From 24 January 1981 – H-Block setbacks and latest assassination attempt mean . . . VIGILANCE VITAL

THE SETBACKS in the H-Blocks and Armagh Jail – after the original relief that the protest was settled – certainly involve vigilance and may well again involve not just the mobilisation of the old faithfuls but the unleashing of much more fresh support which presents the British Government with no choice but to grant the prisoners their demands.

And a resumption of H-Block/Armagh protests (which implicitly raises the national question) will also mean attempts on the lives of campaign organisers, like that last week upon Bernadette McAliskey.

● On the march in County Tyrone, February 1980. Those heading the march included: Miriam Daly (far left, holding the banner) and John Turnly (second row, with dark glasses), both subsequently assassinated by unionists, and Bernadette McAliskey (far right, holding banner), the latest target for loyalist gunmen

So it is not only vital that vigilance be maintained in pressurising the British Government not to backslide on the hunger strike settlement but vigilance against loyalist attack must not be relaxed just because there has been less tension in the air than in the latter half of the year.

From about last summer, a rising grievance within the oppressed nationalist people of the North, and throughout Ireland, was the continuance of the barbaric treatment by the British of young men and women in the H-Blocks of Long Kesh and in Armagh Jail. Two years previously, the visit of Cardinal (then Archbishop) Ó Fiaich to the H-Blocks and his subsequent public condemnation had nailed as fact the inhuman treatment taking place in Long Kesh, and the continued endurance of suffering by the Blanket men began to break down the walls of apathy encouraged by the Free State and SDLP leaders.

By the summer of 1980, however, the British Government’s new ‘initiative’ on the North – [Secretary of State] Atkins’s ‘round table’ conference – was in tatters, and the National H-Block Committee as a mobilising force was beginning to assume more and more prominence. But to the loyalists this was just another form of nationalist militancy and expression — and something which, unlike the SDLP, they could not contain and whose actions threatened to prise concessions from the British.

In a campaign aimed at demoralising the nationalist people through ruthlessly assassinating public figures associated with the H-Blocks committee, loyalists, and in particular the paramilitary Ulster Defence Association, murdered John Turnley, then Miriam Daly, then Ronnie Bunting, and then Noel Little.

The only way to end sectarianism and such killings is to succeed – and succeed we shall!