Abstract
This article critically examines how the emotive experience of political imprisonment is represented in prison memoirs. Using the memoirs of former Irish Republican Army (IRA) members who were involved in prison-related protest in the 1970s and 80s as an empirical basis, it goes beyond surface level cultural reproductions (i.e. murals, songs, and posters) to explore how lived experience of political imprisonment is defined by a complex interplay between loyalty and guilt. The article identifies how the memoirists’ competing roles as IRA volunteers, comrades, sons, husbands, and brothers shaped their lived experience of political imprisonment. Establishing that loyalty and guilt are multi-faceted emotions that emerge out of different relationships, in different contexts and for different reasons, the article argues that nuanced conceptual differences must be acknowledged within, as well as between, these emotions. The article identifies how, for political prisoners at least, loyalty means dedication to collective action, the relegation of self-interest, and fidelity to dead comrades, whereas guilt manifest itself as feelings of benefiting from the sacrifice of dead comrades, recognising their capacity to hurt others, and attempts to belatedly repair past hurt. These insights are instructive in understanding both the historical legacy of political imprisonment and its contemporaneous impact in a global climate of increasing political polarisation and violent unrest.
Introduction
The 1981 hunger strike led by Irish Republican Army (IRA) prisoner Bobby Sands is well discussed in the literature on hunger striking (Connolly et al., 2023; Howland, 2013; Jasper, 2018; Machin, 2016), political imprisonment (Bryson et al., 2021; Jamieson, 2015; McEvoy et al., 2007) and the cultural reproduction of conflict through murals (Rolston, 1987), songs (Millar, 2020), and posters (Welch, 2020). 1 There has, too, been scholarly discussion of the prison writings of Sands himself (Dearey, 2007; O’Hearn, 2006). While this rich vein of scholarship has established how Sands epitomises the ‘political prisoner-as-icon’ (James, 2003: 6), the memoirs of those ‘blanketmen’ 2 imprisoned alongside him remain, by comparison, relatively underexplored. 3 The lack of engagement with these memoirs as firsthand accounts that can inform us about prison-related protest is surprising given that Irish republicans, like other groups that have historically faced political imprisonment (Alexander, 2008; Gready, 1993; Harlow, 1987, 1992; James, 2003;), have a long tradition of writing prison memoirs (Hopkins, 2017; O’Hearn, 2006; Washburn, 2022; Whalen, 2007).
As ‘the most extended narratives and analyses’ of the prison experience (Morgan, 1999: 337), these prison memoirs possess significant empirical value for understanding the lived experience of political imprisonment. Even a cursory glance at the wider literature on prison memoirs shows that they represent ‘subjugated knowledge’ (Foucault, 1980: 81) that reflects the ‘oppositional power of writing’ (Gready, 1993: 493). The argument here turns on how they empower political prisoners to reclaim their prison experience, reaffirm ideological beliefs, and expose prison conditions (Gready, 1993; Harlow, 1987). Relatedly, they capture the nexus between the personal, the political, the self and the nation (Alexander, 2008; Gready, 1993; Harlow, 1987). In doing so, they sate the ‘comradely demand to know’ (Gready, 1993: 493) about political prisoners and their struggles.
At the same time, however, prison memoirs are also cultural products that offer insight into everyday life in prison (Olguin, 2009). Having significant ‘cultural reach’ (Metcalf, 2012: 7), they frame the individual and personal struggles political prisoners face within a broader framework of collective struggle (Alexander, 2008; Harlow, 1987). Even if there is a shared and common theme of political imprisonment, there is nevertheless a subjectivity to the memoirs of political prisoners that reflects their personal lives and circumstances. By capturing this subjectivity, prison memoirs paint a more complex picture of political prisoners than murals, songs and posters that socio-politically celebrate the ‘political prisoner-as-icon’ do.
