Matt Lundy

By AM Monday, January 8, 2024

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Anthony McIntyre  ⚑ There were many teenagers on the blanket, people who in today's terms would be officially acknowledged as children. 

Matt Lundy

The tenderness of their age did not spare them the violent wrath of the state. People prepared to murder children on the streets would have few qualms about beating them in prison. 

Matt Lundy - who died in September - hailed from West Belfast's Turf Lodge. It was a working class community that on top of the deprivation it endured was also subject to British state violence. Names of teenagers like Brian Stewart and Leo Norney were already inscribed on tombstones in local cemeteries where they were buried after being murdered by the British army. They were also etched into the minds of their own generation. So when people wonder why teenagers like Matt Lundy should join the IRA, the answer is not too hard to find. The violence of the state gives rise to the violence of the street.

Matt first heard a cell door clang shut behind him at sixteen years of age when he was imprisoned in 1977. He eventually completed a life sentence.

I came across him in 1978 during the blanket protest. We were never on the same protest wing but spent about two years in the same block, H4, before our wing was moved out to H6 in November 1980.

For years I only ever saw him at the weekly Sunday mass, and say hello prior to moving onto people we both knew better. Sunday mass was like a form of socialising and often the prisoners from the same area outside would congregate together, picking up the latest scéal’, or scandal from their own localities. The gravitational pull of one's own community extended into the canteens of the H Block protest.

A number of years would pass before I got to know Matt reasonably well in the jail. We would have long lasting political discussions about the type of movement we would like to see, the strategic possibilities and limitations of armed struggle, how we should deal with the Life Sentence Review Board,  potential differences between Trotskyism and Leninism, as well as the United Front versus the Broad Front. We discussed at length The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci by Perry Anderson, our eagerness fortified by a critique of neo Marxist thinkers by Norman Geras. Given how things turned out, we might well wonder today what was the point in any of it but that is how we got through our time in jail.  The loyalists did religion and republicans did Marxism, both schools of thought left far behind once the gates opened. 

Matt was by no means a doctrinaire Marxist, but he was quite capable of conversing about Marxism, fuelled by a restless curiosity about political strategy. He was very interested in how republicanism should respond to Left wing critiques, of which there were quite a few in the jail. Matt despite his youth had a wisdom beyond his years. I tended to regard him as a wise young owl. Rarely impulsive, everything he said was considered. Like a chess player he thought moves ahead.

The violence that Matt's community in Turf Lodge had been subjected to did not take a rest once Turf Lodge republican activists had been removed from the streets.  He was no stranger to prison staff brutality. During my time in H4 there was a week known as the Seachtain dona - the bad week. Seamus Kearney gives a chapter of his searing memoir No Greater Love over to it:

all hell broke loose as these quasi criminals ran amok within H4 with over 150 incidents of violent assault on prisoners being reported. We cowered in our cells as we listened to the far wing being mercilessly beaten by rampaging screws and the groans from the men as baton hit flesh with a dull thud.

Matt was amongst those attacked but there was no chance of him being dissuaded from the protest by screw thuggery.

After release I would call in on him and his wonderful partner Margaret in their home in Gortnamona. At two crisis points he proved the most valuable of friends. And while I had not met him for many years I have always brimmed with gratitude each time I reflect back on his steadying hand, his comforting advice.

During his time in prison he mastered the Irish language and would go on to both promote and teach it in his community once released. He was also heavily involved in community activism. Seamus Kearney referred to him as a 'warm, genuine and selfless Irish Republican who suffered and endured, but never lost his sense of humour or his humility.'

So it was with heavy heart that I sat down when my friend Leanne rang from Dublin one evening in September to tell me that yet another blanket had been drawn over the face of a Blanketman.

⏩Follow on Twitter @AnthonyMcIntyre.