Seán McConville talks to us about his book published by Routledge.
Seán McConville tells us about his new book, Irish Political Prisoners 1960–2000: Braiding Rage and Sorrow:
'This is the last part of a trilogy on which I commenced work in 1995. The three books are based on research carried out across three continents. Besides exhaustive archive, special collection, library, and private paper searches we conducted a large number of interviews, formal and informal. Funders included the UK and Irish governments, Leverhulme, Guggenheim, the Atlantic Philanthropies, the British Academy, and others. Numerous research assistants were employed (including undergraduate and graduate students) as well as fully salaried research officers. For the last book Leverhulme also agreed to support a fully funded PhD student to research music and paramilitarism. She (Claire Green) successfully defended her thesis towards the end of the project (on which she also worked part-time).
The project arose almost by accident out of an anomaly in penal thinking and policy that the Victorians and others attempted to resolve: given that imprisonment involved a regime intended, inter alia, to degrade and humiliate, how does one deal with those who commit offences not for reason of personal gain or malice, or through moral turpitude, but for conscionable reasons? These included religious offenders, anti-vaccinationists, anti-vivisectionists, moral campaigners, political protesters and others. As I began to study these offenders and how they were dealt with by the courts and legislature I encountered successive groups of Irish politically motivated offenders. I planned to deal with them in a chapter or two but ended up three books and two million words later – and twenty-five years older…
The books provide the political, religious, administrative, and legal history of Irish political imprisonment from 1848 until the last releases under the Good Friday Agreement of 1998. They are also full of stories of great human interest and set out numerous scenarios that pose difficult ethical questions and humane dilemmas for public administration.'