Expanding from that premise, this article explores how the everyday emotional experience of political imprisonment is represented in prison memoirs. The prison environment is apposite for a study of emotional experiences given that, as Crewe (2007: 123) notes, it exposes the nature of friendship, loyalty, and conflict. Moreover, political imprisonment is an inherently emotive experience for those who resist the regime that jails them because the acts of resistance, hardship, and oppression that define daily life are enrooted in affective attachment to cause and comrades (Alexander, 2008; Gready, 1993; Harlow, 1987, 1992). Although an insightful body of existing scholarship has previously discussed the emotional experience of prison-related protest by Irish republicans in the North of Ireland (Connolly et al., 2023; O’Hearn, 2009; Reinisch, 2019; Rolston and McKeown, 2017), it has, for the most part, failed to substantively engage with prison memoirs as an empirical source of data. It has also focused on emotion more generally rather than taking a focused approach to specific emotions.
Building on the valuable insights offered by previous scholarship, this article locates itself within what has recently been termed the ‘emotional turn’ in carceral studies (Kilty et al., 2025). It uses the prison memoirs of former IRA prisoners Richard O’Rawe (2016), Seamus Kearney (2021), and Laurence McKeown (2021) to explore how loyalty and guilt shaped the experiences of IRA prisoners who were involved in prison-related protest in the 1970s and 1980s. 4 Merging the literatures on emotion, political imprisonment, and memoir, it critically examines the complex interplay between loyalty and guilt that defined prison-related protest in the North of Ireland. The deliberate focus herein on loyalty and guilt seeks to problematise the emotionally repressed ‘Rough Tough Provo 5 ’ self-image that has dominated popular socio-cultural representations of IRA prisoners yet invisibilises the emotional harm they experience (Grounds & Jamieson, 2003; Hearty, 2025). In contrast to simplistic masculine depictions of IRA prisoners as disciplined and committed ideologues, the emotional reality of political imprisonment is laid bare in prison memoirs that reveal their internal struggle between the ‘ideal’ and the ‘real’ (Reissmann, 1993); that is, the impossibility of simultaneously being a good comrade, son, husband, and brother during political imprisonment. By tracking the evolving and changing relationship between the memoirist and an extensive ‘cast of characters’ that includes fellow prisoners, family, and armed groups (Harlow, 1992: x), prison memoirs capture the interplay between loyalty and guilt in a way that songs, murals, and posters cannot.
After establishing the relevant context to the memoirs and offering conceptual clarity to, and showing the empirical relevance of, loyalty and guilt, the article sets out the materials and methods used in the case study. It then unpacks the complexity of loyalty whereby the memoirists were caught in the middle of ‘loyalty dilemmas’ (Gilbert, 2024) between cause, comrades and family. Similarly, it critically examines how in the ‘unique social and moral environment’ of prison (Crewe, 2007: 123) the memoirists experienced a sense of guilt at their inability to satisfy these competing demands. What follows is thus a ‘bottom-up emotional approach’ (Jasper, 2018: 12) of using overlooked empirical data within prison memoirs to better understand the complexity of loyalty and guilt as experienced by political prisoners. The case study therefore speaks to the ‘emotional’ in the ‘emotional turn’ in carceral studies by nuancing how we conceptualise loyalty and guilt, while it speaks to the ‘carceral’ by developing this out of lived experience of political imprisonment.
The ‘jail war’
Loyalty and guilt during political imprisonment can only be understood when the memoirs are located within the context of what Jamieson (2015: 95) calls the ‘jail war’ in the North of Ireland. Although more generally prisons seek to strip away the identity and agency of the individual through institutionalisation (Clemmer, 1958; Goffman, 1968; Sykes, 1958), in contexts like the North of Ireland they become arenas where ‘larger battles are fought’ between those politically opposed to the state and the state who denies their opposition any political legitimacy (McEvoy et al., 2007: 293). Within this context, as Harlow (1987: 119) establishes, the political prisoner becomes an extension of a broader collective struggle taking place beyond the prison walls. Prison was not ‘time out’ from the armed struggle for IRA volunteers (Rolston and McKeown, 2017), but a foray into a new ‘political and ideological battleground’ (Bryson et al., 2021: 82).
