by Mia Bloom
Mairéad’s involvement in the movement mirrored the evolution of women in the PIRA. She had started out as a young girl, throwing rocks at British soldiers and banging garbage-bin lids to warn the PIRA that British troops were on their way. She acted as a lookout and weapons carrier when she was a teenager and then graduated to active service, throwing petrol bombs and planting the Conway Hotel bombs when she was nineteen. She would come to believe that the Irish people had the legitimate right to take up arms to defend their country against the British occupation and to use any means necessary.44
Mairéad’s experiences in prison would have hardened anyone and yet she retained a softness and joie de vivre even during the darkest times. Her fellow inmates from Armagh recalled her wonderful sense of humor and uniquely Irish sense of irony. During the hunger strikes the women would sit around, their empty stomachs growling loudly, while Mairéad would regale them with tales of delicious curries in her favorite local pubs and restaurants. They understood the effect that their hunger strikes were having on their family and friends. It broke their hearts to see the worried faces of their fathers and mothers when they visited but there was no other way to defeat a system that treated them as common criminals. Mairéad ignored the guards who tried to humiliate her and laughed at their childish pranks. During the strikes the guards brought overflowing plates of hot food (a rarity at Armagh) three times a day to tempt the women to eat. Yes, they were hungry, but such transparent tactics would not defeat the women. Mairéad laughed in the face of her captors. Her admirers said that this showed the strength of her indomitable spirit.
The day after her release Mairéad Farrell was once again in the spotlight, giving interviews to the media and taking up the cause against the forced strip searches and the sexual humiliation of Irish women in prison. She would demonstrate to the assembled reporters how the guards had strip-searched her. The final insult had been the strip search on the day she was released, which had lasted twenty minutes.
Strip-searching female prisoners became a banner issue and a successful rallying cry for the Provisional IRA. The PIRA and Sinn Féin seized the opportunity to mobilize supporters into the movement by describing in horrific detail the process by which the guards and police used strip-searching to demoralize their community. From the perspective of the women, the use of strip-searching was a form of sexual humiliation intended to punish Republican women for their political activity.45
British officials insisted that strip-searching was a necessary precaution and that it was only a visual search. They maintained that at no time was the prisoner entirely undressed. Prison staff did not conduct body-cavity searches although they may have sometimes required prisoners to open their mouths. All prisoners (male and female) were routinely searched when leaving or returning to the prison to inhibit the passage of items such as explosives, weapons, drugs, and other contraband into and out of the prison, in order to reduce the risk of escape and for the general safety of prisoners, staff, and visitors.46 Hundreds of women told a different story in their testimonies and several in personal interviews. The British government’s description contradicts the accounts of the women incarcerated in Armagh and Maghaberry prisons.
According to these women, most of the searches involved highly invasive probing of all orifices, often regardless of the presence of male guards. The searches were repeated several times a day, even when the prisoner had never left the guards’ control. One woman told me that she was strip-searched seventy-five times in one week, and several times within a single hour.47 Another said that it was “clearly intended to break us, [but] it just made us stronger and fight them harder.”48 Another woman explained, “You would have to stand there nude and freezing as the guards felt the inside and outside of your legs. It was a degrading experience.”49 Even young children and babies visiting prisoners were subjected to strip-searching. The searches were so invasive that not even menstruating women were exempt—they had to remove any sanitary napkins and hand them to the guards for inspection, much to the women’s disgust. If the women didn’t remove their tampons or towels, these were forcibly removed. The women recalled to me that it was utterly humiliating .
Prison did not deradicalize Mairéad. If anything, her experiences as a guest of Her Majesty’s prison service made her more focused on freeing Northern Ireland from British control. After her release, Mairéad returned to active service and started planning more bombing operations. Many of the plots to “shake the Brits from their complacency”50 backfired with deadly repercussions. After the Remembrance Day bombing at Enniskillen, which killed eleven and injured sixty-three civilians,51 Margaret Thatcher had vengeance on her mind. Even though the Provisional IRA leadership and Sinn Féin denied responsibility for the attack and blamed one rogue brigade that had acted unilaterally, the massacre undermined the positive image the PIRA had enjoyed for several years after the death of Bobby Sands. Even the Irish rock band, U2, condemned the bombing and the organization. In their concert the following day in Denver, Colorado, the band’s lead singer, Bono, shouted to the crowd, in the middle of the song “Sunday Bloody Sunday”: “Fuck the revolution! Where’s the glory in bombing a Remembrance Day parade of old-aged pensioners, their medals taken out and polished up for the day? Where’s the glory in that? To leave them dying … or crippled for life … or dead under the rubble of a revolution that the majority of the people in my country don’t want.”52
Preventing another attack and killing the most famous female operative in the PIRA was a high priority for the British security services and they went through great efforts to circumvent any legal obstacles to kill Mairéad Farrell rather than capture her alive. Her murder, and that of two other members of the Provisional IRA, Danny McCann and Sean Savage, by agents of the Special Airborne Service (SAS) remains controversial. There is little doubt that the three Irish Republicans were unarmed when they were shot dead in Gibraltar on March 6, 1988. The British government eliminated an enemy but in the process created a martyr whose exploits are celebrated in Ireland to this day.
