, and at times the charges were fabricated. When the women were at their lowest, it was often Mairéad who lifted them up and gave them the strength to face the day.

THE PRISON PROTESTS

Over a period of five years beginning in 1976, the men in Maze prison (known as Long Kesh) engaged in the blanket protest. They were led by one prisoner, Kieran Nugent, who refused to wear his prison uniform. Instead, he wore only a blanket, and many of the newly convicted prisoners followed suit. The blanket protest led to the no-wash protest (which the British derisively termed the “dirty protest”) in which the prisoners refused to wash, and smeared excrement all over their cell walls. When the blanket and no-wash protests failed to yield any positive results for the prisoners, they opted for a radical act of self-sacrifice. In 1980 the men began a series of hunger strikes.

During the men’s blanket protest the female inmates in Armagh, led by Mairéad Farrell, refused to wear their prison uniforms in hopes of challenging the British government’s efforts to criminalize them. Unlike the men, they were not allowed to wear only blankets (which might have been more hygienic than their clothes). The women sang freedom songs in Gaelic—an overt expression of Republican nationalism—and demanded to be treated as prisoners of war and not as criminals.26

In addition to the blanket protest, Mairéad led the women in a thirteen-month campaign of passive resistance by refusing to bathe or use the two prison lavatories. According to the women, they did not start the no-wash protest of their own volition. When the women were locked down on February 7, 1980, after an incident in which the guards had ransacked their cells looking for pro-IRA contraband (including every piece of black clothing), the guards refused to provide access to the bathrooms. There were only two baths and two toilets for the thirty-plus female prisoners to begin with. Within a matter of days, the cells’ chamber pots (bedpans) were overflowing with waste. Initially the women threw the contents out the windows but then the guards boarded these up, and forbade the inmates from emptying the pots using the facilities. Finally, the women resorted to smearing excrement all over the walls of their cells in protest. Soon the cell walls were covered in feces, urine, and blood. The stench was overwhelming. The women recalled to me that there were days when they woke to find maggots crawling all over their hair and bodies.

Nevertheless they were undeterred. As one woman recollected, “It was amazing what one could endure for your principles, and, after a few days, the smell did not bother us and we were able to tolerate these conditions for over a year.”²⁷ Another described the process: “You would pluck a piece of pooh out of the chamber pot using a tissue that your relatives had smuggled in. Then you would smear it all over the walls. As the shit dried to a yellow or pale brown, it eventually lost most of its smell, but it was the urine, used sanitary napkins, diarrhea, and vomit that made everyone sick. The floors were covered in dust that was actually shedded skin and flies buzzed everywhere, dying in orgies on the uneaten food and excrement.”28 When the women woke, there would be hundreds of flies covering the walls. Woodworms jumped from pile to pile as various infestations spread through the prison population. The women’s health deteriorated. They lost weight. They lost their hair. Many developed a variety of internal infections. The accumulating broken nails, flaking skin, and hair transformed the cells into rats’ nests.²⁹ To distance themselves from the conditions, the guards patrolled the halls in nylon blue jumpsuits and white Wellington boots that made them look like astronauts on the moon.

After thirteen months of this, Mairéad Farrell, Mary Doyle, and Margaret Nugent began a hunger strike in solidarity with Bobby Sands and the other men at Long Kesh. The women felt that they had exhausted every other possible source of leverage with the prison authorities and the hunger strike was their last resort. All three were prepared to fast to the death to make their point.³⁰ Sands wrote of Mairéad, Mary, and Margaret in his diary before his death: “I’ve been thinking of all the girls in Armagh. How can I ever forget them?”³¹ One of the other male hunger strikers, Lawrence McKeown, said that the women’s experiences during the prison protests made the men more conscious of Irish gender stereotypes. The women recalled that the men at Long Kesh supported their struggle and wrote them notes of encouragement while the women’s movement never did. Large segments of the feminist movement viewed the women of the PIRA with suspicion and, at times, contempt. In fact, within the Irish feminist movement they were called the slaves and dupes of the men. In London, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher declared the three women were criminals.

