Part of women’s contingent, Troops Out demo, May 8, 1982, copyright Helen Dady.
Nettie: We first met in early 1973 in the Women on Ireland Collective which held regular meetings at the Kingsgate Women’s Centre in Kilburn, west London. Although my family and personal background was in Left politics, and in the early 1970s I had become far more involved in sexual and women’s liberation issues, I was also greatly concerned about the political situation in Northern Ireland (NI) which was essentially about Irish independence and the Irish National Question[1] generally.
The focus of the Women on Ireland Collective’s campaigning at the time was on the Price sisters, Marian and Dolours, two female prisoners from Belfast, both feminists and members of the Provisional Republican Army (PIRA) who were convicted of terrorist bombing offences in London in March 1973 resulting in 265 people being injured and one person later dying of a heart attack. The sisters were serving life sentences in Brixton Prison, south London, where they were on hunger strike and were subjected to force-feeding, in total 167 times over 203 days.
Information from Price family members that the prisoners were suffering extensive vomiting, mouth abrasions, tooth damage, fainting attacks, and mental trauma impacted strongly on those critical of the British government’s political strategy concerning the treatment of political prisoners. As an English person, their plight affected me deeply, not least because force-feeding was defined as torture and in violation of the European Convention on Human Rights signed by Britain in 1951.
Ann: The hunger strike and force-feeding of the Price sisters also resonated strongly with me as an Irish person influenced by the prison experiences of women in the Irish independence and suffrage movements in the early 20th century. One of the most prominent was Constance Markievicz, a socialist, republican, army officer, feminist, the first woman elected to the British Parliament, and Europe’s first female cabinet member. Like Markievicz, I believed at the time that national independence and women’s liberation were at least connected, if not inextricably linked, and my recollection is that Collective members were largely of the same mind.
My membership of the Collective was motivated by the desire to join a debate in the British Women’s Liberation Movement (WLM) on the effects of the conflict (euphemistically known as ‘the Troubles’) on the lives of women in an integral part of the United Kingdom. I was enthusiastic about having a feminist forum willing to debate a wide range of issues, for instance, the use of violence,[2] the reasons for the failure of the British state – the supreme authority in NI – to fulfil its much-vaunted role of peacemaker, its lack of support for the NI civil rights movement,[3] and its seemingly blind resolve to replicate the disastrous and deadly mistakes made elsewhere in the process of decolonisation. Another subject debated was the widespread belief, constantly touted in the media and in society at large, that the Troubles was merely about two warring tribes in dispute over religious differences, rather than a power struggle between a dominant settler population and an oppressed minority.[4]
Nettie: A token hunger strike outside Brixton prison between the 8th and 10th February 1974, linking the forcible feeding of the suffragettes and the Price sisters was proposed by the Collective as a means of drawing attention to the plight of the prisoners in the WLM. A great deal of publicity had been carried out in the lead-up to our hunger strike, putting out notices to all the WLM networks and associations, as well as Left groups and trade unions, newspapers, radio stations, and Irish organisations and media.
There were several positive responses, like the live interview Greater London Radio conducted with the Collective outside the prison in the middle of the first night, and which brought some visitors. One arrived with a bag of sandwiches procured from his works’ canteen which we had to decline, given that we were on hunger strike! An elderly Irish man retired from the prison service brought us a pot of hot, sweet tea and talked with us for a while.
On Saturday night the Collective played host to quite a large group of women who responded to a message about the strike relayed at the lesbian disco held at the Crown and Woolpack pub at the Angel. Both nights were spent sitting in the rain unable to sleep for fear of assault by members of the public or being ‘lifted’ by the police. There was also a strong feeling of intimidation because prison security staff regularly checked the prison perimeter with the aid of very large dogs.
Ann: On Sunday morning, the American folk songwriter and musician, Susan Straightarrow, sang and played guitar for us. Friends and family members joined us, and several journalists came by, including Eamon McCann, the civil rights activist from Derry who wrote about our strike in Time Out, the weekly listings magazine. As far as publicity was concerned, Nettie, there was also your account of the strike transmitted by the BBC World Service across the globe following the impromptu interview you gave to one of their journalists visiting the National Council for Civil Liberties (now Liberty) where you worked on the switchboard.
