Ireland's OWN: Women Freedom Fighters

Book Excerpt: Roísín McAliskey's incarceration during pregnancy
—from Women in Northern Ireland: Cultural Studies and Material Conditions*

McAliskey was viewed as a pregnant female because she was pregnant at the time of her arrest; some suggest that the British government used her pregnancy to intimidate her. When the government of the Republic discussed McAliskey's case, it usually spoke first of her pregnancy, highlighting her gender. Though her family seemed most concerned with McAliskey's overall health and treatment in prison, it too discussed her pregnancy.

Yet, ultimately, McAliskey and her family asked that McAliskey's case be seen as an example of an oppressive state.

Though she had never been arrested before, and despite the fact that nobody was hurt in the mortar attack she was accused of participating in, McAliskey was automatically categorized as Special Category A Prisoner; this categorization created particular problems for her as a woman and was decried by an international community. McAliskey was regularly strip-searched, had limited access to visitors, and had restricted exercise. While these conditions would have been difficult for any prisoner, they were especially counterproductive for a pregnant woman: McAliskey's body was changing, and regular strip-searching made her more uncomfortable; the limited exercise could have hurt the fetus.

Moreover, McAliskey has said she was told that prison authorities planned for her to give birth shackled to guards, and that her child could be taken away from her after birth; with limited access to visitors, she found it hard not to believe this story. McAliskey's security status meant that she had two guards with her at all times and that she was not allowed to use the mother and infant birthing center at Holloway (Britain's women's prison) if others were there at the same time. Most likely there would be other women using the center when McAliskey was to give birth. The point here is that while Special Category A status is no doubt difficult for all prisoners, it is especially confining for pregnant women.

Eventually, McAliskey's security status was downgraded to Category A; while she was still guarded and under heavy restrictions, she was allowed to be hospitalized for the birth of her child. She gave birth in a London psychiatric hospital, where she remained until she was said to be well enough to return to Northern Ireland. That McAliskey's incarceration would be gendered, however, was obvious immediately after she was taken into custody.

McAliskey's interrogation after her arrest suggests that police treated her in a particular way because she was a woman and because she was the daughter of a political activist. According to independent reports by human rights organizations, after she was arrested, McAliskey was interrogated for six days and for twelve hours per day. In an attempt to psychologically damage her and to demonstrate that they saw McAliskey as a product of a Republican family, at one point during the interrogation the police brought in an officer who fifteen years earlier had carried McAliskey's sister and brother outside the home where their parents lay critically wounded by loyalist gunfire. Roísín was unharmed during the shooting. The officer recounted the events of the day her parents were shot.

After interrogation and because of her security status, McAliskey was flown to an all-male prison in London. She was placed in a cell within a cell of seventy males; the cell was dirty and was said to have been used by men on the dirt strike (Britain and Ireland Human Rights Centre). [See: Roísín McAliskey: A Briefing Paper, 29 Feb 1997]

Although this could be seen as a way Roísín McAliskey was desexed, putting her in a male cell actually had the effect of highlighting not only that she was a woman but also that she was an extraordinarily deviant woman. Why else would she need to be placed in a male cell, a cell formerly occupied by the most intransigent prisoners? But it was not this "desexing" that proved most harmful. According to several reports, when she was brought to London, the police psychiatrist said that her initial interrogation had already damaged McAliskey's mental health.

McAliskey's gender also had a direct effect on the economics of her incarceration. When she was three days away from going into labor, the British government allowed that McAliskey could be transferred to a hospital to give birth. According to her solicitor, Gareth Peirce, and as reported in several newspapers, there were strict rules regarding the transfer: McAliskey must agree to reside twenty-four hours per day in the hospital's mother and baby unit; her family must pay a surety of £100;000 a £95,000 security note must be deposited with her solicitors; and she must agree to consent to all future medical and psychiatric reports. A pregnant, incarcerated women categorized as a high risk must pay money to the government if she wants to deliver her baby in a hospital.

There was an international outcry against McAliskey's arrest, an outcry which often focused on her treatment as a pregnant woman. A House of Commons motion echoed Amnesty International's contention that "if she is still in custody at the time of her confinement, she will not be able to use the mother and baby unit at Holloway Prison if it is being used by other prisoners". The British government was urged to reconsider its "cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment" of the prisoner. The Republic of Ireland had not pushed for bail for McAliskey because it understood that "Miss McAliskey could not be involved in any subversive action while heavily pregnant or in labor". The Republic's response to McAliskey is interesting on two levels: One, the government was working hard to broker a peace settlement and would want to be seen as supportive of the daughter of a nationalist activist.

Second, enshrined in the government's constitution is a recognition of a woman's special role as a mother. When it made the case that McAliskey could not be involved in terrorist activity because she was pregnant and therefore did not need bail to be moved to a hospital, the government in the Republic was relying on preconceived notions of motherhood. To be a mother means not to be a terrorist. While I have no desire to argue the feasibility of being a mother and a terrorist, I do want to suggest that from the beginning, McAliskey was perceived as a mother by both governments. The discourse of these responses underscores the specifically gendered nature of McAliskey's case, yet the support for McAliskey is more helpful when it moves from the personal to a discussion of women's particular material concerns with respect to incarceration.

As a result of McAliskey's imprisonment, the European Parliament, in its annual human rights report, called for "provisions throughout the EU of appropriate facilities for pregnant women held in detention". In the same report, Ireland was criticized for its "restriction of freedom of opinion where a law prohibits publication of any material in favor of abortion". Thus, in one report, the connection was made between women's position in Irish society — their right to information regarding reproductive choice — and the inadequate facilities for Irish women in British prisons. The lack of provisions for women within Irish culture is reflected in British and Irish prisons, where women are not guaranteed particular freedoms and are punished in a way that is perceived to be most harmful to them as women.

