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.
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