As it traces the textual history of the works of authors like Bobby Sands and Gerry Adams, this book analyses Republican resistance to disciplinary structures, demonstrating the ways in which prisoners appropriate space through discursive strategies.

Writing Resistance in Northern Ireland is an examination of feminist republicanism(s) in the north of Ireland between 1975 and 1986. Republican prison protest was rife during this period, and fractures opened up between the feminist and republican movements. Despite their shared objective of self-determination, the two movements did not achieve a natural or total congruence. While it has been argued that there is a disjuncture between feminism and nationalism, this book argues for a new perspective on feminist republicanism(s) in the north and tells the story of a niche collective of republican feminists who came to the fore during the Troubles and sought bodily, political and economic autonomy. The book examines source material including historical narratives, jail-writings, journalism, documentary film and literary texts, and paints a vivid picture of a movement of republican feminist women’s writing concerned with political crisis, gender and the nation. Aimée Walsh uses the plural ‘republicanism(s)’ as a way of encapsulating the varied iterations of nationalist feminism, from militant republicanism in Armagh Gaol to a non-violent literary nationalist feminism. This examination of the interaction between nationalism and gender shows how the study of women’s writing can offer a paradigm shift in the history of the Troubles as seen through a feminist lens.

This book explores 50 years of Irish women’s prison writing, 1960s–2010s, connecting the work of women leaders and writers in Northern Ireland during the Troubles. This volume analyzes political communiqués, petitions, news coverage, prison files, personal letters, poetry and short prose, and memoirs, highlighting the personal correspondence, auto/biographical narratives, and poetry of the following key women: Bernadette McAliskey, Eileen Hickey, Mairéad Farrell, Síle Darragh, Ella O’Dwyer, Martina Anderson, Dolours Price, Marian McGlinchey (formerly Marian Price), Áine and Eibhlín Nic Giolla Easpaig (Ann and Eileen Gillespie), Roseleen Walsh, and Margaretta D’Arcy. This text builds on different fields and discourses to reimagine gender and genre as central to an interdisciplinary and intersectional prison archive. Centering Irish women’s prison writings, in order to challenge canonization in history and literature, this volume argues that women’s lives and words offer a different view of gender and nation as well as offer a fuller and more inclusive archive of Irish history and literature. Additionally, this book will point to the ways in which their politics of everyday life and their cultural work is a form of anti-colonial civil rights feminism, for it speaks truth to power in a world in which compliance and silence are valued. Overall, this text focuses on rethinking and recasting women’s voices and words in order to document and promote the ongoing Irish freedom struggle from an abolitionist feminist perspective.

In this book the author chronicles the abuse by the British state of emergency laws: harassment and intimidation of civilians; injuries and deaths caused by rubber and plastic bullets; collusion between British security forces, British intelligence and loyalist paramilitaries; unjust killings and murders by the security forces; excessive punishments and degrading strip-searches in prisons – abuses ignored by all but a handful of individuals and civil rights organisations.

As it traces the textual history of the works of authors like Bobby Sands and Gerry Adams, this book analyses Republican resistance to disciplinary structures, demonstrating the ways in which prisoners appropriate space through discursive strategies.

This volume examines the critical factors and processes by which the Provisional Irish Republican movement campaign from 1969 to 1998 transformed a once acquiescent nationalist population in Northern Ireland into a counterpublic of resistance demanding national self-determination and social justice. Considering the establishment of Irish Republican community institutions, prison protests, Republican Feminism, and Provisional IRA media and communications, this volume explores the emergence of Republicanism as a mass social movement in the nationalist Catholic ghettos and rural regions of Northern Ireland in the 1970s – a development that helped to sustain the armed struggle of the Provisional Irish Republican Army for three decades. An examination of the emergence and transformative power of the counterpublic discourse and action of the Irish Republican movement, this volume provides a framework for conceptualizing counterpublics in social movement studies. As such it will appeal to scholars of sociology, history, and politics with interests in social movements and mobilization.

This book tells the dramatic and often surprising story of the learning of the Irish language by Irish Republican prisoners held in the infamous H-block cells during the bloody political conflict in Northern Ireland. Using research methods and techniques, the author closely analyses the emergence of the Irish language amongst republican prisoners and ex prisoners in Northern Ireland from the 1970s up until the present. This pioneering study shows how the language was used exclusively in parts of the prison, despite the efforts of the prison authorities to suppress the language, and the dramatic impact this had on Irish society. Drawing on interviews with the prisoners, and various other materials, Mac Giolla Chriost shows how these developments gave rise to the popular coinage of the term ‘Jailtacht’, a deformation of ‘Gaeltacht’ - the official Irish-speaking districts of the Republic of Ireland, to describe this unique linguistic phenomenon.