The last obscenity

Posted by Jim on August 22, 2015

By Sean Bresnahan

Maghaberry is an injustice that undermines the very fabric of our
society, no man or woman should be subject to what goes on in this
hideous place. It should be an international outrage but instead is for
the most part ignored by those with the power to effect change, those
who have bought into the new establishment in Ireland.

Whether for good or bad, for right or wrong, they’ve bought into it all.
And the ‘all’ in question does not just equate to power-sharing, the
equality agenda or any other ‘positive’ relating to the ‘new
dispensation’, it also involves Diplock Courts, internment, secret
evidence, political policing and the torturing of Irish political
prisoners – prisoners such as Gavin Coyle, who has recently entered his
fourth year in solitary confinement.

By any definition that amounts to torture. 23 hours a day on your own is
mental torture. Those who sit in a government at Stormont that permit
this need to examine their conscience. For years they’ve trotted out the
bogus line ‘Raymond McCartney’s working on this behind the scenes’. Well
what has he achieved?

Raymond and his party would do well to remember how this approach was
rejected by none other than themselves when trotted out by the Catholic
Hierarchy and the SDLP during the Blanket Protest. If it was considered
an unacceptable line 30 years ago then how can it be seen as any
different today? It is a token line and a token approach, a point best
illustrated by the fact there is no change we can point to that suggests
this argument has any merit.

Gavin Coyle is over 4 years in solitary confinement and will no doubt
see out his time in the same condition. That this doesn’t register with
the powers-that-be, with those who claim to represent us, speaks volumes
about their participation in the British system. They told us they were
going in to create meaningful change but it seems the only thing
changing is their bank balance.

There is a responsibility on those who participate in this system, and
legitimise it by their presence at the heart of its institutions, to
ensure the brutality ongoing at Maghaberry is given no place or quarter
in this society, the beatings, the abuse, the horror has to stop. It has
no place in our country today – it never had.

If what goes on behind those gates were carried out in some dictatorship
no doubt we’d hear the great and the good speak out, it would be
condemned vociferously and rightly so. But not here, not in our own
country, not when it is done to and on our own. Why do we never hear
this alluded to by our politicians, why is this brushed under the
carpet, why do they not want us to know what is being done in our name?

The time for action is long past, those in positions of authority, who
have achieved high office on the back of a mandate given them by the
Irish people, can no longer sit back as though this were not happening.
They can no longer watch on through covered eyes in the hope this will
just go away. And they have to take responsibility for the situation,
why else have they been elected if not to do so?

Whether we agree or not with the politics of those held in this gaol
there is a basic onus, common to us all, as right-thinking men and
women, that abuse of human rights not be tolerated. Human rights are
sacrosanct. Silence equals complicity, toleration equates to association
and facilitation. Who would honestly want to facilitate and be
associated with this?

* Sean Bresnahan is a founding member of the Thomas Ashe Society in
Omagh and current PRO of the 1916 Societies