Segregation could end dirty protest
The dirty protest by republican inmates at Maghaberry Prison in Co Antrim could be called off if the prison authorities continued to segregate them from loyalists, it was claimed today.
Marian Price, spokeswoman for the Real IRA-linked Irish Republican Welfare Association, said the prisoners were currently being held in a special unit at the jail’s Foyle House as punishment for the protest, which began more than two weeks ago over sharing a wing with loyalists.
She said: “In effect they have been segregated by the authorities. We have been told that this is because they have been put on punishment but we certainly see that as a moral victory.
She continued: “If the authorities can segregate them for punishment then surely they can segregate them to live together and get on with serving their sentences.”
Ms Price, a former Provisional IRA activist, who was jailed for her part in the 1973 IRA bomb attacks in London, was speaking at a special protest rally on the Falls Road in west Belfast.
There has been speculation that if the prisoners do not get what they want they could begin a new hunger strike.
Ms Price said there would be no announcement of a hunger strike today but added if the prisoners were prepared to intensify their protest to force the authorities to agree to their demands.
She added: “These men are not going to be forced into anything, neither are they going to shirk away from anything. They will do things at their own pace, we are not pre-empting anything, we are getting all instructions from them and it is very much prison driven.”
The protest at Dunville Park on the Falls Road included families of the prisoners involved in the protest.
The campaign centres around republican demands to be separated from the high security complex near Lisburn.
Fears have been raised that supporters could attack a prison officer as the crisis deepens. Ms Price yesterday warned: “If one of these young men dies in prison there are going to be consequences and it doesn’t bear thinking about. Lives will not be lost on just one side.”
So far the Northern Ireland prison service has insisted it would maintain its policy of integration between republican and loyalist prisoners but Ms Price described this policy as a nonsense.
“I have experience of prisons and I fail to see how anyone with any knowledge of how a prison works would see that as a way forward.
“There has always been segregation within prisons in the north. When there hasn’t there is always trouble.”
She added: “People on the outside don’t live together and I don’t see how you can expect republicans and loyalists to live together on a wing – it’s a very confined space.”
She said the republicans wanted an undertaking that the punishment would stop and that they will be held on their own wing so that they could serve out their sentences in safety.
