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17 September 1998 Edition

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Horses for courses

By Eoghan Mac Cormaic

So, what's next on the agenda? The team are in Stormont, they're negotiating away on our behalf, and all we have to do is sit back and watch the victories unfurl on the TV screens every so often. Is that it? Surely, I hear you ask, there's still work to be done... and you'd be right.

Back in the days of my innocent childhood, just as the Civil Rights protests were beginning, a campaign was mounted to `Flood 10 Downing Street with letters!' `Tell Harold Wilson what is going on!' yelled the posters on every lamp-post. On a fixed date, we were all asked to post a letter to Wilson, outlining the corrupt nature of the 6 County State, and ask him to intervene. Images of a postman, groaning under the weight of thousands of letters, Royal Mail bags spilling their deluge of letters onto the Downing Street hallway and poor Harold having to bend over to pick them all up and open them haunted my dreams. Ah, I was bewitched by the thought of it.

Historians will say that it was Gerry Fitt who asked Wilson to intervene, but months before that The Secret Diary of Eoghan Mac Cormaic, aged 12 3/4 records that I wrote my letter and learned to spell big words like Discrimination, Bigotry, Sectarianism, Unemployment, and Gerrymander for the first time. Off my letter went in the post on the due date and I sat back, satisfied that I'd `done my bit' for Ireland. I can't remember what exactly I thought would happen next, but I might have been expecting England to declare her intention to leave or prorogue Stormont. Innocence is bliss. A few weeks later a letter with a Downing Street crest arrived, and there was great excitement in the house. Harold Wilson had asked his Personal Secretary to write back to tell me that he was dealing with all the things I'd mentioned in my letter. No wonder he wasn't able to write back himself, sure he must have been busy with all the Discrimination, Bigotry, Sectarianism, Unemployment, and Gerrymander I'd been describing for him. I don't know why it didn't work.. maybe I should have sent another letter, and another and another. But I didn't.

A few years later, wiser to the ways of the world, I was involved in another lobbying campaign, of sorts. The Blanket protest had ended and POWs were trying to secure proper living conditions for the long haul. We'd been trying to make our voice heard through the channels, gathering in numbers at the grille at the end of the wing to raise our complaints and always seeking negotiations. We were getting little or no results, when someone hit on the idea of the Board Paper.

The Board Paper, the Prison system's official means of registering a grievance, had always been held in high esteem, reverence even, by the prison authorities. Nothing more than an A4 sheet of paper, addressed to the Secretary of State, but the prison administration used to treat the Board Papers like sacred objects. A prisoner had to request to see a governor before making a request to write a Board Paper. A pen would be supplied along with the crisp, pristine sheet of paper, the cell door would be locked while the POW was writing it, the governor or Principal Officer would collect it.... in fact it was a process begging to be humiliated.

We began writing Board papers by the dozen, knowing that every one of them had to be answered. The system was rapidly clogged up with Board papers, secretaries had to read each and every paper and reply to them. The sacred nature of the Board paper became a millstone for the system and soon screws on the wing had bundles of the blank forms in their office. When the system lost respect for its own procedures we had won.

For weeks we would flood the NIO with Board papers. Sometimes they'd get so confused they'd send replies to papers that hadn't even been lodged and all the time we'd keep coming back with more. It was a tactic, boring as hell at times, but as we moved from head-on confrontation to achieving the demands we had set, it was necessary. Soon they began to talk directly to our OC, but still the Board papers kept coming, and we still gathered up at the grille from time to time. What was necessary was the ability to see the time to change, to adapt, to think tactically. And never to leave it all to the negotiators.

Stormont reopened this week. The negotiators are doing their share. The rest of us still have to do ours.

An Phoblacht
44 Parnell Sq.
Dublin 1
Ireland