Mirroring a wider shift in state discourse that sought to deny any political underpinning to IRA violence, the UK Government removed ‘special category status’ (i.e. de facto political status) from those convicted of conflict-related offences after 1 March 1976. 6 Given the irreconcilability of this criminalisation policy with the self-image of IRA volunteers as soldiers fighting a decolonial war of national liberation (Jasper, 2018: 72; Reinisch, 2019), Irish republicans convicted after this date rejected the criminal tag and engaged in a protracted series of protests. This began with wearing a blanket instead of a prison uniform (blanket protest), escalated into a refusal to wash and slop out (choosing instead to smear their excrement on the cell walls – no wash protest) and culminated in hunger strikes in 1980 and 1981 (Bryson et al., 2021; Connolly et al., 2023; McEvoy et al., 2007; O’Hearn, 2009, 2017; Rolston and McKeown, 2017; Welch, 2020).
As the broader ideological battle over the nature of the conflict converged on the prisons, they became sites to ‘break’, rather than simply ‘contain’, Irish republicans (McEvoy et al., 2007: 302). Exceeding the usual ‘pains of imprisonment’ (Sykes, 1958), protesting prisoners were subject to ‘bare life conditions’ where the prison administration removed everyday comforts from their cells, strictly controlled their food allocation, increasingly confined them to their cells for most of the week, and restricted their access to visits, letters, and parcels (O’Hearn, 2017: 159). While this invariably drove
With the protest escalating, prisoners were increasingly subjected to physical and sexual assault during cell searches, forced washes, and the cleaning of cells. However, the ‘top-down’ violence of the prison administration drew increased solidarity among the prisoners (Rolston and McKeown, 2017). As O’Rawe (2016: 102) recalled, ‘they [prison officers] never realised that the more they laughed and the more pain they heaped on us, the more we drew on each other. The brutality only ensured that the famous blanket esprit de corps made us soulmates rather than mere cellmates: we became indestructible’. Facing excessive state violence, daily struggle and existential threat, a powerful emotional bond emerged among the prisoners (Rolston and McKeown, 2017). This bond quickly coalesced around the collective identity of ‘the blanketmen’, with McKeown (2021: 226) describing how this meant that ‘it didn’t matter who they were, what organisation they belonged to, what part of the country they were from, what they were charged with, or how long they were serving. They were blanketmen. They were friends. They were brothers’.
Failing to gain any concessions after 4 years of escalating protest, the blanketmen resorted to the age-old Irish republican tactic of hunger striking (Bryson et al., 2021). In late 1980 seven prisoners embarked on hunger strike for the restoration of political status. Having called off that hunger strike without securing the necessary concessions, Bobby Sands subsequently led a second hunger strike in March 1981 that would claim the lives of 10 blanketmen before ending in October 1981 without having their five demands met. 7
Emotions, loyalty, and guilt
Emotion underpins how we feel about people, places, and ideas (Hochschild, 1998; Jasper, 2018: 3). It shapes the meaning and interpretation we give to different situations and influences how we feel we should react to and within these situations (Hochschild, 1979). Emotions, then, are both
Loyalty has been defined as a ‘subject-object relationship’ whereby it is felt by a person ‘for or toward something else’ – another person, a group or an ideal (Schaar, 1957: 5). Because it is premised on attachment to ‘something else’, loyalty is central to the ‘associational involvements’ that shape our individual and group identity (Connor, 2010; Kleinig, 2014: 9). Just as we may experience a range of ‘associational involvements’, loyalty is a ‘layered’ emotion that is contingent on the social circumstances that we find ourselves in (Connor, 2010). The multiplicity of our ‘associational involvements’ means that layers of loyalty can manifest themselves as loyalty to family, friends, organisation, cause, sporting team, religious sect, employer, and product brand (Connor, 2010; Kleinig, 2014). Tension may arise between these layers of loyalty, leaving us with torn loyalties between the different people, groups, and ideals that we feel attached to (Jasper, 2018: 9). In this context, a ‘loyalty dilemma’ emerges whereby fulfilling one ‘loyalty obligation’ means excluding another (Gilbert, 2024: 69). Where and when this happens, loyalty to family comes at the expense of loyalty to comrades and cause and vice versa. What it means to be a ‘good’ family member, a ‘good’ comrade and a ‘good’ adherent to the cause becomes contingent on time and place rather than any universalistic moral concept of what it takes to be ‘good’.