Mairéad Farrell agreed with Lawrence McKeown that women in Ireland suffered twice, once as Catholics and once as women. Mairéad was quoted as saying: “I am oppressed as a woman, and I’m also oppressed as an Irish person. We can only end our oppression as women if we end the oppression of our nation as a whole. I hope I am still alive when the British are driven out. Then, the struggle begins anew.”32 For the women of the PIRA, the Republican nationalist struggle was intertwined with the struggle for equality. For many of them, there was no difference. The fight for freedom and equality was joined with the fight against the Unionists and the British army and crown. At the same time, most PIRA women did not consider themselves feminists. They felt a deep distrust of the women’s movement and resented the feminist argument that women’s rights came first, before revolution, independence, or freedom from Britain. Mairéad told her cell mates, “Everyone tells me I’m a feminist. All I know is that I’m just as good as others, and that especially means men.”³³

Once in the movement, the women were treated as equals. Seán Mac Stíofáin, former chief of staff for the Provisional IRA, said that in the early 1970s the PIRA had selected a number of women to be trained on the basis of full equality with the men. Some of the best shots he ever knew were women, as were the smartest intelligence officers in Belfast.³⁴ According to the women themselves, they never felt any kind of sexual discrimination or second-class status. Mairéad recalled that she was treated equally to the men, as were all of the women in the PIRA. “You got doing what the lads did but it depended to what extent you were committed, not measured by what sex you were.”³⁵

The women’s organization Cumann na mBan (Union of Women), founded in 1914 alongside the Irish Citizen Army, was one of the precursors of the IRA. Decades later, women were involved only peripherally in the movement, as support units or as “molls” used to lure British soldiers to an apartment or isolated area to be attacked by the women’s colleagues.³⁶ Women accompanied men on a mission as cover; a couple attracted less attention. Women also served as couriers, ferrying messages and weapons. The army’s difficulty was that they could not properly search women for contraband. The women also picketed at the drop of an insult; according to the women themselves, the British were terrified of them.

The British army often conducted night raids in Catholic neighborhoods, in night squads called Duck Patrols. Women began patrolling the streets in units that became known as Hen Patrols. They would blow whistles, bang garbage-can lids, and make as much of a ruckus as possible to warn of an army incursion. The women of Belfast and Derry became the not-so-secret weapon of the PIRA. They were lookouts who raised the alarm when British soldiers approached. They shielded fugitive gunmen when troops swooped into the Catholic ghettos. Over time, they began carrying weapons and taking part in armed encounters against British soldiers.

As the community was increasingly mobilized, more women and children became involved in the movement. Scotland Yard prophesized that mothers and wives would no longer provide a restraining influence on the men in their families. The women would not only egg the men on, but also join in the fight. But not all Republican women were involved in violence. Many joined the local citizen’s defense committees and participated in the anti-internment struggles, lobbying for the release of their husbands, brothers, and sons. Some women supported the PIRA simply by wearing paramilitary dress: black skirt, white blouse, and black beret. Wearing this outfit was sufficient cause to get a woman arrested and questioned for possible membership in a terrorist organization, which was itself criminalized. One woman told me that membership was used as a holding charge, especially if the authorities could not find any evidence against them. “So if you got off on one set of charges, they could prove membership in what they had termed an illegal organization and you would be sentenced anyways.”37

As the numbers of women active in the PIRA increased, the number imprisoned also grew. There were few women interned at Armagh Prison in 1972, more than one hundred in 1976, and more than four hundred by 1982.³⁸ More and more women were arrested on weapons charges and “intent to bomb.” Hundreds of young girls were dragged out of their homes in the middle of the night and interrogated. Once arrested, the women were forced to sign confessions that were often fabricated; many of the women on the Republican wing of Armagh jail had no real connection to the PIRA, and the actual number of women involved with the movement was much smaller than the number serving sentences.³⁹

Allegations of sexual misconduct and impropriety followed. In one notable case in 1975, Margaret Shannon, a prisoner who had been strip-searched, alleged that the guards had threatened to rape her in her cell that night. For four consecutive nights, officers came down to her cell, unlocked the door, and menaced her for hours, shouting obscenities and threatening to come in.⁴⁰ Another prisoner at Armagh, Anne Walsh, was beaten so badly in the head that she lost the hearing in one ear.

