O’Rawe Told Me His Concerns
Brendan Hughes • Irish News, 19 May 2006
IT is not my intention to take sides in the ongoing debate over the claims made in the book Blanketmen by its author Richard O’Rawe.
I am not in a position to speak authoritatively on the matter.
I was in the same block as Richard O’Rawe at the time of the events he refers to but not on the same wing.
However, there has been some attempt to present O’Rawe as a person who made no effort to tell any former prisoner of his suspicions over a 24-year period. This is simply not so.
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‘The Blanket’ meets ‘Blanketmen’
All truth passes through three stages.
First, it is ridiculed.
Second, it is violently opposed.
Third, it is accepted as being self-evident
– Arthur Schopenhauer
Anthony McIntyre speaks with Richard O’Rawe • 16 May 2006
Q: This month marks the 25th anniversary of the death of Bobby Sands, Frank Hughes, Raymond McCreesh and Patsy O’Hara. How has it been for you emotionally?
A: Terrible. It has been terrible.
Q: Can you elaborate?
A: Bob has been in my thoughts all the time. He left from our wing. The others were in different blocks. And I just get this vision of him. I see him in the wing canteen for mass just before he went up to the prison hospital. He was smiling at me. He knew he was going up there to die. I knew it too. It was just so unbelievably heartrending and it has never left me. That smile has been with me for over a week; that smile of pathos. I went over to his grave and just looked around me. There was Joe and big Doc, Bryson and our Mundo, wee Paddy Mul, Todler and all the dead volunteers. It was just horrific.
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Former Blanketman Speaks Out Against ‘Vitriolic Attack’
Richard O’Rawe, Irish News • 15 May 2006
A fellow republican said to me last week that over the period of Bobby Sands’ anniversary, the republican movement had done everything except paint the Star of David on my windows and daub Juden Raus on my front door.
I laughed when he made that analogy but when I had time to think about it, I don’t think he was too wide off the mark.
The recent attempts to demonise me from on high, the vitriol, raw hatred and the ferocious endeavours to destroy my integrity have, in terms of sheer viciousness, been unprecedented within the republican family.
The same republican pointed out that Freddie Scappaticci had not received such a ‘battering.’
Sinn Fein’s silence on the question of this super-tout contrasted sharply with their crazed attacks on my character. An agent, it seems, is better thought of than a blanketman. Scap apparently had both the republican movement’s blessing and its promise of ‘omerta’ as he made haste from Dodge, his saddlebags full of Brit money.
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Tragic period clouded by ‘set of proposals’
(Jim Gibney, Irish News)
The protest for political status in Armagh Women’s prison and the H-Blocks of Long Kesh lasted for five years between September 1976 and October 1981.
At no time before the first hunger strike in October 1980 did the British government try to end the protest by any means other than brutalising and degrading the prisoners.
The first hunger strike involved seven men in the H-Blocks and three women in Armagh jail.
It lasted 53 days.
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An Phoblacht, Top Stories: “The Hunger Strike will never, ever leave me”
Remembering 1981: Former H-Block O/C Brendan McFarlane
Brendan ‘Bik’ McFarlane was Officer Commanding (O/C) the H-Block prisoners during the 1981 Hunger Strike. Last Friday, 5 May, on the 25th anniversary of the death of Bobby Sands, McFarlane spoke to An Phoblacht’s ELLA O’DWYER about the journey that brought him to undertake one of the most difficult challenges ever faced by an Irish republican.
A noticeable feature of Brendan McFarlane’s personality is the comprehensive way in which he looks at things. Observant and lateral thinking, he sees the bigger picture. In terms of awareness, he has an edge. This awareness carried him through his prison sentence and, no doubt, impacted on his selection as O/C during the 1981 Hunger Strike.
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It has withstood the blows of a million years, and will do so to the end.