Bombshell (13 page)

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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Another said that it was “clearly intended to break us, [but] it just made us stronger and fight them harder.”
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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.”
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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”
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backfired with deadly repercussions. After the Remembrance Day bombing at Enniskillen, which killed eleven and injured sixty-three civilians,
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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.”
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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 strikes
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with Bobby Sands, Mairéad suffered years of what she called cruel and inhuman treatment at the hands of the British.
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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.