Post by dangeresque on Oct 31, 2006 7:19:00 GMT
important bit of history of usually ignored. Fair play to McIntyre for highlighting it!
Granny Josie
'No tyranny is so irksome as petty tyranny' - Edward Abbey
lark.phoblacht.net/AM3010061g.html
Anthony McIntyre • 28 October 2006
They carried Granny Josie out of the Ballycolman estate where she had
lived up until the time of her death. As in life it was no different in
death: her immediate family were closest to her as she left the estate for
the last time. She had eleven children. They in turn provided her with
grandchildren. The ripple effect from that was evidenced in the size of
the cortege as it crept up the road towards the chapel where the funeral
mass would be heard. Schoolchildren lined part of the route, many of them
the friends and classmates of her grandchildren.
Josie Gallagher was a devout Catholic. One of her sons said to me that she
possessed a very deep faith. The hardship she encountered during the
course of her life was alleviated to some extent by the succour she took
from a firm belief in God. In the chapel, one grandchild after another
came up to say a few emotionally charged words in her honour. Each spoke
of their love for Granny Josie and how her empty chair would be a painful
but constant reminder of her presence.
Earlier that morning I had travelled from Belfast to Strabane along with
Kevin McQuillan to attend the funeral. Both of us knew the Gallagher
family well. Throughout my spells in prison Josie's sons always seemed to
be represented in the republican prisoner population. From what is the
norm for families they were overrepresented, three sons in at one stage
all serving hefty sentences. Another had served an earlier sentence. In
prison I gravitated to them as a duck does to water. They were no
respecters of authority, even less so when it was arbitrary and
unaccountable.
The republican prisoner Alex McCrory once observed to me during his second
stretch, when the days of seriously battling the prison management were
long behind us, that the daily battle for republicans in jail was to
create personal space. There was no shortage of people trying to close it
down. The tyranny of the small man is well suited to prison. With
literally a captive audience which as a consequence of enforced proximity
is always within fifty yards of some moral guardian, it was easy to see
why Alex McCrory thought as he did.
The Gallaghers sought out their own space and helped make it for others.
Theirs was an oasis in a desert of boredom and stifling conformity. The
republican leadership in the prison might not have appreciated such a
bolthole in the middle of the aridity they so proudly ruled over. But for
others who felt republicans should not try to emulate the lives of frugal
monks, the colour lent by the Gallaghers to prison life was welcome. While
others were busy ascetically committing to memory the words of some
obscure revolutionary, they and the coterie they hung out with were
indifferent to what people drank, smoke, read or expressed. Whether they
partook or not, hooch, pot, porn or free speech, were never reasons to be
shunned from their company. Small wonder that the friendships forged
behind steel doors have lasted long after the final clang of the slammer
faded in the distance.
Josie Gallagher shared something of her sons' disdain for authority. She
knew that the great and the good rarely practiced what they preached. The
forces of good order brought bad disorder to her home. At one point she
found herself bound over to keep the peace after hitting a member of the
RUC who was violently attacking one of her children. Her home was
frequently raided, every year from 1973-2002, often several times a year.
She saw her sons imprisoned, one of whom went on a lengthy hunger strike
after being falsely convicted and who was subsequently brutally beaten on
a daily basis by prison staff eager to break his spirit and diminish his
resolve. The hunger strike never established his innocence but it kept the
NIO paid thugs at bay for its duration and for some time after. His
actions had made him into a political hot potato, too hot to be kicked
along the cell block. During that fast Josie's husband decided to take on
Roy Mason in his Barnsley constituency in a bid to draw public attention
to their son's plight. An accomplished smuggler of material comforts
punitively banned from the prison, Josie defied the prison regime time out
of number. In her own words, 'in my own small way I was beating the system
and provided my sons with some small luxuries they were being denied.'