Whereas loyalty is felt towards something else, guilt is an inward directed ‘self-critical’ emotion (Turner and Stets, 2006: 550) based on our disapproval for failing to meet expectations that we have set for ourselves (Jasper, 2018: 5; Turner, 2010). Unlike shame, guilt hinges on how we evaluate our
The fact that loyalty and guilt are relational and situational, and rooted in identity, is problematic because of our ‘movement’ through different roles and identities in the different relationships and contexts that we find ourselves in (Turner, 2010). Each of these different identities are premised on different expectations of how we should behave (Turner and Stets, 2006). As the memoirs show, the expectations of how to behave as a husband/brother/son are not naturally conducive to similar expectations of how to behave as an IRA volunteer and a blanketman; if loyalty stemmed from ‘identity verification’ as blanketmen during the ‘jail war’ then concomitant feelings of guilt arose from ‘identity non-verification’ as father, husband, brother, and son (Stets and Carter, 2012).
Materials and methods
With life stories allowing the experience of political imprisonment to be ‘interpreted and reinterpreted, told and retold’ (Bruner, 1987: 31), prison memoirs enable Irish republicans to reflect on the emotional experience of political imprisonment throughout their life course (Hearty, 2025; Hopkins, 2017). Granted, some of the emotional immediacy of prison memoirs may be lost when they are written retrospectively, yet the stories that are most emotionally meaningful are those that are retained when experiences are
Accordingly, this article draws empirically on the memoirs of Richard O’Rawe, Seamus Kearney and Laurence McKeown to further explore the emotions of loyalty and guilt within the context of prison-related protest in the North of Ireland. Other ‘blanketmen’ have written their firsthand accounts of the ‘jail war’, yet this case study has chosen the three memoirs above because the personal experiences of the memoirists speak directly to the themes of loyalty and guilt. As the discussion below shows, the personal circumstances that each memoirist faced as either father/husband, brother/son, and son during the ‘jail war’ created a ‘themal coherence’ (Reissmann, 1993: 67) around loyalty and guilt in their memoirs. Moreover, prioritising a deeper analysis of fewer individual cases from within a smaller-sized sample to theorise at a broader level fits with a narrative studies approach (Reissmann, 1993: 70).
Richard O’Rawe was arrested following an armed robbery in February 1977 and sentenced to 8 years in prison. Following his conviction, he joined the prison protest despite being newly married and having an infant daughter. He would later become the prisoners’ Public Relations Officer (PRO) during the 1981 hunger strike. O’Rawe’s memoir is most notable for his controversial claim that the IRA leadership on the outside vetoed the prison leadership’s decision to accept an offer to settle the hunger strike before the death of the fifth hunger striker Joe McDonnell in July 1981. 8 Seamus Kearney was sentenced to 14 years in prison after trying to ambush a member of the security forces in 1977. Remarkably, Kearney remained on protest after the IRA killed his younger brother Michael as an informer in 1979. After his release in 1986 he would subsequently embark on a prolonged campaign to have the IRA clear his brother from the accusation of being an informer. Laurence McKeown had gotten immediately involved in the prison protest after being sentenced to life imprisonment. He subsequently joined the hunger strike in June 1981. His family authorised medical intervention when he lapsed into unconsciousness after 70 days on hunger strike.
