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Nollaigh Shona Daoibh.
Beannachtaí daoibhse go leir. Have a great Christmas dear readers.
Thanks and benedictions also to the Belfast Media Group team. Christmas can be
a sad and stressful time for some people. Be mindful of them my friends. Reach
out to neighbours and others who may not be as lucky as we are.
I’m strongly against the commercialism of Christmas. I love the
Christmas story and the story of Joseph and Mary and of Jesus’ birth in a
stable. The simpleness of it all and the way children relate to Dadaí Na
Nollaig appeals to me. So let’s celebrate our humanity, raise a glass to absent
friends and give thanks to all who enhance and brighten our lives.
A NIGHT
BEFORE CHRISTMAS.
Earlier last week I was on my way to Craigavon for a book signing
event. The cold weather had conspired to create a thick fog. As we drove
along the M1 we passed what remains of Long Kesh prison and I was reminded of
another December, another fog and life in the internment cages.
I have undoubtedly told this story before but good stories always bear
telling more than once and it is Christmas. So put up with me.
It was December 1973. Republican prisoners were always scheming around
ways to escape. Some would go under the wire; others tried over or through the
wire, and others still tried going through the gate, usually in disguise as a
visitor. Although in the Great Escape they ran through the front gate pursued
by Prison Officers. On that famous occasion 19 out of the 38 escapees made it
to freedom.
Escape tunnels were dug, but these suited perimeter cages better.
Because of the time required, the problems involved in getting rid of the soil,
the closeness of the water table to the surface and the real difficulties
encountered in the actual tunnelling, many tunnels were discovered. Still,
persistence sometimes paid off.
The camp authorities countered efforts by increased raids and
surveillance, and wannabe escapees were badly treated. If captured during an
escape, we were beaten and subjected to spells in the punishment block,
followed by charges in the Diplock courts. Hugh Coney was shot dead by the
British army during an escape attempt in November 1974. Successful efforts to
escape over or through the wire were aided by the fog which frequently
enveloped Long Kesh in winter. Some of these escapes were unplanned. It was
just a matter of being in the right place at the right time, but it helped, of
course, to have wire-cutters or other equipment.
A team of us in Cage 6 – Marshall Mooney, Tommy Toland, Marty O’Rawe and
myself, all from the Murph – gathered up all the necessary tools, including
camouflaged clothing, bolt cutters and hacksaws. We studied weather reports and
spent months sitting up for hours waiting for the fog to fall. It didn’t. After
a while we got bored with this standing by and, to pass the time, we used to
escape from the hut – as a dummy run – and sneak around the cage. Marshall
Mooney became particularly adept at this, but despite his ingenuity it was
obvious that we were getting nowhere fast.
Fog or no fog, we decided to make a bid on Christmas Eve of 1973 during
the midnight mass. By now we had established the blind spots on the wire, and
we had perfected a method of getting to them. Christmas Eve eventually arrived,
and when the rest of the inmates were locked up, we four cut our way out of
Cage 6, and crept into a gap between the internee and sentenced ends of the
Kesh. It was ten o’clock. All around us we could hear the prison camp
settling down for the night. It was very bright where we were. We were
surrounded by miles of razor wire rolled in long tunnels and with watch-towers
overlooking it all.
Progress was slow; we crawled along inch by inch. By midnight a slight
fog fell. Security was immediately tightened. We could hear orders being
shouted all around us, and extra patrols were put out on the catwalk, which ran
within feet of us to our right. Inside Cage 6, to our left, a patrol was put in
the cage. Unfortunately, the fog was too light to assist us. The extra patrols
meant we couldn’t move. We decided to sit tight until the security was lifted.
‘What’s that over there?’ I heard one screw ask.
‘Only an old football,’ replied his fellow screw. I realised it was
Marshall Mooney’s head they had spotted, but fortunately they continued on
their patrolling rounds and we continued to sit tight.
However, they returned after a while, and one of them was convinced he
could see something other than a football. The game was up. ‘Ho, ho, ho, Merry
Christmas to you all!’ shouted Marshall Mooney suddenly as he emerged from the
razor wire. Then he moved along the wire, trying to draw attention away from
Tommy Toland, Marty O’Rawe and me. Searchlights cut through the darkness and
the light fog; sirens sounded. Pandemonium broke out in the camp as shouting
screws and soldiers ran around all over the place, guard dogs snarling and
barking.
Screws were shouting at Marshall to go to the other side of the wire,
but when he produced his wire cutters and started to cut his way through they
shouted at him to stop. Still trying to draw attention away from us, he walked
on along the wire, but there was just too much light and too much attention
focused on us, so I decided to try another ruse in the hope that the other two
might still be missed by the screws. I stood up and walked away from them. Marshall,
who copped on immediately to what I was at, shouted out ‘Hello!’ as if he were
greatly surprised to see me. We rushed into each other’s arms, greeting each
other like long-lost pals, ignoring the screws, the dogs and the chaos which
surrounded us. But the barking and shouting rose to a new crescendo.
The diversion didn’t work, and the screws threatened to set the dogs on
us if we didn’t go back the way we had come. The screws and soldiers were
pretty fired up as they bustled us up to the punishment block, and Marshall and
I took bad beatings. I was wearing a pair of glasses, which I had tied on, and
a very senior official pulled my glasses down and when he realised they weren’t
coming off he gouged my face so that the flesh was pulled away in a deep and
ugly wound. Meanwhile Tommy Toland had hit on the trick of shouting at Marty
O’Rawe in a English accent and marching him up to the punishment cells, all the
time shouting insults at him.
This succeeded in confusing the Brits, and so Marty and Tommy escaped
being beaten. In the punishment block we were taken one at a time and stripped
naked. I was first. As I made my way, draped in a blanket, to a cell
Toddler slipped a set of wire cutters to me. I put them under my mattress and
when we were returned to Cage 6 days later the wire cutters came with me.
Meantime the four of us were locked up in separate cells and the dogs were set
loose in the corridor outside. We feared that at any moment soldiers and
warders would descend on us, and so we kept our spirits up by shouting jokes
back and forth to each other. Marshall and Toddler in particular gave the
British soldiers a hard time.
Despite their provocations, or maybe because of them, the night passed
without incident, though at one stage a couple of British army officers came to
have a look at us. The next day, Christmas Day, a British army doctor was sent
in to see me as part of the routine of checking that we were still alive.
‘Can you give me some antiseptic cream for my face?’ I asked him.
‘What’s wrong with your face?’ he replied, looking straight at the ugly
wound on the side of my nose and across my cheek.
‘I hope you have a great Christmas’ I told him.
‘Happy Christmas to you too’ he replied with a grunt and away he went.
‘Ho Ho Ho’ big Marshall shouted into me. ‘Nollaig Shona duit
chara’
‘Nollaig shona daoibhse.’ I shouted back to him and Marty and Todler.
Then I wrapped myself in my blanket and settled down to be entertained
by Toddler and Marshall’s festive and very funny and colourful tirade against
the unfortunate British soldiers who guarded us.
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