03/26/2024
PACS students: please check out this event being sponsored by the PFW International Studies program. If you have any questions about it, you can contact Dr. Lachlan Whalen ([email protected]), the program's coordinator.
Title: The Pen Behind the Wire: Irish Republican Prison Writing and Protest (A Virtual Talk with Eoghan Mac Cormaic)
When: Wednesday March 27 at noon
Where: Liberal Arts 152
Why: free pizza (and an informative presentation)!
Speaker bio: Eoghan Mac Cormaic spent almost 16 years in prison. Arrested in 1976 and released on licence in 1992, he spent the first six years of his time in prison on protest, beginning with four and a half years on the Blanket protest and followed by a long period on work strike in his efforts to secure political status. Those protest culminated in the epic Hunger Strike of 1981, where ten prisoners died in a struggle to secure rights.
Although denied writing material or pens, the prisoners smuggled thousands of ‘comms’ from the prison during those years and Mac Cormaic was one of the H Block ‘Public Relations Officers’ who publicised all that was occurring. In 1980 he wrote a book on pieces of toilet paper and managed to smuggle it out: the book was published in April 1981 as The Crunch Has Come under the pen name Frankie O’Brien. He continued writing for the remainder of his sentence, publishing smuggled books in Irish and a regular column in the Sinn Féin paper An Phoblacht /Republican News. Before his release he wrote a surreal novel in Irish which won the major Irish language Oireachtas literary prize in 1992. In the intervening years he has continued to write, and create, mainly in Irish, and he was the producer of the Irish language versions of international games such as Scrabble, Cluedo and Monopoly.
In 2021 a new work, Pluid, ( pluid = blanket) won another Oireachtas Prize for the best work aimed at an adult readership. An English language title On the Blanket – an A to Z of Prison Resistance followed in 2022. A further two titles appeared in 2023, Macallaí Cillín (prison poetry in Irish) and the ironically titled the pen behind the wire.
In February 2024 Gaeil agus Géibheann, a new research work into the story of the Irish language in prison since the time of the Fenians was published, and in April 2024 another English language title will be published: Captive Columns – an underground prison press 1865-2000. This book will explore a remarkable and forgotten story of hand written prison papers which republican prisoners covertly produced inside the jails and camps in which they were held.