With three sons at one point all serving time together for republican
activity, two as INLA prisoners and the third for IRA activities, it would
be expected that lots of assistance would be directed Josie's way. She had
visited the prisons almost every week from 1974 to 1996. Then in the Teach
na Failte booklet Out of the Shadows I came across a short contribution by
Josie:
We received no financial assistance for years, maybe a decade … Manys a
time I had to thumb it up the road to see them as we had no car and I was
not permitted to travel on the Sinn Fein transport as my sons were in on
INLA charges … I could never, and still cannot, tell the difference
between Stickies, Provos or INLA as they were all soldiers to me. I
remember once thumbing back from Long Kesh and it was snowing and the
local Sinn Fein transport passed me. Once I was told I could use the
transport to visit my son who was in on Provo charges.
She could not of course use the transport for the purposes of visiting her
INLA sons. The power of the small man would prevail; her visiting pass for
the day would be checked by the transport police. No mother of imprisoned
republicans would evade their scrutiny. What a crime that would be,
letting the mother of the wrong type of republican political prisoners use
the bus to visit her children. 'Papers please.'
A sceptic might be excused for thinking like JK Galbraith that under
British bosses man oppressed man but under republican bosses it was just
the opposite. Was our self-righteousness, elitism and political
sectarianism so entrenched that we nurtured an outlook utterly disdainful
of an impoverished mother standing at the side of the road in the snow?
The bus driver could have thought about a career improvement and applied
to become a prison officer. He of course did not devise the policy but was
the willing minion at the bottom of the food chain.
Such prejudice against the membership of the Republican Socialist Movement
and their immediate family was unfortunately not an isolated incident.
Those interested in the double discrimination faced by these political
prisoners and their kin will find plenty to disturb their sleep at night
in Out of the Shadows. It is a document that leaves a serious blemish on
the standard Provisional republican accounts of how they managed their own
regime within prison. Republican socialist prisoners endured an experience
which was once summed up by an imprisoned son of Josie Gallagher. When on
the morning of his release, asked what he would tell people about the
H-Blocks, his response was damning: 'the place is full of bastards and the
screws are nearly as bad.'
It is a testimony to the generosity of her character that Granny Josie
never held a grudge as a result of this discrimination against her and her
family. A mere couple of years after her ban on using the Sinn Fein prison
transport she helped three IRA volunteers, two of whom were wounded in a
gun battle with British soldiers, escape imprisonment. One of them
however, Tommy Brogan, was captured three days later. She hid them,
assisted their escape and destroyed incriminating evidence. On that
particular day the whole Ballycolman Estate was cordoned off by the RUC
and British Army while house to house searches were conducted. Josie's
home was raided twice that day, the second time after it was noted that
smoke was coming from the chimney. It must have been a strange sight, much
of the case against IRA volunteers going up in smoke billowing from a
chimney on a hot summer day. She knew the volunteers as they had attended
the same primary school as her own children. The title of the film Some
Mother's Son jumps to mind. Josie was proud of the fact that she prevented
the mothers of two sons going through what she had - years of trudging to
prisons. Prior to that day she had assisted another IRA volunteer destroy
evidence which could have led to the imprisonment of a number of his
comrades.
Knowing her sons and coming to learn that she was the rock upon which they
stood, I regret that I never got to know this tenacious and tender
matriarch in life but was honoured to walk in her funeral cortege. While
not having a religious thought in my head, I entered the chapel and
listened to every word of her funeral mass. Granny Josie was no republican
ideologue. She cared about her family. There is a side to the republican
struggle which people like Granny Josie and the late Denis Faul graced. A
humane side buttressed by remarkable individuals who cared for people,
persevered against the odds and the disapproval of others. Like Denis,
Granny Josie was pilloried and ignored and left to stand in the snow
because the faces of two of her sons didn't fit the political order.
She got little material reward for her efforts but she never sought it. A
number of years ago her sister left her £3000.00 in her will and despite
being a pensioner with a weekly income of £60.00 she donated all of it to
African children. Recently she was involved in fund raising, with her
family, for the establishment of an orphanage in South Africa which is
presently under construction. The group involved in the construction
decided to name the orphanage 'Josie's Place' after her untimely death, in
recognition of her contribution. For Granny Josie it was about people not
property. And in the end, fittingly, it was the people of no property,
like herself, who bore her to her grave.