According to military sources, the army’s dossier on women’s involvement grew thicker every day, with women playing “an increasingly important role in IRA activities, especially as communications officers.” In 1973, the Price sisters, Marian and Dolours, made headlines when they received life sentences for the March London bomb attacks that killed one person and seriously injured 216. The following year, Judith Ward was arrested for a bombing on the M62 highway which caused many civilian casualties, and Roisin McLaughlin was wanted in connection with luring three British officers to their deaths.

The British use of the policy of internment refers to the arrest and detention without trial of people suspected of being members of illegal paramilitary groups. The policy was introduced a number of times during the conflict in Northern Ireland, including from August 9, 1971, until December 1975. During this period a total of 1,981 people were detained, more than 90 percent of them Catholic: 1,874 were Catholic/Republican, and 107 were Protestant/Loyalist.41 Six months after internment was introduced, nearly three hundred Irish Republican women (but no Loyalist women) had been taken into custody and Armagh Prison was bulging at the seams with female political prisoners. Maire Drumm had always said, for every woman they put in the Armagh jail, there would be fifty more ready to take their place.⁴²

Many of the women fighters exceeded even the PIRA’s expectations in terms of their skills and lethality. One of the most accurate snipers in the Belfast Brigade was a teenage girl; another young woman was their most experienced expert on booby traps. At times, the women were more ruthless than the men and made credible Rudyard Kipling’s assertion that the female of the species is more deadly than the male. Critics used hyperbole to demonize the women, comparing them to the harpies better known as tricoteuses who, during the French Revolution, sat knitting before the guillotine, counting their stitches by the severed heads. The women did not want the men accusing them of holding back just because they were women. The critics felt that the women were competing not only against the enemy, but also against the men of their own side to show that women could do anything men could do, and could hate better than the men too. The British military claimed that their troops were reluctant to fire upon women, even when faced with female snipers, although this was not always the case, as the subsequent events in Gibraltar would demonstrate.

Starting in the 1970s, scores of teenage girls bolstered the thinning ranks of the PIRA as men were either killed or jailed by British forces. The organization recruited the girls to carry timed devices, hidden under their clothing, into shops; they hoped that because of the girls’ youth, they would receive only cursory examination by security staff.43 Girls as young as thirteen smuggled bombs into Belfast city center. They targeted women’s and children’s clothing and toy stores, the kinds of places where a man would stick out like a sore thumb. Some nights, as many as ten devices would be found along Belfast’s busy Victoria Street, all timed to explode when the shops were closed and shoppers had gone home, nevertheless disrupting the economic life of the city. Some of the more fashionable girls hollowed out their three-inch platform heels and smuggled weapons, ammunition, and even rifle parts through security checkpoints. Each pair of platforms could carry half a pound of explosives.

Mairéad’s involvement in the movement mirrored the evolution of women in the PIRA. She had started out as a young girl, throwing rocks at British soldiers and banging garbage-bin lids to warn the PIRA that British troops were on their way. She acted as a lookout and weapons carrier when she was a teenager and then graduated to active service, throwing petrol bombs and planting the Conway Hotel bombs when she was nineteen. She would come to believe that the Irish people had the legitimate right to take up arms to defend their country against the British occupation and to use any means necessary.⁴⁴

Mairéad’s experiences in prison would have hardened anyone and yet she retained a softness and joie de vivre even during the darkest times. Her fellow inmates from Armagh recalled her wonderful sense of humor and uniquely Irish sense of irony. During the hunger strikes the women would sit around, their empty stomachs growling loudly, while Mairéad would regale them with tales of delicious curries in her favorite local pubs and restaurants. They understood the effect that their hunger strikes were having on their family and friends. It broke their hearts to see the worried faces of their fathers and mothers when they visited but there was no other way to defeat a system that treated them as common criminals. Mairéad ignored the guards who tried to humiliate her and laughed at their childish pranks. During the strikes the guards brought overflowing plates of hot food (a rarity at Armagh) three times a day to tempt the women to eat. Yes, they were hungry, but such transparent tactics would not defeat the women. Mairéad laughed in the face of her captors. Her admirers said that this showed the strength of her indomitable spirit.

