The change in status from High Risk Category A to Standard Risk Category A means that strip-searching which the British regime had indulged in with vindictive intensity is now being relaxed to a small degree to random strip-searching as applied to other Category A prisoners. However, she will still be strip-searched before and after court appearances and for the “purposes of drug testing”.

On International Women’s Day, Saturday, March 8, a crowd of over 300 people outside Holloway prison, London demanded the release of Róisín McAliskey. Groups of singers from Kurdistan and London raised their voices to her prison cell. In the US sixty activists gathered outside the British Embassy in Washington DC to coincide with International Women’s Day. The crowd banged dustbin lids and blew whistles.

At the same time over 600 protesters gathered outside the British Consulate in New York demanding bail for McAliskey, where speakers included Róisín’s sister Deirdre.

In a message to the New York rally on International Women's Day, Cathleen Knowles, Republican Sinn Féin General Secretary, said that the treatment of Róisín McAliskey was both a women's issue and an international political issue. “ It has its roots in the illegal British occupation of six north-eastern counties which has caused suffering and conflict for more than 800 years now.

“The persecution of a young Irish woman in a British jail is intended to quell the spirit of freedom in the nationalist community in Ireland and overseas. We must answer this message of hate with one of solidarity and defiance: Release Róisín McAliskey and all Irish political prisoners wherever they are incarcerated! End British rule and create a New Ireland negotiated by the Irish people themselves,” she added.
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In a letter to a constituent complaining about McAliskey’s treatment Maclean wrote:

“When the day comes that evil scum of the IRA are no longer murdering the innocent, and our children are no longer tortured by the Hindley’s of this world, then I am certain that when I no longer need all my compassion for the innocent I shall be able to spare some for the perpetrators.”

Tory MP Terry Dicks came to Maclean’s defence on March 14 saying “he has said what most people in this country think. Why should someone who is an IRA suspect get any special treatment at all? If this woman has not got anything to hide, why is she fighting extradition to Germany? Maclean has spoken for Britain.”

British Prime Minister John Major also defended Maclean, saying his comments had not been seen in “proper context”

Unnamed Dublin administration sources felt moved enough by Major’s comments to suggest to the Irish Times (March 15) that Major was being “dishonest”. Michael Howard gave his deputy full support.

Maclean, a former British Territorial Army member, was in the news previously in January when, himself a Scot, he claimed that most of London’s beggars’ were Scottish who slept rough out of choice.
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As a result many messages of congratulations on the Republican Sinn Féin President’s performance in a gruelling session reached Head Office and indeed the President himself personally. Also, listeners’ favourable comments were referred to by Browne on the following evening’s programme (March 19).

Of course many people did not realise that while interviews on Tonight with Vincent Browne are normally live, in this case it was pre-recorded one week earlier in a hang-over from Section 31 censorship.

Accordingly there were none of the usual phone-in questions. neither were the questions available in advance which prevented any preparation for the hour-long interview.

In the event, more than twenty minutes of the matter recorded were edited out. One hour and four minutes of answering was reduced to forty-three minutes on the air.

This meant in effect that a number of points made by Ruairí Ó Brádaigh were edited out entirely. These included.
1. In the matter of public support for resistance to British rule, a comparison was made with France under German occupation during WWII. The great majority of people there supported the elected Vichy government which was collaborating with the German occupation forces.

They were opposed to the Resistance but when success built on success and the Allied invasion forces landed and linked up with the Resistance, public opinion turned around and overwhelmingly backed the underground fighters.

2. The reaction of unionists to the ÉIRE NUA proposals in the 1970s was not carried. They invariably agreed that if the British government quit Ireland and the Six-County state could not stand up on its own, that they would accept the four-province federal Ireland as the most generous offer available.

The fact that John Taylor gave a favourable response to an invitation from Dáil Chonnacht to address them was of course also deleted from the programme as broadcast. (This occurred in 1972 shortly before the assassination attempt on Taylor by the Officials.)

3. The warning given to British government representatives in January 1975 during the Bilateral Truce talks when the Gardiner Report proposed withdrawing Special Category Status from political prisoners was likewise dropped.

The Republican Movement representatives told them that there would be a gigantic reaction to this and reminded them of Portlaoise Prison in the 1940s where Republicans went seven years on blanket protest and three years in solitary confinement rather than accept criminal treatment.

Similar protests took place in Belfast and English prisons.

4. References to Róisín McAliskey: With the exception of the Six-County conflict as “a recurring problem”, this was illustrated by the case of Róisín.Her mother Bernadette was active in the Civil Rights campaign and the H-Block-Armagh and hunger strike campaigns. Now her daughter Róisín was in prison.

She was about to give birth to a baby. Would that baby in 20 years time be also caught up in the ongoing struggle?

5. Asked about Seán Mac Stíofáin the answer was that both were deeply attached to the cause of the Irish language. In the early 1970s as IRA Chief-of-Staff, Mac Stíofáin was “the man for the job!”

6. The late Frank Maguire MP for Fermanagh-South Tyrone whose untimely death caused the by-election in which Bobby Sands was elected was described as well-known to Ruairí Ó Brádaigh and “a close friend of Dáithí Ó Conaill”.
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The Sunday Business Post reported testimony from the former soldier, called Soldier A on March 16. Soldier A claimed that the Paras were psyched up on the eve of Bloody Sunday. One of the officers said: “Let’s teach these buggers a lesson. We want some kills tomorrow.”

He also claimed that during the 15 minutes in which the bulk of the shooting took place there was no command over the soldiers. They were effectively allowed to run amok.

Soldier A also claimed that a statement he had prepared for the Widgery Tribunal of Inquiry into Bloody Sunday was torn up by “Crown lawyers on Lord Widgery’s team” and replaced with a statement which fitted with the official version of events.

He said that even after a ceasefire command was given – nine people were dead at Rossville Flats – the paras continued into the area of Glenfada Park, where they shot four people dead and injured three.

The Irish Times (March 22) wrote: “The former soldiers description supports the Witness accounts of James Wray being almost casually shot dead as he lay on the ground wounded; of Gerard McKinney with his hands in the air pleading for mercy being shot dead; of Gerard Donaghy shot while running away; of William McKinney shot in the back. It also supports claims that at least one of the soldiers was firing his rifle from the hip.

“Lord Widgery had some difficulty with Glenfada Park, where he acknowledged that firing ‘bordered on the reckless’ and that at least one soldier lied in saying he fired up to 22 shots at an alleged IRA gunman at a window.

“He heard evidence to the contrary from people like the future Bishop of Derry, then Father Edward Daly, who said that apart from noticing one person with a revolver, he saw no weapon other than those in British army hands.

“. . . Lord Widgery, if he had wished, could have cited similar testimony from over 500 witnesses – evidence, as Don Mullan’s book Eyewitness: Bloody Sunday records, that was submitted to the inquiry but largely ignored.”

BBC journalist David Capper also came out in the same week and said that evidence which he gave to the Widgery Tribunal had been altered to suggest that he had seen a man firing a shot at the British army just before they started firing. Capper had actually claimed to have seen a man firing a shot “which was more a gesture of defiance than anything else” more than two hours before the civil rights march.
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