Back to Tipperary
Roisín de Rossa talks to Ella O'Dwyer about her years in prison in
England and what it's like to be home in Tipperary
Crowds came out to welcome Ella O'Dwyer home - and they played Irish
music all night.
``It's like you're on a bus and you see all the people waiting there,
and you've been off somewhere, in between, and you come back and they
are still waiting there - except they are younger.''
Ella O'Dwyer, strikingly beautiful, self-possessed, is in a big
hurry.
On her release after 13 years in jail, mostly in England in appalling
conditions, the world didn't seem to be much different - except the
technology. When the mobile put up the message `check your mail box'
that is exactly what she did. `You've only to read the instructions,
you know, and do what they tell you,' her brother had said.
But that is exactly what Ella had forgotten how to do. ``If they said
to us, `You can't write a complaint everyday', then next day we gave
them two. We were unmanageable. Sure we had nothing to lose.''
Ella and Martina Anderson were sentenced to life, minimum 20 years,
in 1985. For the first 13 months they were on remand in Brixton. Up
to five strip-searches every day was normal. ``It was a very deep
invasion of your most intimate self. Most of the time they didn't
beat us like they did the men - that was the way they tried to prove
to fellows they were powerless. With women it was to show us how we
didn't have control over anything - not even our own bodies.
``Women in our society are supposed to be gentle, weak and submissive
- the `weaker sex'. They knew that we wouldn't have been involved in
the struggle at all had we accepted that role. Strip-searching is
designed to force you back into the submissive role. Strip-searching
was a way to impose subjection on us - to undermine our determination
to play our part in the struggle against oppression. It was to rob
you of the self-control that you had asserted in joining the
struggle.
``Women differ from men: they talk more easily about things, and are
perhaps more conscious of what is happening to them. Martina and I
could talk to each other. She was brilliant. No one really can
explain how you feel about comrades in jail. I just know that what
they went through, the pain and the suffering, it brought out a deep
humanity, and facing that reality - their optimism - that is the
stuff of rebellion.''
Ella gives the example of Patrick Hackett (who, though terribly
injured, endured many years of brutality in English prisons). ``Like
Patrick. That kept us going. I'm so proud that he comes from
Tipperary. And then the women in Armagh, men in the Blocks, the
hunger strike...'' and she tails off, and resumes ``you wouldn't want
to feel sorry for yourself - you'd be slaughtered.''
People who visited Ella said she'd apologise for causing them
trouble. She says herself that she didn't like to send cards to
people, all the hundreds of people who protested outside Brixton,
Durham, and even came over to Maghaberry when she and Martina were
transferred, cause she knew they'd send a card back with a tenner in
it!
Independence is the name of the game. Ella was the youngest in a
family of five brothers and one sister, on a small farm out in the
country between Roscrea and Nenagh. ``We worked hard as kids, milking
cows, cutting turf, feeding pigs, you name it.'' She determined to get
education and out of poverty. She travelled alone to work summers
abroad, in France, Greece, Germany, and Switzerland.
Ella was abroad when Bobby Sands' election hit the headlines all over
Europe. She came back to Ireland, joined the H-Block campaign, and
later joined a Sinn Fein Cumann. ``There is so much needing to be done
down here. There is so much political support for Republicanism.
Crowds came out to welcome me home. I was only the occasion, but it
wasn't for me, or Patrick, it was for the struggle - for freedom, for
equality.''
She went to UCD in Dublin and got a degree in English. Beckett,
Yeats, Kavanagh, Hamlet, Strumpet City - she doesn't even pause to
think who or which - and, always, love of Irish, and most of all,
Irish music. ``When we landed into Durham, Judith Ward, who had been
there already eleven years, who'd come in when she was just a
teenager, she played us Irish music. It was marvellous - amidst all
that cruelty, screams, emptiness, sadness and danger, why it was
almost a touch of Ireland again. I'll never forget it. She was
amazing - I really admired her greatly - just for surviving all those
unjust years.''
Ella got parole a year before release. Her father had open-heart
surgery.
``The family weren't Republican, but they stood by me - never
questioned or criticised. I said to my father, when I got out that
time, how I knew I had put them through so much grief, that I was
sorry for that, although I would do just the same again, and he said,
`I know. They are the most interesting people to me at the moment'.''
She talks about her time in Durham Jail. ``Durham conditions were
disgraceful. There was a sewer that, when the pipes froze, overflowed
into where we ate. They got the prisoners down on their knees to
clean it up and then gave them a Mars bar. No way we would put up
with that. We were expected to sew NATO uniforms - we refused. We
were locked up for months on `cellular confinement'. There were old
people - a 70 year old woman who said nothing but just kept repeating
4.30, 4.30, the time she was to be hanged; a young girl of 17, in
isolation; the cockroaches; the doctor, ex-Territorial Army, who
attempted to get the women to have hysterectomies. It was shocking -
that they could do that to their own people, treat them like that.
``You are going to have to do something about this, we said. There are
mentally disturbed people, sick people, who need treatment.''
They took on the fight. And they won. In the end they got
representatives from the lifers, the Category As, the long-termers,
the short-termers, the old and the young to meet together with the
governor, put their case and demand that their needs be met. And
slowly conditions for all the prisoners began to improve. They got
washing facilities, toilets in the cells, they got computers,
knitting workshops, and the prisoners got more confident. They got
better education facilities and Ella was able to do her Ph D, which
she finished back at Maghaberry.
When Ella and Martina were due to leave Durham for transfer to
Ireland, the prisoners partied several nights in a row (their
transfer was continually delayed). When the day finally came the
prisoners all queued up to shake hands. Someone had to put a stop to
them going round the queue again!
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