40 years on Des recalls the ‘folly’ of internment

40 years on Des recalls the ‘folly’ of internment

3 October 2012

DES O’Hagan is not bitter. He was marched from his home by soldiers in 1971, badly beaten before being thrown from a helicopter hovering just feet from the ground. But he is not bitter.

The slight 78 year-old is remarkably philosophical for someone who lost a year of his life after becoming a victim of one of Northern Ireland’s most controversial events.

In 1971 O’Hagan was one of 342 people who were rounded up after the Stormont government of Brian Faulkner decided internment was the best way of combating rising terrorism. History has shown the policy to have been a disaster. Thanks to shocking intelligence the wrong people were locked up and the IRA enjoyed a recruitment bonanza from which they launched decades of terrorism.

O’Hagan, who was a senior lecturer in sociology at Stranmillis College when he was detained, is scathing of Faulkner’s decision to introduce internment, describing him as a “total idiot.”

What makes O’Hagan different from the many other internees is that he wrote about life in Long Kesh as it happened. Throughout his one year and a day of incarceration he wrote a series of letters which were published in the Irish Times, giving insightful and articulate snapshots of a key moment in Northern Ireland history.

To celebrate the 40th anniversary of internment the 22 letters have now been published collectively for the first time. They are contained in a new book entitled simply Letters from Long Kesh which last week was launched at a special event in Belfast.

O’Hagan was 36 and living in Belfast when he was detained under Operation Demitrius which saw soldiers rounding up people suspected of being involved with Irish republican violence. No-one suspected of Loyalist terrorism was detained.

O’Hagan had been imprisoned in Crumlin Road jail in the 1950s during the IRA border campaign but since then had graduated from the prestigious London School of Economics and joined Stranmillis College. In 1967 he was one of the founding members of the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA) and played an important role in organising many of the campaign’s major demonstrations and in the development of NICRA into a serious political machine which forced the British government of the time to make major political concessions.

It was on this flimsy basis that O’Hagan was interned. He was dragged out barefoot and taken to Girdwood Barracks where, having thrown him to the ground, each passing soldier kicked him in the small of the back. He still suffers back pain to this day. He was threatened with being shot and then, having been put in a helicopter which he believed had taken off, he was thrown out only to find the aircraft was barely off the ground.

But what makes O’Hagan so remarkable, beyond his literary activities during his spell behind the wire, is that he harbours no bitterness. He condemns those who ordered the policy and the brutality of some of the soldiers and policemen who carried it out but in the same breath lauds the humanity and decency of others.

He recalls one of the soldiers who detained him returning to O’Hagan’s St. Alban’s Gardens home in South Belfast to tell his wife Marie, “I am sorry. I felt like a Nazi in the Warsaw ghetto.”

He recalls the bravery of a prison officer who told O’Hagan to lock himself in a cubicle and who stood outside to prevent two RUC men getting to him.

He recalls the policeman who told him not to go anywhere on his own until he got inside Long Kesh.

O’Hagan’s letters, which he admits to never having read since they were published 40 years ago, began as a conscious anti-internment attempt to highlight life in the camp. “It was a politically conscious attempt by me. I was not a conscious historian but I had to comment on it. I couldn’t spend my time in there without trying to tell people outside about the various aspects of life within Long Kesh.”

During his time in the camp O’Hagan was housed with colleagues from the Official republican movement and later played a key role in its development into the Workers’ Party. But he observed members of the Provisional IRA and took part in debates with them. In one discussion about republicanism and anti-sectarianism O’Hagan heard Gerry Adams say he was prepared to wade up to his knees in Protestant blood.

After being released O’Hagan then resigned from his lecturing position at Stranmillis College after the Board of Governors and students split on whether he should return. “I couldn’t see the college torn apart because of this so I resigned.”

He became a full time party worker and fully espoused the Workers Party’s fierce criticism of physical force republicanism. He remains a member of its Central Executive Committee.

O’Hagan is somewhat frail, the hair and beard are almost totally grey and his memory occasionally lets him down, but he still possesses a fierce rasp of voice and piercing flash in his eyes when recalling some of the awful events of the past — such as internment.

And the eloquence displayed in the Letters from Long Kesh is still in evidence. “Faulkner was a political idiot because once he turned on the tap of internment he opened the floodgates to the murdering bastards in the provisionals and their loyalist counterparts. Once that happened people like me, who opposed sectarianism and terrorism just disappeared.”

• Letters from Long Kesh is published by Citizen Press, priced €10.