McAliskey's case is significant as well because discussion about it highlights the tension between right-to-life supporters in Ireland and pro-choice activists, a tension which was especially contentious in the 1980s and is still debated in the 1990s (see Alibhe Smyth, The Abortion Papers). Most virulent in its attack against a woman's right to choose has been SPUC, the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children. Yet in April, responding to McAliskey's incarceration, Dr. Mary Lucy, the president of SPUC, asked the society's sister organization in England to address prison authorities regarding McAliskey.

Bernadette Devlin McAliskey has been an outspoken opponent of SPUC, and SPUC has consistently sought to represent itself as an "antipolitical" organization, by which it means that it is separate from and does not intervene into the conflict in Northern Ireland. Yet as McAliskey's case illustrates, women and their material concerns (such as pregnancy) can never be entirely separate from the conflict in Northern Ireland; by association, neither can the focus on abortion in the South be entirely separate from other political realities in the Republic and Northern Ireland. Lucy notes the unusual nature of SPUC's intervention into the McAliskey case: "We are primarily a pro-life, antiabortion society and we have nothing to do with [political] campaigns as such, but we would also have a duty, an obligation to protect Irish mothers from the effects of abortion and to protect the life of the unborn child, so it [ McAliskey's case] would be within our remit to some degree" (quoted in John Connolly).

While SPUC denies that it is a "political" organization, and while Sinn Fein's policy document on a woman's right to choose is ambivalent, McAliskey's case indicates that there cannot be a separation between women's material conditions and national conflict. SPUC's involvement testifies that movements about women and their concerns and "political" movements can and do inform one another.

Because she was incarcerated, McAliskey underscored the connections between the material conditions that beset women and the conflict in Northern Ireland. Yet the discourse of the case suggests the extent to which gendered presuppositions affect and can alter national and international decisions. While it is true that because they invoked her pregnancy to discuss McAliskey, politicians and others were defining her incarceration in terms of her gendered status with all that the history of Irish womanhood suggests, it is also true that McAliskey's pregnancy has forced a recognition of inadequate policy regarding women and incarceration. Roisin McAliskey and her mother have both tried to foreground the institutional concerns about women and incarceration.

In her interview with Radio Free Eireann, Devlin McAliskey (1997) said that her daughter's arrest "formed a part of a systematic pattern of aggressive harassment and intimidation of community groups in West Belfast accompanied by the arrests of young women who worked in the area, were computer literate and were vulnerable because of pregnancy or recent childbirth." Devlin McAliskey's socialist principles encourage her to recognize institutional patterns rather than individual wrongs. If she is correct, police targeted women, especially women who were perceived to be vulnerable because they were pregnant or had recently given birth. According to Devlin McAliskey, police also targeted women who were computer literate. Interestingly, in a workingclass area such as West Belfast, women who are employed and who have marketable skills are said to be targets for arrest.

Roísín McAliskey was granted release in March of 1998 on the grounds of her ill mental health. However, in an open letter she posted over the Internet that month to discuss the need for institutional change in prisons, McAliskey appeared thoughtful and emotionally healthy. McAliskey's case was assisted by her family's use of the Internet and the "Free Roísín McAliskey Website." Browsers were asked to inform themselves about the case and to write letters to Roisin and on her behalf. In her open letter of thanks broadcast over the Internet to her supporters, McAliskey draws attention to the specific plight of women in prison. In the letter, McAliskey names herself as a Category A Prisoner, Holloway Prison. The overt text of the letter is that she wishes to thank people for thinking about her because incarceration has taught her that the only things people cannot take from you are your thoughts. She then begins the crux of her discussion: prison conditions. "Although everyone knows what a prison is, I don't think anyone can imagine 'how' it is until they experience it." How it is, according to McAliskey, is colorless, tasteless, and lifeless. Yet for Irish female prisoners, she states, it is even worse:

It's the closed and controlled [prison] environment that leads to closed and biased minds. Out of nearly 30 women with children in prison, only two would sit in a room with me. But when I'm treated like such a danger that I'm put in a high security male prison, why wouldn't they be fearful and object to having to associate with what is presented as a threat to the little they have for themselves. There is a prison rule that prisoners cannot share, lend or give anything to other prisoners. So that while you are removed from your family and friends, you are prevented from building new relationships. But if you are an Irish prisoner in England, they segregate you — build a prison within their prison. With the men, they house them in S.S.U. — Special Secure Unit! And as they haven't got a S.S.U. for females, I get a human equivalent, with two "shadow" officers accompanying at all times, human bookends, giving me my own prison within a prison.

According to McAliskey, Irish prisoners in Britain generally feel different from the regular prison population, but female prisoners who are treated as a security risk feel even more alienated. When the British government placed her in a male prison, the implication was that McAliskey was such a deviant woman (a terrorist) that she could not be housed with "ordinary decent" female prisoners. When they treated her as a security risk because they considered her a Republican and because of her mother's political activity, the British government set the stage for McAliskey to be ostracized.

The case of Roísín McAliskey was most productively analyzed when it was discussed in terms of specific material concerns for women, especially their treatment when incarcerated. Her case should also be contextualized within what I am calling here prison narratives, or the discourse of incarceration. Taken together, male and female prison narratives will indicate how we read incarceration.

*—from Women in Northern Ireland: Cultural Studies and Material Conditions, by Megan Sullivan; University Press of Florida: 1999, pp 19-25.

See also: Bernadette Devlin McAliskey