Granny Josie
'No tyranny is so irksome as petty tyranny' - Edward Abbey
lark.phoblacht.net/AM3010061g.html
Anthony McIntyre • 28 October 2006
They carried Granny Josie out of the Ballycolman estate where she had
lived up until the time of her death. As in life it was no different in
death: her immediate family were closest to her as she left the estate for
the last time. She had eleven children. They in turn provided her with
grandchildren. The ripple effect from that was evidenced in the size of
the cortege as it crept up the road towards the chapel where the funeral
mass would be heard. Schoolchildren lined part of the route, many of them
the friends and classmates of her grandchildren.
Josie Gallagher was a devout Catholic. One of her sons said to me that she
possessed a very deep faith. The hardship she encountered during the
course of her life was alleviated to some extent by the succour she took
from a firm belief in God. In the chapel, one grandchild after another
came up to say a few emotionally charged words in her honour. Each spoke
of their love for Granny Josie and how her empty chair would be a painful
but constant reminder of her presence.
Earlier that morning I had travelled from Belfast to Strabane along with
Kevin McQuillan to attend the funeral. Both of us knew the Gallagher
family well. Throughout my spells in prison Josie's sons always seemed to
be represented in the republican prisoner population. From what is the
norm for families they were overrepresented, three sons in at one stage
all serving hefty sentences. Another had served an earlier sentence. In
prison I gravitated to them as a duck does to water. They were no
respecters of authority, even less so when it was arbitrary and
unaccountable.
The republican prisoner Alex McCrory once observed to me during his second
stretch, when the days of seriously battling the prison management were
long behind us, that the daily battle for republicans in jail was to
create personal space. There was no shortage of people trying to close it
down. The tyranny of the small man is well suited to prison. With
literally a captive audience which as a consequence of enforced proximity
is always within fifty yards of some moral guardian, it was easy to see
why Alex McCrory thought as he did.
The Gallaghers sought out their own space and helped make it for others.
Theirs was an oasis in a desert of boredom and stifling conformity. The
republican leadership in the prison might not have appreciated such a
bolthole in the middle of the aridity they so proudly ruled over. But for
others who felt republicans should not try to emulate the lives of frugal
monks, the colour lent by the Gallaghers to prison life was welcome. While
others were busy ascetically committing to memory the words of some
obscure revolutionary, they and the coterie they hung out with were
indifferent to what people drank, smoke, read or expressed. Whether they
partook or not, hooch, pot, porn or free speech, were never reasons to be
shunned from their company. Small wonder that the friendships forged
behind steel doors have lasted long after the final clang of the slammer
faded in the distance.
Josie Gallagher shared something of her sons' disdain for authority. She
knew that the great and the good rarely practiced what they preached. The
forces of good order brought bad disorder to her home. At one point she
found herself bound over to keep the peace after hitting a member of the
RUC who was violently attacking one of her children. Her home was
frequently raided, every year from 1973-2002, often several times a year.
She saw her sons imprisoned, one of whom went on a lengthy hunger strike
after being falsely convicted and who was subsequently brutally beaten on
a daily basis by prison staff eager to break his spirit and diminish his
resolve. The hunger strike never established his innocence but it kept the
NIO paid thugs at bay for its duration and for some time after. His
actions had made him into a political hot potato, too hot to be kicked
along the cell block. During that fast Josie's husband decided to take on
Roy Mason in his Barnsley constituency in a bid to draw public attention
to their son's plight. An accomplished smuggler of material comforts
punitively banned from the prison, Josie defied the prison regime time out
of number. In her own words, 'in my own small way I was beating the system
and provided my sons with some small luxuries they were being denied.'
