Abstract
This chapter shows how Irish Republican Army (IRA) prisoners started a critical debate within and beyond the prison walls during the Northern Ireland conflict, thereby becoming leaders of a conflict transformation process. The IRA prisoners used their position to criticize the then leadership of the Irish republican movement for the failed truce of 1975/76, thereby igniting a debate in the wider republican movement outside the prisons by smuggling statements and articles out of the prisons. These articles originated in the “Cage 11” of the internment camp Long Kesh and became known as the “Brownie papers.” Following their release from prison, the authors used their status to reach influential positions in their movement and, in these positions, they supported the conflict transformation process. Thus, these Brownie papers were a watershed moment in challenging the old leadership and, thereby, laid the foundation for the future peace process in the 1990s. In essence, this chapter shows that the IRA prisoners were the leaders of a debate that ultimately turned the Irish republican movement from a militant nationalist movement determined of establishing the United Socialist Republic in the mid-1970s to a movement that supports the Good Friday Agreement in 1998 and, today, embraces parliamentary politics.
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- 1.
I will refer to this group as “Cage 11 group” and “Cage 11 faction” throughout the chapter; the term “Young Turks” for the “hard-line associates of Adams, Bell, and Hughes” is used by Ed Moloney (2007).
- 2.
In 1969, the republican movement split in two wings. The socialist-orientated Official IRA and Official Sinn Féin later changed their name to Workers Party. The nationalist Provisional IRA and Provisional IRA became the dominant republican organization in the early 1970s. It is the latter that is today referred to as “IRA” and “Sinn Féin.” Hence, I will also neglect the “Provisional” suffix throughout this chapter.
- 3.
The case study is based on a series of oral history interviews with former Irish republican internees and prisoners. Between 2014 and 2017, I interviewed 34 former prisoners (Reinisch 2018c).
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Reinisch, D. (2020). Prisoners as Leaders of Political Change: Cage 11 and the Peace Process in Northern Ireland. In: Gutmann, M. (eds) Historians on Leadership and Strategy. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26090-3_4
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