 |
| Ronnie McCartney Image @ Belfast Media |
When he was released in 1995, he was described as the longest-serving republican prisoner. The bulk of it was spent in English prisons of which he saw quite a few as a result of ghosting - a practice which saw prisoners, without any notice, ghosted out of the prison they were in to another, maybe hundreds of miles across the country. A frequent habit of prison authorities was to move prisoners hours before their family visit. The family would then arrive at the prison gates having made the long trip from Ireland, at no small expense, often involving overnight stays.
Last week a former blanketman was reflecting with me on the passing of Ronnie and said that his own nose was out of joint that the blanketmen were always first served when it came to handing out accolades for prison protest. In his view, if anybody merited top table status it was those republicans in English jails. Theirs was truly a horrendous experience. Belfast Media detailed something of Ronnie's experience:
He spent a total of five years in solitary confinement for protesting the severe prison conditions imposed on republican prisoners and was 'ghosted' repeatedly — moved without notice — from jail to jail. He attempted to escape from Wormwood Scrubs in 1977 but was apprehended in the prison yard. He took a leadership role in a series of prison protests, including the Gartree riot of 1978 and the subsequent rooftop protest there. He took part in a further rooftop protest in Wormwood Scrubs in 1980.
Less than two weeks after I had arrived in Magilligan as a young IRA prisoner twenty one year old Ronnie was involved in a shootout with British police in Southampton. 'In spite of one of the biggest dragnets ever mounted by the Hampshire Constabulary' he evaded capture and made his may back to Ireland. But his time there would be short lived. Captured the following year in Tyrone he entered the British penal system and stayed there for almost as long as he had spent outside prison.
By 1991 Ronnie was back in Ireland, not as a free man but a prisoner in Maghaberry by which time he had served around seventeen years of his life sentence. Most of us in the Life Sentence Review Unit were awaiting our final release. But not Ronnie who continued to be held within the general prison population. The former UDA leader John White said to me in 1992 while on the work out programme that Ronnie deserved a break but the authorities seemed intent on denying him one. I didn't know Ronnie at the time but White seemed to have a lot of respect for him, maybe as a result of both having a shared interest in criminology, which they studied.
It was only after we had both been released from prison that I met Ronnie through my late friend Tony TC Catney. We would often talk politics. He was open minded and not averse to different ideas. I didn't find him greatly at odds with Sinn Fein's direction of travel but unlike many in the party he did not respond with a snarl at the unapproved thought. Ronnie viewed the world through a prism of the left and would often join others from that perspective in the John Hewitt bar in Belfast's Donegal Street where ideas flowed as freely as the beer. Ronnie had a penchant for both so he was good company to be in.
Something else I was pleased to find he shared with me, alongside a love of beer, was a passion for Liverpool FC. The one area which saw our paths diverge was religion. For some reason Ronnie held onto his faith. Perhaps the years spent in solitary confinement in England left him with no one to talk to or share his thoughts with but his god.
Ideationally promiscuous, he would turn up at events that Sinn Fein members preferred to avoid. On one occasion he attended an Expac AGM in Monaghan. An ex-prisoners body set up to help any former prisoner seeking advice or direction, it never took the party whip and for that reason while not quite shunned by Sinn Fein, there was no welcome mat laid out for it. Ronnie could fit in, aided perhaps by a level of education that allowed him the confidence to be comfortable with a different idea. This was evident when twenty years ago BBC Spotlight broadcast The Provo and the Policeman in which Ronnie came face to face with the cop he shot in Southampton. The two men talked, shook hands and later went to a restaurant for a meal.
The French philosopher Jean Paul Sartre, probably no stranger to Ronnie, stressed the importance of a life lived authentically. Whatever faults and foibles might have interloped along the way, when this old dog for the hard road was breathing the last breath of his seventy two years he might have cast his mind back to the days of prison protest in England and thought, with much justification . . . authenticity.
 |
| ⏩Follow on Twitter @AnthonyMcIntyre. |
RIP. Superbly written.
ReplyDelete