Recognising that narrative analysis defies any rigidly prescribed template (Esin et al., 2014), the case study analysed the memoirs by creatively merging thematic analysis with dialogical analysis. Thematic analysis involves critiquing dominant themes within the chosen text (Reissmann, 1993; Sandberg, 2022). In this instance, the themes of loyalty and guilt became the ‘analytical interest’ (Frank, 2010: 114) for how experiences of the ‘jail war’ were storied in the memoirs. By contrast, dialogical analysis focuses on what emerges from within or through narrative dialogue (Frank, 2005, 2010; Sandberg, 2022). Naturally, this involves analysing what can be learnt about loyalty and guilt from the dialogue between the memoirist and the ‘cast of characters’ throughout their memoirs. However, dialogical analysis also accepts that ‘each voice [is] the site of multiple voices’ and seeks to uncover ‘the contest among these voices’ (Frank, 2005: 972). This reflects how any memoirist does not speak from a single fixed position (Esin et al., 2014) but can ‘narrative identify’ (Frank, 2010: 49) with different positions, roles, and perspectives throughout their memoir. As an ‘unfinished’ person who has been cast into ‘multiple scripts’ (Frank, 2010: 7) during the ‘jail war’, each memoirist speaks in different authorial voices throughout their memoir; the IRA volunteer, the blanketman, the hunger striker, the father, the husband, the brother, and the son (Hearty, 2025). Dialogical analysis of the memoirs identifies these different authorial voices in the first instance then subsequently critiques the tension between them.
The analysis began with reading each memoir to identify sections relevant to the themes of loyalty and guilt. Having been identified, these sections were then manually transcribed from the memoirs into a word document. Following transcription, the extracts were coded in a two-stage process; the first stage involved coding them to the relevant theme (loyalty or guilt) and the second stage involved coding them to the relevant authorial voice being assumed by the memoirist (IRA volunteer, blanketman, hunger striker, father/husband, brother/son, or son). The memoirs were analysed as individual texts
Loyalty and the ‘jail war’
Loyalty becomes most relevant whenever it is tested and challenged (Gouldner, 1954). The salience of this for the memoirists is obvious, with their accounts showing that solidary resistance to a violent prison administration and ideological commitment to a political cause became the catalysts for loyalty among the blanketmen. As the memoirs demonstrate, this loyalty manifest itself as a collective commitment to the cause, a relegation of self-interest, and keeping fidelity with comrades who had made the ultimate sacrifice.
Loyalty as ‘joint commitment’
Joining the protest is framed by the memoirists as an act of loyalty that arose from a ‘joint commitment’ (Gilbert, 2024: 79) among the blanketmen to defeat the criminalisation policy. Successfully attaining this objective required each individual prisoner joining the protest as a common course of action. If the protest was a ‘shared expression of sacrifice’ by the blanketmen (Welch, 2020: 18), then joining it was an act of loyalty towards both cause and comrades. The strength of the loyalty underpinning their ‘joint commitment’ is captured in Kearney’s (2021: 121) remarks that the blanketmen ‘could rely on each other and no one else . . . we all developed a sense of duty, which meant we would not let ourselves or our comrades down and that became the driving force of the blanket protest and eventually the hunger strikes’. O’Rawe (2016: 39–40) would similarly conclude that the fortitude to sustain the protest lay ‘not only in the justice of our cause, but also in the loyalty and affection we had for each other’.
As the prison administration adopted increasingly repressive measures in response to the escalation of the protest (O’Hearn, 2009; Rolston and McKeown, 2017), the blanketmen provided the requisite moral and physical support to one another that would help those on the brink of collapsing endure the extreme conditions. Kearney offers an illustrative example of this support when he discusses how he helped his cellmate remain on the protest during a significant moment of doubt. In return, his cellmate would help Kearney remain on the protest when he later experienced his own doubts. Kearney (2021: 91) viewed this mutual support as an act of loyalty whereby ‘one brother would carry another because they were brothers’.
The bondedness among the blanketmen, the gravity of the situation they found themselves in, and their unwavering ideological commitment created a high degree of what Gouldner (1954: 58) calls ‘loyalty consciousness’ among the group. Reflecting the reciprocity at the core of loyalty (Connor, 2010), the memoirs show how acutely aware the blanketmen were of the imperative to support each other in their bid to defeat the criminalisation policy. This is captured in the memoirs through the framing of each individual’s experience within a narrative of ‘common struggle’ (Harlow, 1987: 120) among the blanketmen.
