Ready to Die in the Maze

By Robert Ajemian

What it is like to starve to death--and why the I.R.A. men do it

After fasting for 62 days, Tom McElwee, 23, died last weekend, touching off widespread rioting in Belfast that killed two persons. The threat of violence is always present, yet the real battle between the British authorities and the Irish Republican Army is being fought these days not in the streets of Northern Ireland, but in a sprawling, gray brick prison near Belfast known as the Maze. There, one after another, I.R.A. members are starving themselves to death for the right, technically, to get the special handling accorded political prisoners instead of being treated as common criminals. But, in a far more profound way, the hunger strikes have come to symbolize the bitter and enduring struggle between the stubborn I.R.A. and the equally stubborn British. By week's end nine hunger strikers had died and others were on what they vowed would be their deathbeds. An inside report on what it is like to live in the Maze--and what it is like to die there:

The tray of food sits there, untouched. Every once in a while, the hunger striker steals a glance at it. After the first week, the servings seem enlarged to a ravenous man, the beans huge, the scones puffed up. His sense of smell is also more acute; he can detect the kind of food almost before it arrives. The breakfast tray waits until lunch, lunch stays until dinner, and dinner remains all night long. British authorities say they have the obligation to keep food always available. The prisoners consider the practice taunting and cruel.

But after two weeks, the war of nerves becomes irrelevant. The trays keep arriving, but by now the prisoners have lost their craving for food. The stomach cramps and pains recede and eventually disappear. The prisoners concentrate instead on their daily five pints of water. Now their only concern is whether they can hold down the water without retching. A small bowl of salt is provided for each prisoner, and he can sprinkle in as much as he wants. When the hunger strikes are far along, the prisoners ask for carbonated water and the British grant the request.

This is the world of the zealots, where Irish youth are willing to starve themselves for their cause of driving the British out of Northern Ireland. It is an astounding kind of sacrifice--a brutal, lingering death, full of hatred and martyrdom, so fanatical and Irish. The moment one striker dies, 50 volunteer to take his place. Tom McElwee, who died last week, wore a glass eye as a result of one of his own guerrilla bombs. Behind him, at 55 days, Patrick Quinn, 29, had once slipped into unconsciousness. Big-bellied Michael Devine, 27, was at 48 days, gangly Lawrence McKeown, 24, at 41, and then, not too far behind, Patrick McGeown, 25, and Matt Devlin, 31, and more to come.

Street fighters from youth, terrorists half their lives, hardened and ruthless from years in prison, they are old at age 20. Because so many of the rebels, 406 of them, are locked in the H-shaped blocks of the Maze, they now believe they must win their war inside the prison, and that helps explain their astonishing defiance. But questions about them persist. Why are they so willing to starve themselves? How do they stand the pain? Are they afraid?

The intimate details of each death, spread eagerly from cell to cell, are well known to all the prisoners. Each time new volunteers are sought, Maze leaders review the awful effects of starvation. They want no false bravado and no dropouts. The prisoners stand silent against the cell-block doors, ears pressed to cracks in the framing, and listen to block commanders speaking in Gaelic to confound the guards, describe the ulcerated throats, the tooth fillings that drop out, the skin that turns so dry that bones break through, the inevitable blindness before death.

I.R.A. leaders at first feared the idea of hunger strikes, believing the men would be unable to persist and would thus endanger the esprit of the movement. The longstanding question--Would starvation bring results?--was raised again early this year by prison leaders and debated for hours up and down the blocks. Some of the inmates spoke into the darkness and predicted glumly that the British would never yield. Such comments were usually met with silence. The men were asked to consider the proposal for one week and then volunteer if they felt ready to go.

A hundred offered to die. I.R.A. commanders in the Maze, startled by the number, ordered the hunger strikes to begin. The volunteers quickly became heroes, paid special attention by the other prisoners, passed extra cigarettes, showered with support in the early days of stomach cramps. Poems were written to them and recited through the pipes and doors and shouted across the blocks.

Now the pattern of dying has become almost routine. After 21 days of no food, strikers are moved, past cheering cellmates, to continue their fast in the nearby prison hospital, a modern, one-story building where they are locked into individual rooms. Here they regain the status of prisoners who conform to regulations, and they are allowed to have visitors for one half-hour each day. The trays of food are always there. Radios are in each room and the strikers listen for special songs played for them by name by a sympathetic local station. But the men are even more interested in the hourly news, often interrupting conversation when they realize the program has already started, hoping, in the midst of dying, they will get word that the British have relented--that they can live. For two hours each evening, from 6 o'clock to 8, the hunger strikers are allowed to visit together in a small television room. Four or five gather at a time. After years alone in a cell, the men are fascinated by TV. The sudden appearance of their hated enemy, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, sets them off into howls of outrage.