The day after her release Mairéad Farrell was once again in the spotlight, giving interviews to the media and taking up the cause against the forced strip searches and the sexual humiliation of Irish women in prison. She would demonstrate to the assembled reporters how the guards had strip-searched her. The final insult had been the strip search on the day she was released, which had lasted twenty minutes.

Strip-searching female prisoners became a banner issue and a successful rallying cry for the Provisional IRA. The PIRA and Sinn Féin seized the opportunity to mobilize supporters into the movement by describing in horrific detail the process by which the guards and police used strip-searching to demoralize their community. From the perspective of the women, the use of strip-searching was a form of sexual humiliation intended to punish Republican women for their political activity.45

British officials insisted that strip-searching was a necessary precaution and that it was only a visual search. They maintained that at no time was the prisoner entirely undressed. Prison staff did not conduct body-cavity searches although they may have sometimes required prisoners to open their mouths. All prisoners (male and female) were routinely searched when leaving or returning to the prison to inhibit the passage of items such as explosives, weapons, drugs, and other contraband into and out of the prison, in order to reduce the risk of escape and for the general safety of prisoners, staff, and visitors.46 Hundreds of women told a different story in their testimonies and several in personal interviews. The British government’s description contradicts the accounts of the women incarcerated in Armagh and Maghaberry prisons.

According to these women, most of the searches involved highly invasive probing of all orifices, often regardless of the presence of male guards. The searches were repeated several times a day, even when the prisoner had never left the guards’ control. One woman told me that she was strip-searched seventy-five times in one week, and several times within a single hour.⁴⁷ Another said that it was “clearly intended to break us, [but] it just made us stronger and fight them harder.”⁴⁸ Another woman explained, “You would have to stand there nude and freezing as the guards felt the inside and outside of your legs. It was a degrading experience.”⁴⁹ Even young children and babies visiting prisoners were subjected to strip-searching. The searches were so invasive that not even menstruating women were exempt—they had to remove any sanitary napkins and hand them to the guards for inspection, much to the women’s disgust. If the women didn’t remove their tampons or towels, these were forcibly removed. The women recalled to me that it was utterly humiliating .

Prison did not deradicalize Mairéad. If anything, her experiences as a guest of Her Majesty’s prison service made her more focused on freeing Northern Ireland from British control. After her release, Mairéad returned to active service and started planning more bombing operations. Many of the plots to “shake the Brits from their complacency”⁵⁰ backfired with deadly repercussions. After the Remembrance Day bombing at Enniskillen, which killed eleven and injured sixty-three civilians,⁵¹ Margaret Thatcher had vengeance on her mind. Even though the Provisional IRA leadership and Sinn Féin denied responsibility for the attack and blamed one rogue brigade that had acted unilaterally, the massacre undermined the positive image the PIRA had enjoyed for several years after the death of Bobby Sands. Even the Irish rock band, U2, condemned the bombing and the organization. In their concert the following day in Denver, Colorado, the band’s lead singer, Bono, shouted to the crowd, in the middle of the song “Sunday Bloody Sunday”: “Fuck the revolution! Where’s the glory in bombing a Remembrance Day parade of old-aged pensioners, their medals taken out and polished up for the day? Where’s the glory in that? To leave them dying … or crippled for life … or dead under the rubble of a revolution that the majority of the people in my country don’t want.”52

Preventing another attack and killing the most famous female operative in the PIRA was a high priority for the British security services and they went through great efforts to circumvent any legal obstacles to kill Mairéad Farrell rather than capture her alive. Her murder, and that of two other members of the Provisional IRA, Danny McCann and Sean Savage, by agents of the Special Airborne Service (SAS) remains controversial. There is little doubt that the three Irish Republicans were unarmed when they were shot dead in Gibraltar on March 6, 1988. The British government eliminated an enemy but in the process created a martyr whose exploits are celebrated in Ireland to this day.

