The first thing that strikes you about the IRA library is its breadth and range. Far more than their loyalist rivals (whose collection was much smaller), IRA prisoners used prison to read, to engage in political debate. Previous generations of IRA men in other lockups had done the same; prisons seem, at times, like an alternative version of university. The course here appears, unsurprisingly, to have been left-of-center. There are shelf after shelf of books by Lenin, Marx, Engels, Trotsky. Books about Cuba, China, the Soviet Union and Albania.
I discussed this leftist orientation with one of the most articulate Irish republicans of his generation, former Sinn Fein publicity director Danny Morrison. For prisoners in the post-hunger-strike years, Morrison suggested, “Marxist Leninism provided a matrix which they fitted into perfectly. It explained the world. It was very fundamentalist, very pure. People in the jails were far more advanced than the people on the outside.”
They also identified with struggles elsewhere. “Nicaragua: America’s New Vietnam” sits alongside volumes on El Salvador, Palestine, South Africa and the anticolonial writings of Frantz Fanon. And here, as with Marxism, the library points to a vital change in the political and military context in which the IRA operated. The main reason for the IRA moving to a more political rather than military strategy over the last decade has to do with events inside Northern Ireland. But international and intellectual contexts also played a part.
The changing nature of other struggles–including peace processes and compromises in South Africa and the Middle East–altered the mental world in which the IRA operated. Revolutions were now less in vogue, less promising of success, less appropriate. In Morrison’s words, there had been a “world reorientation which had an effect on the prisoners”–with the collapse of communism in particular having “a devastating effect.”
Following the so-called dirty protest that culminated in the 1981 hunger strike, prisoners were paid a weekly amount for cleaning cells, cleaning toilets, mopping the landing and so on. Out of that money some went to pay for tobacco, for chocolate, for crisps and lemonade to have while watching their twice-weekly video. Some of the money went toward the purchase of these books: a valuable library, its copies frequently well-thumbed and annotated, books read by a radical organization that did not lose, but which found that it could not win.