With three sons at one point all serving time together for republican
activity, two as INLA prisoners and the third for IRA activities, it would
be expected that lots of assistance would be directed Josie's way. She had
visited the prisons almost every week from 1974 to 1996. Then in the Teach
na Failte booklet Out of the Shadows I came across a short contribution by
Josie:
We received no financial assistance for years, maybe a decade … Manys a
time I had to thumb it up the road to see them as we had no car and I was
not permitted to travel on the Sinn Fein transport as my sons were in on
INLA charges … I could never, and still cannot, tell the difference
between Stickies, Provos or INLA as they were all soldiers to me. I
remember once thumbing back from Long Kesh and it was snowing and the
local Sinn Fein transport passed me. Once I was told I could use the
transport to visit my son who was in on Provo charges.
She could not of course use the transport for the purposes of visiting her
INLA sons. The power of the small man would prevail; her visiting pass for
the day would be checked by the transport police. No mother of imprisoned
republicans would evade their scrutiny. What a crime that would be,
letting the mother of the wrong type of republican political prisoners use
the bus to visit her children. 'Papers please.'
A sceptic might be excused for thinking like JK Galbraith that under
British bosses man oppressed man but under republican bosses it was just
the opposite. Was our self-righteousness, elitism and political
sectarianism so entrenched that we nurtured an outlook utterly disdainful
of an impoverished mother standing at the side of the road in the snow?
The bus driver could have thought about a career improvement and applied
to become a prison officer. He of course did not devise the policy but was
the willing minion at the bottom of the food chain.
Such prejudice against the membership of the Republican Socialist Movement
and their immediate family was unfortunately not an isolated incident.
Those interested in the double discrimination faced by these political
prisoners and their kin will find plenty to disturb their sleep at night
in Out of the Shadows. It is a document that leaves a serious blemish on
the standard Provisional republican accounts of how they managed their own
regime within prison. Republican socialist prisoners endured an experience
which was once summed up by an imprisoned son of Josie Gallagher. When on
the morning of his release, asked what he would tell people about the
H-Blocks, his response was damning: 'the place is full of bastards and the
screws are nearly as bad.'
It is a testimony to the generosity of her character that Granny Josie
never held a grudge as a result of this discrimination against her and her
family. A mere couple of years after her ban on using the Sinn Fein prison
transport she helped three IRA volunteers, two of whom were wounded in a
gun battle with British soldiers, escape imprisonment. One of them
however, Tommy Brogan, was captured three days later. She hid them,
assisted their escape and destroyed incriminating evidence. On that
particular day the whole Ballycolman Estate was cordoned off by the RUC
and British Army while house to house searches were conducted. Josie's
home was raided twice that day, the second time after it was noted that
smoke was coming from the chimney. It must have been a strange sight, much
of the case against IRA volunteers going up in smoke billowing from a
chimney on a hot summer day. She knew the volunteers as they had attended
the same primary school as her own children. The title of the film Some
Mother's Son jumps to mind. Josie was proud of the fact that she prevented
the mothers of two sons going through what she had - years of trudging to
prisons. Prior to that day she had assisted another IRA volunteer destroy
evidence which could have led to the imprisonment of a number of his
comrades.
Knowing her sons and coming to learn that she was the rock upon which they
stood, I regret that I never got to know this tenacious and tender
matriarch in life but was honoured to walk in her funeral cortege. While
not having a religious thought in my head, I entered the chapel and
listened to every word of her funeral mass. Granny Josie was no republican
ideologue. She cared about her family. There is a side to the republican
struggle which people like Granny Josie and the late Denis Faul graced. A
humane side buttressed by remarkable individuals who cared for people,
persevered against the odds and the disapproval of others. Like Denis,
Granny Josie was pilloried and ignored and left to stand in the snow
because the faces of two of her sons didn't fit the political order.
She got little material reward for her efforts but she never sought it. A
number of years ago her sister left her £3000.00 in her will and despite
being a pensioner with a weekly income of £60.00 she donated all of it to
African children. Recently she was involved in fund raising, with her
family, for the establishment of an orphanage in South Africa which is
presently under construction. The group involved in the construction
decided to name the orphanage 'Josie's Place' after her untimely death, in
recognition of her contribution. For Granny Josie it was about people not
property. And in the end, fittingly, it was the people of no property,
like herself, who bore her to her grave.