SIOBHAN

Like many other young women who joined the Provisional Irish Republican Army, Siobhan had been raised in Ardoyne, a West Belfast neighborhood that suffered from the tension and conflict caused by sectarianism. Armed struggle was all around her. Siobhan, like Mairéad before her, felt both the British army and the Loyalist paramilitaries were assaulting her community. As a teenager, she witnessed the British army enter Catholic neighborhoods, and saw how men and women were interned without trial. Siobhan’s uncle had been imprisoned as a rebel and shot while trying to escape. He was only wounded at first, but Siobhan said that the British army hunted him down and finished him off as part of their shoot-to-kill policy. The army routinely cut off food supplies to the Catholic areas and set up barriers and checkpoints that disrupted daily routine. Worst of all, both the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) and the British army failed completely to control the Protestant paramilitaries that routinely drove through Catholic areas, shooting or beating anyone in their path, including children.

In the ghettos of West Belfast, political awareness was instilled at an early age. Siobhan recalled being told, as a very young child, which areas were dangerous. There were five streets in her neighborhood that were safe; the rest were rife with what she called “murder and mayhem.” Her parents cautioned her that the “Shankhill Butchers” were taking anyone and to be careful. Even as a girl of eight, Siobhan was so affected that she later remembered vividly the impression made on her by the Irish hunger strikers and the election of Bobby Sands to parliament while he sat in prison wrapped in a blanket. Sands’s death in 1981 at the age of twenty-seven after sixty-six days of a hunger strike resulted in a recruitment surge for the Provisional IRA. In the days and weeks after Sands died, nine other hunger strikers perished. British prime minister Margaret Thatcher was widely condemned for letting an elected member of parliament die; Her Majesty’s government responded by amending the electoral laws so that no prisoner could ever run for office again.

On the day of her failed bombing attempt, April 28, 1990, Siobhan was a young, pretty, and idealistic seventeen-year-old, yet she had already been a member of an active service unit (ASU) of the Provisional IRA for three years. She felt at the time that she was living a double life, as she had never told her parents that she had joined up. Now that she had been arrested, she worried what their reaction might be. Her grandfather had been active against the British during the time of Michael Collins and Eamonn de Valera, but her parents were not political.

Siobhan joined the organization very young, like her mentor, Mairéad Farrell, who had herself been recruited at fourteen by Bobby Storey, a notorious leader of the PIRA, after he had escaped from Crumlin Road jail. As a young girl Siobhan idolized Mairéad and followed her exploits on the pages of An Phoblacht/Republican News, Sinn Féin’s official newspaper. One of only three women who had been on the hunger strikes53 with Bobby Sands, Mairéad suffered years of what she called cruel and inhuman treatment at the hands of the British.⁵⁴ Sands and the women at Armagh were a source of inspiration for a generation of young women like Siobhan, who grew up wanting to be just like them.

In many ways, Siobhan’s life as a terrorist paralleled Mairéad’s. Mairéad had taken the young girl under her wing when Siobhan secretly joined the PIRA. Siobhan was still in her first year with the organization when Mairéad was gunned down by the SAS in Gibraltar. Siobhan, only fifteen at the time, was devastated. “To the people of Falls Road Mairéad was a patriot. To the British she was a terrorist. To her family she was a victim of Irish history.”⁵⁵ To Siobhan she was a friend. Days before Siobhan’s bombing attempt, An Phoblacht reported on the British government’s actions to obstruct the investigation into the Gibraltar killings.⁵⁶ The assassination of Mairéad Farrell, the subsequent British cover-up, and a perceived pattern of discrimination and human rights abuses suffered all her life led Siobhan to board the airport bus that day to carry out her mission.