Prison officers say the hunger strikers undergo a drastic personality change when they leave the discipline of the blocks. They become far more civil, even amiable, finally speaking directly to the staff, asking and answering questions. They spend a great deal of time in bed, trying to preserve their strength. The staff puts sheepskin rugs in their beds to warm their bodies, now slowly turning colder. Although they refuse medication, the men do ask the nurses to give them liniment rubdowns to soften their parched skin. A barber comes in once a week to trim their hair and, if they are feeble, give them a shave. The prisoners are weighed daily and always anxiously demand to know the exact figure, then pass the word immediately to their waiting I.R.A. comrades, who spread it everywhere. Joe McDonnell, 30, dropped from 196 lbs. to less than 100 before he died on July 8.

At 42 days, almost exactly, a nightmarish experience occurs. They have been thoroughly warned, and the prisoners await the moment with great alarm. They are struck by something called nystagmus, a loss of muscular control due to severe vitamin deficiency. If they look sideways, their eyes begin to gyrate wildly and uncontrollably, first horizontally and then vertically. The prisoners struggle to stare straight forward, even cupping their hands against the sides of their heads, but they cannot help themselves. Francis Hughes, 25, the second striker to die, even constructed cotton gauze blinders around his eyes.

Nystagmus also causes spells of constant vomiting and dizziness. The whole experience is terrifying and no amount of advance description can begin to prepare the strikers for the ordeal. When it ends, usually right on schedule after four or five days, they are enormously cheered up and for about a week go through a physical and psychological revival.

But now the end is not far off. Their speech is slurred, and they try not to talk because the sound of their own voices echoes in their heads. Their hearing is failing and visitors have to shout during normal conversations. They are slowly going blind. Even their sense of smell is fading.

Their families are with them often now and together they flash back to early memories and images. Francis Hughes, a folk hero inside the Maze long before his death, retained his needling, cheery nature to the end, lying in bed and singing rebel songs in a thin hoarse voice, his sad relatives gathered around him.

The families usually are helpless. They sit beside the beds, haunted by doubts about whether or not to intervene. "A son is a son," said Bridie McTaggert, who had come to visit her brother, Kevin Lynch, 25, a couple of days before he died, "but my mother has to accept this." When families timidly suggest giving up the strike, sons turn their faces away or weakly hold up their palms asking them to stop. If mothers plead, some angry sons will order them out of the room and refuse further visits. Bobby Sands, 27, warned his mother he would never speak to her again if she interfered after he lost consciousness.

But a fortnight ago there finally was a break in that reluctant agreement by the families to accept the men's wishes. Catherine Quinn decided she could no longer obey such orders. When her son Patrick, 29, was unable to hold down water and fell unconscious, she defied him and had prison authorities take him to a nearby hospital and feed him intravenously. "He can't make a decision for himself any more," she said, "I want my boy to live." When Pat Quinn regains his wits, the cruel struggle between family and cause will continue.

Catherine Quinn's desperate boldness sent a wave of hope through hundreds of families who live in dread of the sudden news that their sons have volunteered to starve. When the name of the latest hunger volunteer, Liam McCloskey, 25, was announced last week, his parents protested to the I.R.A. that their son had a chronic ear infection that could cause early death. They dared to express their indignation.

Nonetheless, some families are caught up in the cause even more than their sons. Hunger Striker Raymond McCreesh, 24, went about 50 days without food and one day wondered aloud to a member of the prison staff if a single glass of milk would violate his fast. After all, McCreesh said hesitantly, it was only liquid, like the five pints of water and salt he took each day.

The staffer was so unnerved by the question that he rushed word to the prison governor who swiftly summoned members of McCreesh's immediate family.

One of them pulled a chair close to the bed, for by now Raymond was partly deaf, and reminded the prisoner that he had made a pledge to his comrades. Then the relative alluded to the first hunger striker to die this year: "Remember, Bobby Sands is waiting for you in heaven." Raymond gave up asking for milk and died a week later.

The prisoners who support the strikers often remind each other bitterly that living may be worse than dying. The cause they cling to is far more compelling than anything in their bleak home neighborhoods. Instead, the prisoners have created their own society inside the Maze that enables them to continue the struggle. Each of the four wings in a block has a commander and an adjutant, and each block has an intelligence officer and an education officer. The inmates speak Gaelic; those who do not know the language are taught inside the prison. The entire hierarchy is run by a shrewd, tough commander, Brendan McFarlane, 25, who is serving 25 years for blowing up a pub and killing five civilians.