Unsurprisingly, there were rejections and negative comments, too. One very vocal condemnation came from a man who phoned us at a nearby telephone kiosk designated our communications centre in an era predating mobile phones. He declared us ‘terrorists’ who would be ‘taken out’, along with the Price sisters – ‘in coffins’. Outright rejections and cautious reactions came in the form of silence. The only negative comments in print followed Spare Rib’s feature article on our strike (No.22, 1974) via letter-writers’ responses. One, from Anna Ansraab, was especially incensed by our linking of the force-feeding of the suffragettes and the Price sisters. She stated:
I object to your soiling the memory of the Suffragettes by including a 1914 passage about them in the same feature as if it were some kind of direct parallel. What distinguishes the Suffragettes from people like the Price sisters is the fact that before setting fire to buildings and breaking windows on a protest they went round in groups to see whether the buildings were empty of both people and animals.[5] Rather different, I think from the despicable [P]IRA tactic of giving deliberately wrong or confused telephone warnings so that people are sometimes herded into direct force of the blast. (Spare Rib, 23, 1974)
In response, the Spare Rib editorial team gave a detailed reply. They argued that they had presented an alternative viewpoint in the light of the welter of information coming from the British government and media sources daily, a not inconsiderable amount being misinformation, especially in attributing all deaths and injuries ascribed to the PIRA regardless of whether they were perpetrated by the British Army, the police or Loyalist (a type of Unionist) paramilitaries. They added: ‘the [P]IRA are always described as terrorists though similar forces operating further away, whether in place or time, are referred to as liberation forces’ (Spare Rib, 23, 1974).
Nettie: For the rest of its short life the Collective continued making connections through fact-finding trips to Belfast and Derry which were reciprocated by women invited to address feminist gatherings in the London area and beyond. One memorable one was about the 1971 rent and rates strike organised by Republican women against internment[6], others highlighted British Army routine, violent house raids in Republican ghettoes, the widespread use of CS gas, and the deadly consequences of the firing of rubber bullets and baton rounds. These visits and exchanges continued after the demise of the Collective through the activities of the Women and Ireland Group (1976-1980), which campaigned extensively on the abuses of the Prevention of Terrorism Act (1974), the London Armagh Group (1980-c.1987), which focused on female Republican prisoners, and through other groups in different parts of Britain.
Ann: Looking back, Nettie, I think that the connections you mention were among our most positive achievements in the short life of the Collective. To me, it’s important to see the group, not only as a strand of the WLM, but as part and parcel of a tradition established in Left and progressive circles in Britain, a significant example being the South African Boycott and Anti-apartheid campaigns stretching back to the 1950s and 1960s. The experiences and concerns of women worldwide in armed conflict zones and dictatorships began to be emphasised in these organisations reflecting the influence of the women’s movement worldwide.
In the British WLM, there was a certain amount of focus on existing or former US-dominated neo-colonial regions in Latin America, like Chile, Nicaragua, Argentina, and Cuba, considerably less, if anything at all, on large swathes of Africa, Asia and the Middle East where people were painfully extricating themselves from British colonial rule, to say nothing of those nearer to home like Cyprus and Northern Ireland.
My memories of attending meetings and listening to debates informed by knowledgeable political exiles in groups like the Chile Solidarity Campaign set up in London in 1973, is that they provided a political haven for anti-imperialist emigres like me. Apart from race and slavery, other salient issues in the colonial context – imperialism, nationalism, ethnicity, religion, settler supremacy, communal conflict, women’s participation in armed warfare in pursuit of the ‘liberated’ nation, and the like – were rarely thrashed out in depth in the British WLM.
On coverage of the Troubles expressly, an exception was in the popular journalism of Spare Rib, but not in its weightier counterpart, Red Rag, the socialist-feminist Marxist magazine, both first published in 1972. Half a century on, mulling over these absences and silences, I’m minded of a comment made by Amanda Sebestyen in her Introduction to the Prison Letters of Countess Markievicz’, ‘…I, like most people born in England (even though my mother’s Irish) can hardly bear to look at Ireland until it’s safely in the past.’ [7]
* ‘The Pale’ refers to the part of Ireland directly under the control of the English Crown in the late Middle Ages. Colloquially, it means ‘outside the limits of propriety’
[1] The ‘National Question’ refers to unresolved issues concerning nation and nationalities.
[2] A total of 3,720 deaths and 47,541 injuries were logged throughout the Troubles.
[3] In 1972, the Parachute Regiment opened fire on unarmed civil rights marchers, killing 13, and in effect crushed the NI civil rights movement and its campaign to reform the Unionist-dominated regime.
[4] The settler population, mainly Lowland Scots and Northern English dates to the Plantation of Ulster which began in 1609 in the reign of King James I of England.
[5] A bomb warning was telephoned to The Times giving the police one hour to evacuate the four areas where bombs were placed.
[6] Nearly 2,000 civilians were interned without charge between 1971 and 1975.
[7] Published by Virago, London, 1987.