WeeklyWorker

23.01.1997

POWs killed by Labour and Tory

Terry O hEarcain (from the Irish Republican Socialist Party) and Tom Ball give their views on the film ‘Some mother’s son’ and the impact it has today

Just when the Daily Mail readers thought it was safe to go back to the cinema that nasty, nasty man Terry George has gone and made it all unsafe for them. What could be more unsettling for these folks than yet another dose of the truth - well, sort of - about the occupied Six Counties of Ulster. These poor people have had enough: first there was that awful man, Neil Jordan, with his lies about the father of terrorism, and now this.

Only this time the truth telling has been a little closer to home. The subject matter of Terry George and Jim Sheridan is the most taboo - the republican hunger strikes of 1981.

The fact that 10 young Irish republicans - three members of the Inla; seven members of the IRA - starved themselves to death in front of the world’s media just over 15 years ago is something that the governments north and south of the Irish divide would like us all to forget.

The film opens with the election of Margaret Thatcher as prime minister and then proceeds to the Tory think tank that invented her new policy to defeat the IRA and Inla - ‘Ulsterisation’.

The movie then cuts to a cell meeting of the local IRA, who are planning a response to this latest helping of Brit imperialism. What follows is like a snapshot of the times. Son borrows mother’s car to buy shoes, but in fact uses it to carry out an operation against troops closing off a border town in company with his comrades.

One of the most poignant scenes of the film occurs when we see Helen Mirren as Mrs Quigley visiting her son in police custody. She asks him why he tried to kill one of the SAS men who arrested him and his comrade Frank Higgins. He tells her, “Ma, he was waiting to kill us and got shot - you have been trying to run away from this stuff for years.”

Terry George has made a film that does not apologise for the republican mentality but rather shows the viewer what that ethos is all about. However, he then fails to show one of the main points and consequences of the ‘Ulsterisation’ policy - the conveyor belt system in which young Irish men and women were first lifted, taken to special interrogation centres, sent to a special no-jury court, then on to special prisons, only to be told at the end of the journey that they were ordinary criminals.

The main meat and potatoes of the script is the relationship between the mothers of Quigley and Higgins. The Quigley character, brilliantly played by Mirren, is that of a typical middle-class catholic school teacher, and the Higgins character a dyed-in-the-wool republican who has already seen her husband shot dead by the British army. The interaction of the two women, as both their sons go first on the blanket and then on to the hunger strike together, is as skilfully crafted a piece of cinematography as you will see and is a joy to watch.

However, it is not the staunch republican Higgins who is converted to the futility of armed struggle, but rather the middle class eyes of Quigley that are opened to the suffering and pain of the North all around her.

It must also be said that the film not only brings home difficult truths to the British but also to the Irish film public, for as the relationship between the two women grows, Mrs Quigley’s awakening grows as well. She is forced to come to terms not only with perfidious Albion and the fact that, far from being safe in her little world, she is actually a member of an underclass in her own land - but also the duplicity of the Catholic Church.

The church is shown in its true light on this issue and the Father Fall-like character is exposed at the end for what he was - a mere dupe who was cynically exploited by the British government to try and end the fast. All this is brought home to her when the nun who is headmistress of her school tries to suspend Mrs Quigley for her protest activities.

In this film, the courage and dignity of the prisoners and their families is touched on, but never quite done justice. I do not think this is a fault in the film, but rather a point that can never be made. Those of us who played an active role on the streets in those days will never be able to forget the pride and determined courage of the boys in the Block or their families as they faced their slow and painful deaths. The death of Bobby Sands is shown with dignity and feeling from the moment he starts his last slow journey down the wing to the prison hospital.

At this point I must say I find it hard to reconcile the fact that Terry George chooses to gloss over Inla involvement, as Terry himself was once an Inla prisoner in the cages of Long Kesh. Three Inla prisoners died on the fast.

However, the feelings of futility as the death toll mounts is captured well, as is the intransigence and wanton inhumanity of the Thatcher government to the prisoners and their five demands.