SIOBHAN
Like many other young women who joined the Provisional Irish Republican Army, Siobhan had been raised in Ardoyne, a West Belfast neighborhood that suffered from the tension and conflict caused by sectarianism. Armed struggle was all around her. Siobhan, like Mairéad before her, felt both the British army and the Loyalist paramilitaries were assaulting her community. As a teenager, she witnessed the British army enter Catholic neighborhoods, and saw how men and women were interned without trial. Siobhan’s uncle had been imprisoned as a rebel and shot while trying to escape. He was only wounded at first, but Siobhan said that the British army hunted him down and finished him off as part of their shoot-to-kill policy. The army routinely cut off food supplies to the Catholic areas and set up barriers and checkpoints that disrupted daily routine. Worst of all, both the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) and the British army failed completely to control the Protestant paramilitaries that routinely drove through Catholic areas, shooting or beating anyone in their path, including children.
In the ghettos of West Belfast, political awareness was instilled at an early age. Siobhan recalled being told, as a very young child, which areas were dangerous. There were five streets in her neighborhood that were safe; the rest were rife with what she called “murder and mayhem.” Her parents cautioned her that the “Shankhill Butchers” were taking anyone and to be careful. Even as a girl of eight, Siobhan was so affected that she later remembered vividly the impression made on her by the Irish hunger strikers and the election of Bobby Sands to parliament while he sat in prison wrapped in a blanket. Sands’s death in 1981 at the age of twenty-seven after sixty-six days of a hunger strike resulted in a recruitment surge for the Provisional IRA. In the days and weeks after Sands died, nine other hunger strikers perished. British prime minister Margaret Thatcher was widely condemned for letting an elected member of parliament die; Her Majesty’s government responded by amending the electoral laws so that no
prisoner could ever run for office again.
On the day of her failed bombing attempt, April 28, 1990, Siobhan was a young, pretty, and idealistic seventeen-year-old, yet she had already been a member of an active service unit (ASU) of the Provisional IRA for three years. She felt at the time that she was living a double life, as she had never told her parents that she had joined up. Now that she had been arrested, she worried what their reaction might be. Her grandfather had been active against the British during the time of Michael Collins and Eamonn de Valera, but her parents were not political.
Siobhan joined the organization very young, like her mentor, Mairéad Farrell, who had herself been recruited at fourteen by Bobby Storey, a notorious leader of the PIRA, after he had escaped from Crumlin Road jail. As a young girl Siobhan idolized Mairéad and followed her exploits on the pages of An Phoblacht/Republican News, Sinn Féin’s official newspaper. One of only three women who had been on the hunger strikes53 with Bobby Sands, Mairéad suffered years of what she called cruel and inhuman treatment at the hands of the British.54 Sands and the women at Armagh were a source of inspiration for a generation of young women like Siobhan, who grew up wanting to be just like them.
In many ways, Siobhan’s life as a terrorist paralleled Mairéad’s. Mairéad had taken the young girl under her wing when Siobhan secretly joined the PIRA. Siobhan was still in her first year with the organization when Mairéad was gunned down by the SAS in Gibraltar. Siobhan, only fifteen at the time, was devastated. “To the people of Falls Road Mairéad was a patriot. To the British she was a terrorist. To her family she was a victim of Irish history.”55 To Siobhan she was a friend. Days before Siobhan’s bombing attempt, An Phoblacht reported on the British government’s actions to obstruct the investigation into the Gibraltar killings.56 The assassination of Mairéad Farrell, the subsequent British cover-up, and a perceived pattern of discrimination and human rights abuses suffered all her life led Siobhan to board the airport bus that day to carry out her mission.
As the uniformed officers lifted the bomb from under her overalls and handed it to the bomb-disposal unit, Siobhan thought to herself that someone had given the authorities information about her mission. They knew too much. They knew that she would be traveling alone, that she would be pregnant (not really), and exactly what her plan was. The Provisional IRA was rife with informers and people who were working with the British security services, MI5, or the RUC. A few years earlier, a high-ranking informer on the IRA’s command council had provided the information that saved Prince Charles and Princess Diana from an assassination attempt at London’s Dominion Theatre in 1983. Another informer, a double agent code-named Stakeknife, had alerted the authorities to Farrell, McCann, and Savage’s mission in Gibraltar. Siobhan counted herself lucky that the officers had not shot her on the spot as part of the dreaded shoot-to-kill policy.
Siobhan was sentenced on May 21, 1990. When, years later, she reminisced about her time in jail, there was no regret or bitterness in her voice. Armagh’s green and pink stone walls had made her the person she was now. She felt that it was a tremendous growth experience for her. Like Mairéad, she had entered jail as an idealistic young woman, but her experiences in jail transformed her into a leader. Mairéad had not regretted her time in jail either. Her only regret was getting caught.