Loyalty as relegation of self-interest
Having made a ‘joint commitment’ with the blanketmen to defeat the criminalisation policy, the memoirists were prepared to prioritise the collective needs of the group over their own individual interests. Groups that are bound by loyalty often expect their members to put group interests before their personal interests (Ewin, 1992). Members, in turn, see this as a moral obligation (Schaar, 1957: 14). While the solidarity among the blanketmen fed off this abiding sense of group loyalty, at the same time it suppressed negative emotions felt by individuals facing ‘loyalty dilemmas’. As Rolston and McKeown (2017) highlight, those prisoners struggling to process familial bereavement or the breakdown of marital relationships during the protest suppressed their emotions for fear that they might undermine the protest.
While the memoirists were able to relegate self-interest for the sake of the collective good by joining, and then remaining on, the protest, they also frankly discuss the ‘loyalty costs’ (Gouldner, 1954: 84) incurred through this decision. Although their emotional turmoil may not have been openly expressed to other blanketmen, the memoirs nonetheless show how taxed they were by their ‘loyalty dilemmas’.
Given that protesting prisoners lost remission for every day spent on protest, going on the protest meant that O’Rawe would be separated from his wife and baby daughter for longer than if he conformed to prison policy. There was also the not insignificant fact that coming off the protest would spare him the ‘bare life’ conditions and violence inflicted on protesting prisoners. Recalling the difficulty of his position, O’Rawe (2016: 34) conceded that: If I came off the protest, the beatings would stop and I would lose no more remission and be with her [his wife], and our daughter, Bernadette, all the quicker. I only had to give the nod. In my heart of hearts, I knew that giving that nod to a screw [prison officer] was never really an option. I was torn between my political beliefs and loyalty to my comrades, and my love for and commitment to my wife. Either way, I was going to hurt other people.
Although contrary to his own self-interest, O’Rawe remained on the protest as an act of loyalty to the blanketmen that came at the expense of his family.
Likewise, Kearney (2021: 139) discusses his decision to remain on the protest after the IRA killed his brother. Even though he had been presented with a ‘ticket out’, he refused to follow other prisoners who had left the protest because of minor ailments and family bereavements. Instead, he felt it was his duty to remain on the protest and act as an example to others who were considering quitting. Kearney (2021: 134) recalls adopting the position that ‘the blanketmen didn’t kill my brother, so why should I blame them. Elements of the IRA may have been responsible, but the blanketmen were not’. Because of this he ‘would not be letting them down by leaving them on their own’. His decision to remain on the protest led to him being singled out for extra verbal and physical abuse by prison officers.
Similarly, when discussing his decision to volunteer for the hunger strike, McKeown (2021: 184) frames it as an act of loyalty to cause and comrades: ‘It wasn’t a case of bravery or ego; I simply felt that I could go through with it. I wasn’t married and was serving life, and I felt I had a responsibility to those around me and to the struggle’. Here, McKeown assesses the situation in terms of what is best for the Irish republican cause and for the blanketmen, rather than what is best for him individually. Accordingly, he acts in furtherance of the collective interests of the blanketmen, yet to his own detriment, by volunteering for the hunger strike.
The memoirists’ decisions demonstrate how loyalty can cause more personal hardship than abandoning the group would (Ewin, 1992). Yet their decisions also show that loyalty is most strongly felt and expressed whenever the group is under threat (Schaar, 1957: 16). Although an easier time in prison was within their own gift, none of the memoirists were prepared to forsake their political beliefs and abandon beleaguered comrades for the sake of personal expedience.
Loyalty as fidelity to the dead
Unsurprisingly, the hunger strikers who died in 1981 are prominent among the ‘cast of characters’ (Harlow, 1992: x) within the memoirs. Within Irish republicanism the hunger strikers encapsulate the phenomenon of the ‘political-prisoner as icon’ (James, 2003: 6), yet insights from the memoirs are more layered and nuanced in capturing personal portrayals of them as friends and comrades
For example, Kearney (2021: 233) reveals that, despite the deep hurt, the death of each hunger striker quickly galvanised the blanketmen’s resolve to win the ‘jail war’: With the deaths of our four comrades we now understood the meaning of brotherhood and the bond which we had forged through suffering. With this bond we realised that we had the power to carry on, regardless of any human attempt to stop us, or prevent us from reaching our ultimate goal. The bond would never be broken and the love would never get lost.
