August 17 1974
Each of the 1,600 people interned in Northern Ireland belongs to a family, as parent or spouse or child. Reckoning four persons to each family unit and allowing for some overlapping, we have a total of over 6,000 lives disrupted by internment.
To put faces on the figures, travel to The Maze on a visiting day and see the visitors arrive by bus from the Falls and the Shankill. They are mainly women, with a few men and a scattering of children. You will have plenty of time to study them as they wait an hour, or two hours, gossiping, smoking, sipping cups of tea in the scruffy hut that serves as a reception centre.
In spite of the noise and the smoke it is possible, after a time, to focus on a few faces out of the herd.
There is a young wife with a three-month-old baby. She has had a hair-do and donned her best clothes to visit her husband. The baby is probably the only happy person in the room. His world is still bounded by his mother’s arms. He does not even see the 20-foot-high fence and barbed wire entanglements that separate him from his father.
There is an older woman with a teenage son. Suffering has marked her face. She looks weary and resigned, as though she has been coming here for months. She has endured much and will endure more.
There is a girl sitting aloof from the chatting crowd. Her mien is angry, defiant and proud.
So they sit, waiting on the convenience of the monster which has swallowed their husbands, sons and sweethearts.
Lethargically the monster stirs. The visitors are ticketed, ferried in a bus through locked gates to the interview huts. Here they are searched, their personal belongings temporarily impounded and, at last, visitor and visitee come together in the presence of a warder. In the grudging half-hour allotted to them there is so much that can’t be said.
Remember that some of these women have been going through this ordeal not just once or twice, but week after week after week. Remember that the detainees have not been convicted of any crime. Remember that internment has not abolished terrorism. Remember that a young man may go into The Maze a non-political, light-hearted youth and emerge a doctrinaire revolutionary.
The visitor cannot enter the world of the prisoners. Perhaps only those who have been deprived of liberty know how imprisonment saps a man’s integrity.
The epithet “obscene” has been applied to The Maze and it is not inappropriate, for as obscenity degrades the human body, so the system of internment degrades the human spirit.
A poignant Irish News editorial on the impact of internment on those detained and on their families.
The epithet “obscene” has been applied to The Maze and it is not inappropriate, for as obscenity degrades the human body, so the system of internment degrades the human spirit
