Ban on Irish speaking in Maze prison sparked political row
Prison authorities defended regime for security reasons
The use of the Irish language in the Maze prison caused a major headache for the Northern Ireland Office in the early 1980s, according to previously confidential files released in Belfast.
One of the controversies was sparked by Brendan Ó Cathaoir, an Irish Times journalist who wrote to the minister for prisons at the Northern Ireland Office, Lord Gowrie, on June 15th, 1982, to protest against the decision of prison staff to end a meeting between him and a prisoner that was being conducted through Irish.
Ó Cathaoir told the minister that he had visited Hugh Rooney, a prisoner in the Maze, a few days earlier.
"A few minutes after the visit had started," he went on, "a warder intervened and asked: 'are you speaking a foreign language?' (We had been conversing in Irish because of Mr Rooney's interest in the language). I answered 'No'."
Visit terminated
The reporter was asked to sign a form, after which the visit was terminated.
He told Lord Gowrie: "The reason given was that we had spoken in Irish. At no stage were we told explicitly that English must be used."
The warder could produce no written evidence for such a restriction. In conclusion, he told Gowrie: "Please don't tell me that it has anything to do with security. This gratuitous insult to the Irish identity of these prisoners serves no other purpose than the perpetration of hatred and violence in Ireland. Those who govern the Northern Ireland prison population feed a cycle of fanaticism."
The matter was also raised by John Hume, MEP and SDLP leader, in a letter to Lord Gowrie questioning the legal basis for such a policy.
In a note on the file, John Mitchell from "prison regimes" branch noted that governors were instructed under prison standing orders to ensure that all visits took place in English, unless either party was incapable of conversing in the English language.
"Such a restriction is necessary on security grounds to enable officers supervising visits to effectively monitor conversations," he wrote. While they could not depart from this rule, he had asked the prisoner governor to brief the officer on duty so that a visitor speaking Irish would be warned to continue in English or have the visit terminated.
In his reply to Hume, Lord Gowrie said he was sorry that Ó Cathaoir had had his visit terminated, but the instruction to governors was quite explicit that visits to prisoners should be "in sight and hearing of the prison staff".
Fluency in Irish
"This is rendered ineffective if staff are unable to understand the language used. You will understand that we have difficulty, to put it no higher, in finding staff who are fluent in Irish," wrote the minister.
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