This feeling persisted as more comrades began to die, with Kearney (2021: 254–255) later recalling the indelible mark that his last conversation with hunger striker Kevin Lynch left on him: I knew that I had been changed forever after our conversation and had to earn the rest of my life because I owed it to Kevin and the others for everything that they had done for me. Kevin and the lads had laid down their precious lives in an act of great love for us and for our people struggling to be free. From that moment onwards I could not afford to become a degenerate or mediocre person, because I now had a mission and Kevin and the boys were my mission and continue to be.
For Kearney, then, the ‘loyalty cost’ owed to the hunger strikers for their sacrifice was to protect their memory from dishonour or disgrace.
Loyalty as fidelity to the dead was, however, a double-edged sword. Reflecting later upon the impact that this had on the hunger strike, O’Rawe (2016: 191) concluded that it led to the hunger strike being prolonged past the point when it became clear that the prisoners’ demands would not be met: It seemed like the next man to die did not want to be seen to pull the plug on the hunger strike . . . even though the hunger strikers knew that the chance of winning all five demands was remote in the extreme, they were still prepared to give their lives . . . in case they were perceived to be letting down both their dead comrades and themselves.
According to O’Rawe, ‘joint commitment’ locked the blanketmen into a fatal pact with those hunger striking comrades who died for the collective good. On the one hand, for those blanketmen like Kearney they became inspirational figures whose memory helped their comrades endure the ‘jail war’, yet on the other hand, for those joining the hunger strike, fidelity to their memory, rather than attainment of objectives, began to take precedent as the ‘jail war’ wore on.
Guilt and the ‘jail war’
While we may legitimately feel guilty about how our (in)actions hurt others, guilt can also be irrational when we are self-critical for things that are beyond our individual control (Misheva, 2019). Within the memoirs there are examples of both rational and irrational forms of guilt as the memoirists recount their experiences of survivor guilt at having survived the ‘jail war’, agentic guilt of realising their capacity to hurt others, and ‘positive guilt’ (Misheva, 2019) of repairing past hurt.
Survivor guilt
Survivor guilt is a non-culpable form of guilt that is
Kearney (2021: 203) had initially considered volunteering for the hunger strike, yet upon learning that it would be to the death withdrew his name after concluding that ‘death on hunger strike was not for me, that took a special type of man’. Reflecting the prevalence of the ‘solidarity guilt’ that came from watching comrades sacrifice themselves for the blanketmen, Kearney (2021: 232) describes the death of Bobby Sands as being: truly cataclysmic, because we understood exactly why he had died and most of us felt a deep sense of guilt around his demise. This ‘survivor’s guilt’ would continue to haunt us blanketmen for the rest of our lives on this earth, and nothing of earthly value would placate that great sense of loss . . . his death and the deaths of the men who followed tore something deep inside us, that can never really heal in this life, but maybe in the next.
Likewise, thinking of how his comrades Kevin Lynch and Kieran Doherty neared death in the prison hospital left O’Rawe (2016: 165) with ‘gut-wrenching feelings of helplessness, inadequacy and guilt’. As this ‘solidarity guilt’ intensified, O’Rawe began to question whether having a wife and child was sufficient reason not to volunteer for hunger strike. After all, his comrade Joe McDonnell was also married with young children yet had put his name forward and seen his hunger strike through to death. After wrestling with this ‘loyalty dilemma’, O’Rawe (2016: 173) concluded that ‘I could no longer sit back, so I put my name forward for the hunger strike. Once again, I selfishly took the easy way out: I decided that it was best not to tell Bernie the news until I got word that I had been selected’. As it transpired, O’Rawe was not selected for the hunger strike.
The ‘solidarity guilt’ felt by Kearney and O’Rawe exposes the emotional burden shouldered by the surviving blanketmen. Although this ‘solidarity guilt’ makes little empirical sense to others who observe the situation (Juni, 2016), the memoirs of Kearney and O’Rawe show that it is viscerally felt by those who experience it.
