Defiant former women prisoners declare:
‘We broke Armagh, it never broke us’
 ARMAGH GAOL: The halls are now empty and the final key has turned on a history many will never forget.
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 THE WOMEN who made the final visit to Armagh Gaol before the prison closed for good. Many of the former internees and prisoners took their daughters along on the journey.
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 MARGARET BARR and Kate McGuinness embrace outside the cell they shared together.
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By EIBHLÍN GLENHOLMES
BELFAST – Armagh Gaol in County Armagh was the prison where hundreds of Irish women ranging from 17 years of age to grandmothers were held captive from the introduction of internment without charge or trial on August 9, 1971. The jail also housed sentenced female republican prisoners.
In October 2009, Armagh Gaol closed its doors for the last time. Unlike Long Kesh there are no plans to maintain any part of it for future posterity. This made it all the more important for some of the republican political prisoners who had a chance to visit the site before the key was turned for the last time.
On a beautiful late autumn morning, a group of internees and sentenced prisoners began a journey that some of them had only made once before, but which their families had made many times during their years of incarceration.
I had suggested to the group that they should bring a relative with them and most of the women brought their daughters, so it became the mother and daughter Armagh trip.
Some of the women were nervously excited as each new face appeared at the top of the stairs. There were screams of recognition – and sometimes introductions had to be made among old cell mates. The passage of time and geographical location meant that some had not met again in over 30 years.
The journey down passed swiftly, as old comrades began the journey back in time to Armagh Gaol.
One daughter told me that her mother, a former internee, had called her into the kitchen the week before to ask if she would like to go on the visit to Armagh.
She had said yes, and asked her mother if she had ever visited the jail before. Her mother told her no, she hadn’t visited, she had been in it as a political prisoner.
The young woman was aware of the years her father had spent in prison, but was totally flummoxed by the news that her mother had also been in jail. I was also confused, but later in the day I heard a similar tale from a former prisoner.
She explained that she was very young when she went to jail, had married her husband shortly after her release, and had started a family. Then her husband went to prison. She felt that the children would worry about her being taken back to jail, so she never told them.
There was much laughter as the women reminisced about escape plans, pre-status days, different governors, and graded the screws on their viciousness.
As we went around the gaol, the mood darkened as they remembered some of the worst times. All of them remembered where their cells had been, and whom they had shared with. They remembered the protests, and they remembered the beatings at the hands of the screws.
Among the group was Pauline Derry, who was the last woman to have political status. Pauline spent a year and a half in a specially constructed cage on an otherwise empty wing. She was allowed no contact with the other women during all that time.
As the stories were told, I watched as the young women looked at their mother as if seeing them for the first time. I saw one of them in tears as her mother and a former cell mate chatted away about the night their cell door burst open and a raiding party rushed in, and the gratuitous beating they both received.
As they toured the jail, they remarked on how small the cells were, how the chapel seemed to have shrunk, and Ann Marie McWillams relived the night she saw the Armagh ghost.
Or, as I said, the night she thought she saw a ghost. However, she is sure, and if you see her about the road, ask her to tell you about it. All I know is I declined to sit in her cell on my own, but only because we were running out of time. That’s my story anyway.
As we were leaving, I called the women into the courtyard. Having made sure the guide was occupied, I pointed out an intact window to Pauline Derry. “Be a shame to go without leaving your mark,” I said as I handed her a rock.
Now bear in mind that I was talking symbolism here, and the re-enactment of the Battle of the Bogside that ensued was not my fault.
As I was standing behind Pauline, I wasn’t aware that the other 20 women also intended to “leave their mark.” Suddenly, as the hail of rocks began to sail through the air I heard the first shout; “Ye couldn’t break us then and you’ll never break us now.”
And then another “Here’s what we think of your strip searches.” And another “We were political prisoners no matter what you all said.” “Where’s Thatcher now?”
The daughters and I stood back as their mothers vented 30 years of pent up rage at the institution and the lackeys. I think that’s when some of the daughters realized just what their mammies might have been capable of when they were their age.
As the bus was returning to Belfast, the mood was slightly subdued, and I asked them if they were depressed by the visit.
They said “no, it was just that it had been so good being together again, and that they probably wouldn’t be together again until,” as they cheerfully pointed out, “one of us dies and we’re all at the funeral.”
So I’m planning a reunion for them.
My abiding memories of that day will be when they spontaneously sat on the stairs of “B” wing and started to sing together, as they used to every night after lockup, of Marie Barr’s face as she looked at her mother and Kate McGuinness standing in the cell they shared and hugging each other.
Of Pauline Derry throwing the first stone in the battle of Armagh and of looking back into that jail for the very last time, and seeing in my mind’s eye the relentless flow of women who had entered those ominous doors because they would not lie down.
And I will always cherish the moment after the stoning when one of the women turned to the others and said “Armagh thought it would break us – well we’ve broke Armagh.”
Never a truer word.
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[Writer Eibhlín Glenholmes was born in the Nationalist enclave of the Short Strand in Belfast. Her father was interned in Long Kesh in the 1970s and her grandfather in the 1920s. She was a republican activist from her youth and was first arrested on the word of a paid perjurer in 1983 and held in Armagh Gaol. Following the IRA decision to declare a unilateral cessation in July 2005, Eibhlín became the National Coordinator for Gender Equality for Sinn Féin. In January 2006, she was elected to the Ard Chomhairle (National Leadership) of Sinn Féin.]
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