As the uniformed officers lifted the bomb from under her overalls and handed it to the bomb-disposal unit, Siobhan thought to herself that someone had given the authorities information about her mission. They knew too much. They knew that she would be traveling alone, that she would be pregnant (not really), and exactly what her plan was. The Provisional IRA was rife with informers and people who were working with the British security services, MI5, or the RUC. A few years earlier, a high-ranking informer on the IRA’s command council had provided the information that saved Prince Charles and Princess Diana from an assassination attempt at London’s Dominion Theatre in 1983. Another informer, a double agent code-named Stakeknife, had alerted the authorities to Farrell, McCann, and Savage’s mission in Gibraltar. Siobhan counted herself lucky that the officers had not shot her on the spot as part of the dreaded shoot-to-kill policy.

Siobhan was sentenced on May 21, 1990. When, years later, she reminisced about her time in jail, there was no regret or bitterness in her voice. Armagh’s green and pink stone walls had made her the person she was now. She felt that it was a tremendous growth experience for her. Like Mairéad, she had entered jail as an idealistic young woman, but her experiences in jail transformed her into a leader. Mairéad had not regretted her time in jail either. Her only regret was getting caught.

The idea that prison could be a learning experience was duplicated in many instances of political incarceration around the world. When Nelson Mandela left his prison cell after twenty-seven years in February 1990, the African National Congress dubbed the prison Robben Island University. It had become a college of resistance, a training school for opposition to apartheid in which the older prisoners cared for and educated the younger ones. In prison they learned to read and write, and became politically aware. Among Palestinian inmates in HaSharon and Megiddo prisons, captured terrorists serving life sentences take classes and complete degrees online. Northern Ireland in the 1990s (once political status was restored) was no different. According to the women, prison broadened their political horizons and sharpened their ability to recognize violence against women both in the family and as a form of economic exploitation. As part of the learning process, the women initiated contacts outside of prison. As a consequence, they identified themselves with women across the globe. They spent hours talking about politics, cooking, and studying. The camaraderie was intense and the friendships Siobhan formed in prison lasted long after she was freed.

While in jail, Siobhan worked out two hours a day and took classes online from the Open University toward her degree in political science. By the time of her release she had read hundreds of books on Irish history and politics and had learned about nationalist struggles in the developing world and injustice in places far and wide. Her experiences differed from those of Mairéad Farrell because special status had been reinstated. She was allowed to wear her own clothes, study, and receive packages and mail. Most important, special status meant that she was not considered an ordinary criminal. This was what Bobby Sands and the other nine men had died for, and why Mary Doyle, Mairéad Farrell, and Margaret Nugent had gone on their hunger strike.

After her release Siobhan once again followed in Mairéad’s footsteps, pursuing a degree in political science and sociology at Queen’s University in Belfast. She was active in many of the student organizations. Unlike Mairéad, who had become famous in jail, Siobhan rarely shared her personal history with others. Unless people were in the movement, they were unlikely to know who she was. But within her own community, she had rock-star status. When she got out of prison, every man wanted to date her and everyone wanted to buy her a pint. She laughed when she told me she could have gotten any man she wanted. After a few months of the adulation, however, she grew bored. She married a boy in her social circle and settled down to start a family. After school she went to work for several benevolent organizations connected to Sinn Féin. Eventually, she took a job at Sinn Féin headquarters.

Siobhan sat in her office wearing a colorful sundress with tiny red and blue flowers. Her shoulder-length strawberry-blond hair would occasionally fall into her eyes. She looked no more than twenty-five despite her five years in prison (she was released early as part of the Good Friday Agreement in 1995). A picture of two lively children and a handsome husband sat on her desk. She smiled a lot and spoke in an animated fashion of life in the PIRA.

Siobhan felt that she was working for peace and justice for her people, but legally now, helping to raise community awareness, ensuring that everyone had voting rights, and helping Sinn Féin win elections. Was she angry at having spent so many years behind bars? No, she did not feel any anger. Several times she said that everybody has to forgive in order to move the peace process forward. That’s what she was doing, working toward a peaceful future for her children.