Then the death in March 1981 of the MP for Fermanagh and south Tyrone prompted a by-election. Bobby Sands was entered as a candidate and the SDLP withdrew from the race, allowing the entire nationalist vote to swing behind the hunger striker. Sands won, giving a dramatic boost to the protest and to Adams’ plans to exploit the ballot box as well as the Armalite. On 5 May 1981 Sands died, his death leading to large-scale rioting. Some 100,000 people attended his funeral. Through his self-sacrifice, which appealed to the Irish people’s deep respect for martyrdom, Sands had won near universal acclaim among republicans.
One after another the IRA prisoners died and each time the republican enclaves erupted in violence. Lieutenant General Richard Lawson, the GOC, and Chief Constable Jack Hermon decided to bring in an extra Army battalion to help contain the public disturbances. The two men spent many hours discussing the situation, often late at night in the Chief Constable’s flat at police headquarters in Knock. Despite the scale of the street violence prompted by the deaths, the two men remained calm throughout the strike, according to a source party to their discussions. Mrs Thatcher, who frequently consulted them by phone, remained adamantly opposed to the idea of any concessions.
More funerals did not bring any change in Downing Street’s public position and, finally, on 3 October the hunger strike was called off, after the death of eleven prisoners – eight from the IRA and three from the INLA. The government then announced a deal: prisoners would be allowed to wear their own clothes and half of the remission lost as a result of joining the strike would be restored.
The most important practical effect of the strike was to strengthen the hand of those within the republican movement who favoured political campaigning. The strong instinct that the organization should abstain from elections – which had caused the original split with the Officials and which was still held by many in the Provisional IRA – had been compromised by Sands’ election. After Sands’ death Owen Carron, another prominent republican, held the Fermanagh and south Tyrone seat. The republicans had succeeded in showing that they could win elections and had done so largely because of the emotion generated by the hunger strikers’ sacrifice. Having a Sinn Fein MP opened a new dimension for republican propagandists. It brought home to the populace in Bromley or Barrow that the strength of feeling in Ulster led, in some places at least, to the people choosing a candidate who clearly endorsed IRA violence to be their representative.
In the years which followed the hunger strike, prisoners and prison officers evolved means of defusing crises through dialogue rather than confrontation. When BBC TV’s Inside Story was allowed to film inside the Maze in 1990 it became clear that prisoners there enjoyed privileges quite different to criminals in British jails. In one scene, evoking memories of the internment years when paramilitary groups held drill parades before the ‘criminalization’ of terrorist offences, a loyalist flute and drum band marched down the corridor on their H-Block to commemorate the battle of the Boyne. Prison officers confirmed that the men had 100 per cent control of their wings: the prison officers could only perform their duties with the co-operation of the inmates. Raymond McCartney, Officer Commanding the IRA prisoners in the Maze, and a veteran of the dirty protest, described it as a ‘political jail’.
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Just over a month after the hunger strikes ended a further drama began with the arrest of Christopher Black, a member of the Belfast Brigade, who had been mounting an illegal IRA roadblock in the Ardoyne. Black was taken to Castlereagh for questioning and, under pressure, he agreed to give information about the organization. Despite the use of cellular structures and Black’s comparatively lowly position, he was able to identify many people who he said had played a key role in acts of terrorism.
There had been previous attempts to use members of paramilitary groups in court but Chief Constable Hermon and the Army hierarchy at Lisburn agreed that there should be, as one senior Army officer describes it, ‘a very special effort made to persuade some CTs [converted terrorists] to turn Queen’s Evidence’, despite the mixed experience some years before with the ‘Freds’. The ‘very special effort’ involved trying to protect them from the kind of pressures which had led some of the Freds to return to the ghettos. Black was to become the most celebrated of the ‘supergrasses’, as these informers were known. Large sums of money were allocated to give the supergrasses – often accompanied by their wives and children – a new life away from IRA retribution.
Black told the police that he would testify against several people who he said were senior IRA members. These included Gerald Loughlin, who according to the RUC was commander of the Belfast Brigade’s 3rd Battalion, and Kevin Mulgrew, described as being in charge of one of Loughlin’s subordinate ASUs. A total of forty-one people were arrested on Black’s word, although three of them were not subsequently charged.
In August 1983, thirty-five of the thirty-eight people charged were found guilty in the Black case. During the trial Black had painted a picture of the IRA which was quite different to the idealized image projected in republican propaganda. He told of boredom, mistakes and service in an IRA unit nicknamed the ‘Sweeney’ which meted out punishments to wrongdoers on the estates. Although claiming that he had deliberately undermined attacks on the security forces, Black and his colleagues emerged as brutalized people who gave little thought to the purpose or consequences of their violence. It was a notable propaganda coup for the security forces.
Exploiting supergrasses offered tempting possibilities for the police. Few people would give evidence against paramilitaries, and the IRA’s growing forensic awareness meant that they often left few clues. Although by the early 1980s the Special Branch informer network was giving more information than