The idea that prison could be a learning experience was duplicated in many instances of political incarceration around the world. When Nelson Mandela left his prison cell after twenty-seven years in February 1990, the African National Congress dubbed the prison Robben Island University. It had become a college of resistance, a training school for opposition to apartheid in which the older prisoners cared for and educated the younger ones. In prison they learned to read and write, and became politically aware. Among Palestinian inmates in HaSharon and Megiddo prisons, captured terrorists serving life sentences take classes and complete degrees online. Northern Ireland in the 1990s (once political status was restored) was no different. According to the women, prison broadened their political horizons and sharpened their ability to recognize violence against women both in the family and as a form of economic exploitation. As part of the learning process, the women initiated contacts outside of prison. As a consequence, they identified themselves with women across the globe. They spent hours talking about politics, cooking, and studying. The camaraderie was intense and the friendships Siobhan formed in prison lasted long after she was freed.
While in jail, Siobhan worked out two hours a day and took classes online from the Open University toward her degree in political science. By the time of her release she had read hundreds of books on Irish history and politics and had learned about nationalist struggles in the developing world and injustice in places far and wide. Her experiences differed from those of Mairéad Farrell because special status had been reinstated. She was allowed to wear her own clothes, study, and receive packages and mail. Most important, special status meant that she was not considered an ordinary criminal. This was what Bobby Sands and the other nine men had died for, and why Mary Doyle, Mairéad Farrell, and Margaret Nugent had gone on their hunger strike.
After her release Siobhan once again followed in Mairéad’s footsteps, pursuing a degree in political science and sociology at Queen’s University in Belfast. She was active in many of the student organizations. Unlike Mairéad, who had become famous in jail, Siobhan rarely shared her personal history with others. Unless people were in the movement, they were unlikely to know who she was. But within her own community, she had rock-star status. When she got out of prison, every man wanted to date her and everyone wanted to buy her a pint. She laughed when she told me she could have gotten any man she wanted. After a few months of the adulation, however, she grew bored. She married a boy in her social circle and settled down to start a family. After school she went to work for several benevolent organizations connected to Sinn Féin. Eventually, she took a job at Sinn Féin headquarters.
Siobhan sat in her office wearing a colorful sundress with tiny red and blue flowers. Her shoulder-length strawberry-blond hair would occasionally fall into her eyes. She looked no more than twenty-five despite her five years in prison (she was released early as part of the Good Friday Agreement in 1995). A picture of two lively children and a handsome husband sat on her desk. She smiled a lot and spoke in an animated fashion of life in the PIRA.
Siobhan felt that she was working for peace and justice for her people, but legally now, helping to raise community awareness, ensuring that everyone had voting rights, and helping Sinn Féin win elections. Was she angry at having spent so many years behind bars? No, she did not feel any anger. Several times she said that everybody has to forgive in order to move the peace process forward. That’s what she was doing, working toward a peaceful future for her children.
THE SCOUT
I do not recognize the legitimacy of this court, and I do not introduce myself to you by my name or age, I introduce myself with my actions … I see you all in this court today angry, and it is the same anger that [is] in my heart and the hearts of the Palestinian people … Where are your hearts when you kill children in Rafah, Jenin and Ramallah, Where is the sense!?
—Ahlam at-Tamimi, 20051
AHLAM
Ahlam at-Tamimi smiled angelically as she recalled the events of the afternoon of August 9, 2001, when twenty-two-year-old Izzedine as-Suheil Al Masri went to the Sbarro pizzeria at the intersection of Jerusalem’s King George and Jaffa streets. In Al Masri’s guitar case was a fifteen-pound improvised explosive device, which master bomb maker Abdullah Barghouti had packed with nails, screws, nuts, and bolts to maximize the carnage. This trip to the Sbarro pizzeria was not a maiden trip for Ahlam. The twenty-year-old from the village of Nebi Saleh had reconnoitered the street days earlier, studying the neighborhood to ascertain when and where a bomb might do the most damage. Ahlam claims that she chose the Sbarro after seeing the crowds of people who crammed into the restaurant at lunchtime.2 Israel assassinated Jamal a
nd Omar Mansour and six other people in Nablus on July 31, 2001; the next day, Hamas set in motion their act of revenge. The attack had taken just nine days to plan.
Ahlam pointed out the busy intersection to Al Masri. There were four stoplights and people crisscrossed the street in all directions. It was one of the busiest intersections in all of West Jerusalem, the Jewish part of the city. She first suggested detonating the bomb in the middle of the street, perhaps as a bus was stopped at the traffic light, so he could kill all the passengers inside in addition to the pedestrians. But he opted instead to enter the pizzeria.
Al Masri bore an innocent expression as he walked into the Sbarro and sat down at a table. It was 2:00 P.M. and the two-story restaurant was packed with families and young children eating their midafternoon snack. When the bomb exploded, 15 civilians were killed instantly and another 130 wounded. Half a dozen strollers lay charred on the street where mothers had left them while they ate lunch. When rescuers ran into the restaurant, the blistered bodies were still smoking, so hot that they could not be touched. The first wave of good Samaritans ran in and wrapped the pizzeria’s checkered tablecloths around the victims’ hair and clothes. Everyone in the restaurant and several passersby had been struck by shards of flying glass when the windows were shattered. Streaks of blood ran down people’s arms, legs, and torsos.