McFarlane and his staff keep a close eye on the guards, searching for some who have been imported from the south because they understand Gaelic. Prisoners try to trick guards who are suspect, making a shocking remark to them in Gaelic about killing their children. If they see as much as a flicker of response, they know. Ordinarily, prisoners never speak to the guards directly or even look at them. It is part of the endless psychological war.

Prisoners are ingenious about looking after themselves, rubbing their toenails and fingernails on the concrete to keep them short. Long letters printed on toilet paper in miniature handwriting are sneaked out by the hundreds. One inmate, John Thomas, swallowed a small cigarette lighter, intending to store it in his body for a couple of days. A metal detector picked it up and it was removed by a purgative.

Isolated in their cells, the men devise ways of passing items across corridors by stripping threads from cotton towels and attaching a button. Then they swing the button under the door until it intersects with another thread and button from across the hall. Once the link-up is made, the inmates pass small objects to each other. Another way of transferring such items as cigarettes is to tie them to the end of a towel or a trouser leg, and then swing them from one window to the next.

The Maze springs alive for the prisoners around midnight when the guards tend to be less alert and less in evidence. The perfect evening is when the air is still, without a trace of wind or rain. Prison leaders shout into the quiet darkness and their voices carry easily between the H-blocks separated by about 100 ft. The men are called "scorchers," an anglicization of the Gaelic word scairt, for shout, and they fill the air with orders and questions and plain gossip. Sometimes they conduct quiz shows, asking questions about entertainment figures, geography, history. When someone wins, a cheer rises in the blackness.

But always, as life goes on in the Maze, the I.R.A. men are inspired and haunted by those who are about to die. The fate of the hunger strikers dominates the prison. Guided by orders from outside the Maze, McFarlane and his lieutenants still have a great deal of control over the prisoners and spend hours picking volunteers to replace the strikers who die. The leaders choose grit rather than physical strength, often quoting Bobby Sands, a small man, who said of his own hunger experience: "The body fights back, sure enough, but at the end of the day, everything returns to the mind. If you don't have a strong mind to resist, you won't last."

The pressure from fellow prisoners is heavy. To volunteer to go on strike and then quit would be an overwhelming disgrace, roughly akin to the basic Irish horror of becoming an informer. One prisoner, Sean MacStiofain, at the time the No. 2 man in the I.R.A., started a hunger strike in 1972 and quit after 57 days. He was relieved of his command.

The will to endure is strong, almost maniacal. Sands, a cold, sullen man, turned on his bedside radio and listened with a faint smirk to news broadcasts of his own final hours. Even when the end is not far off, there are some lighter moments. Only days before he died, Kevin Lynch asked his family to bring him some cigars. He lay there, his body emaciated, his voice a whisper, blowing smoke toward the ceiling. The mother and girlfriend of Kieran Doherty, 25, were lifting his shrunken body for a rubdown when he almost slid from the bed; the prisoner kidded them about taking 24 hours off his life.

From start to finish, it is a mournful scene, prisoners in green pajamas and blue robes, shuffling around slowly, trying to stretch their fasts--and lives--as long as they are able. The British will not force-feed them. They claim that such an act amounts to personal assault and, besides, they say the doctors will not obey such orders. Hospital pathologists report that post-mortems reveal no single cause of death. Rather, the young bodies simply wither away. It is a terrible way to die, bodies slowly wearing out, time and faces blurring. The prisoners strengthen themselves from time to time by recalling the words of a famous I.R.A. hunger striker, Terence MacSwiney, who fasted for 74 days in 1920 before dying.

"It is not those who can inflict the most," said MacSwiney, "but those who can suffer the most who will conquer." British authorities, for their part, are convinced the Irish cannot continue indefinitely to sacrifice their young. "They just can't keep it up," says Humphrey Atkins, Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, a man who sounds as dogged as the H-blockers.

Rebel leader Gerry Adams, 34, recently spent an afternoon with the strikers in the Maze. They gathered in the TV room and, speaking only in Gaelic, Adams told them bluntly there was little chance of anything changing. If the strikers wanted to abandon their fast, he went on, they would not be scorned. They had already done more than could be asked.

The prisoners said they wanted to go on anyway. Adams then said he believed they would all very soon be dead. By his word, he seemed almost to be inviting them to break their fast. But they would have none of it. For a moment, they stared back at him in silence. So be it, the silence said.

-- By Robert Ajemian

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