The brinkmanship of the British government is shown in the last few scenes when the minister for prisons steps in and uses the church to broker a lesser deal. This causes the death of Higgins because of the delay in scrapping one deal in favour of another.

As she sits beside the bed of her dying son, Mrs Quigley first agonises over, then takes the decision to remove her comatosed son from the fast. As they move him to an intensive care ward they pass the body of Frankie Higgins being removed with his mother by his side.

Mrs Quigley tells her friend, “I had to take him off.” Mrs Higgins retorts, “At least you had that choice.” In those few lines is the paradox of the film. Did Mrs Higgins let her son die because her son wanted it or because the movement wanted it?

The last words of a fellow Derry man and comrade of mine do not fit the bill for the ending of the film. As he lay for the last time in his mother’s arms, the O/C of the Inla prisoners, Patsy O’Hara, told his mother: “I am sorry, mammy. We did not win. Please, mammy, let the fight go on.”

The deaths of all the 10 will stay with me and us all for ever. Let us hope as Irish men and women we can come to terms with the fact that they died for us and because of us.

Terry O hEarcain

British imperialism’s crimes in Ireland are manifold. Not least has been its treatment of captured men and women of the republican movement, imprisoned in the H-Blocks and Armagh after ‘trials’ in the no-jury Diplock courts. Following the Gardiner Report, in 1976 the Labour government under Callaghan removed ‘special category’ status from these prisoners of war under its policy of criminalisation. Special category status had been granted by the British authorities in 1972 after political prisoners went on hunger strike for nearly five weeks; it was one of four IRA conditions for truce negotiations. The captured republicans immediately resisted criminalisation.

Some mother’s son commences with an IRA attack on a British column after the closure of ‘unauthorised roads’ between the Six Counties and the 26 Counties of Ireland. Gerard Quigley (Aidan Gillen) is one of the IRA Volunteers who carries out the attack; his CO is Frank Higgins (David O’Hara). Arrested over Christmas dinner by British forces, Gerard and Frank are given kangaroo court ‘justice’ and sent to the H-Blocks of Long Kesh (Long Kesh is referred to throughout the film as The Maze, the new, British name it was given after ‘Long Kesh’ became synonymous worldwide with ‘concentration camp’ during internment without trial in the 1970s).

After H-Block activists were harassed and murdered in the Six Counties in late 1980, and following a massive H-Block demonstration, ‘on the blanket’ prisoners rejecting criminal uniform in the H-Blocks refused the insulting British offer of ‘civilian-type clothing’. Seven H-Block men (six IRA and one Irish National Liberation Army) went on the first hunger strike starting on October 27 for the political prisoners’ demands. Some mother’s son neglects to mention that clothing was only one of the political prisoners’ five demands, which were:

Three women political prisoners in Armagh and 30 more H-Block men joined the hunger strike in December. Despite intimidatory beatings, some 500 men had joined the blanket protest supporting the hunger strikers by the end of 1980. Street demonstrations added to the effect of the prisoners’ actions.

Just before Christmas 1980, the Tory government appeared to climb down and the hunger strike was called off. But this was just manoeuvre on the Tories’ part and they reneged on their promises: their treachery resulted in the prisoners starting another hunger strike, initiated by officer-in-charge of IRA H-Block prisoners, Bobby Sands (John Lynch). In Some mother’s son, Gerard Quigley shares Sand’s cell and fight, eventually joining the hunger strike himself, as does Frank Higgins.

In ending the hunger strike, political prisoners considered their sacrifices had “politicised a very substantial section of the Irish nation” (An Phoblacht/Republican News October 10, 1981) and that they would continue the struggle for the five demands. Their struggle within prison was supported by tens of thousands in the whole of Ireland, joining it to the armed struggle and electoral work and engendering solidarity throughout the world, including in the imperialist citadel, Britain. Some mother’s son cannot help but show some of this, whatever its real motives.

Tom Ball