Agentic guilt
Yet guilt
Kearney, for example, discusses how his refusal to give a verbal undertaking that he would leave the protest meant that he was refused compassionate leave for his brother’s funeral. Although his mother backed his decision to remain on protest, the fact that he could not be at the funeral to support her caused him distress and led to a ‘schism’ within the family (Kearney, 2021: 135).
Similarly, McKeown (2021: 33) concedes that ‘I broke my mother’s heart with the life choices I made. Choices she could never understand. Choices that led to the deepest pain for her’. While McKeown clashed with his father over joining the hunger strike, his mother would not ask him to abandon his protest despite the obvious hurt it was causing her. Showing an acute awareness of this hurt, he recalls the last conversation they had before he lapsed into unconsciousness: She had never asked me at any time since joining the hunger strike, or even when I had first told her that I would volunteer, not to do so. And she didn’t ask me now . . . I knew she must be feeling her sorrow intensely. That evening I said to her ‘I’m sorry all this came about for you’. She leaned across to me and whispered ‘You know what you have to do and I know what I have to do’. (McKeown, 2021: 231)
Although Kearney and McKeown acknowledge their agency in making decisions that hurt their families, this is nonetheless attributed to the exigencies of the situation they were in rather than any malicious intent.
O’Rawe’s agentic guilt was more complex and multi-layered. He frankly acknowledges the ‘profound guilt’ he felt over putting loyalty to the blanketmen before loyalty to his wife, conceding that ‘by staying on the blanket I was perpetuating her agony’ (O’Rawe, 2016: 34). While this mirrors the agentic guilt Kearney and McKeown experienced, the fact that O’Rawe was part of the prison leadership during the 1981 hunger strike added further difficulty. As part of the prison leadership, O’Rawe (2016: 173) had the ‘shattering burden’ of vetting potential hunger strikers. Helping to choose which of his comrades went to their deaths led O’Rawe (2016: 129) to experience ‘considerable guilt’ that compounded the survivor guilt he was already experiencing. O’Rawe’s leadership position also led to feelings of guilt for not pushing more forcefully to bring the hunger strike to an end when it became clear that the prison administration would let prisoners die rather than meet their demands. This left O’Rawe (2016: 171) feeling that ‘I let my hunger-striking comrades down; I took the line of least resistance rather than say the unpalatable words that no one wanted to hear’.
Positive guilt
Although the memoirists acknowledge how they hurt others, they also experienced what Misheva (2019) refers to as ‘positive guilt’ by trying to repair past hurt once the ‘jail war’ had ended. Aware of the difficult position remaining on protest left his family in, Kearney reveals how ‘positive guilt’ led him to accept an unorthodox request from his mother following his release. While Kearney (2021: 359) had initially planned on resuming his IRA activities, his mother had a ‘more important job’ for him: uncovering the circumstances of his brother’s death. With the family always being sceptical of the claim that Michael was an informer, his mother impressed on him the importance of repaying the support she had given him during the protest: I have stood by you for almost ten years, especially during the blanket protest, so I need you to stand by me, I need you to help clear my son’s name and restore his honour before I die. My son Michael needs you to go back in time and find out what happened to him and the circumstances which led to his death. (Kearney 2021: 359)
Although he felt uneasy about the request, Kearney reluctantly agreed. Following a prolonged engagement with the IRA, an internal investigation into his brother’s case by the organisation concluded in 2003 that there was no evidence to support the claim that Michael Kearney was an informer. Upon hearing this, Kearney’s mother told him ‘now I can go to my grave knowing that my son’s good name has been restored’ (Kearney 2021: 360). Removed from the context of the ‘jail war’ where any ‘loyalty dilemma’ was resolved in favour of the blanketmen at the expense of his family, ‘positive guilt’ sees Kearney verifying his identity as son and brother by helping his mother remove the stigma of the informer from his brother’s memory.
Despite an order from the IRA leadership for prisoners to remain on protest and reject the prison regime at the end of the 1981 hunger strike, O’Rawe (2016: 201) left in disillusionment at how the hunger strike had been handled. He has since publicly challenged leading republicans over the matter. Due to his leadership position, O’Rawe (2016: 6) argued that ‘I have a duty to the dead hunger strikers to explain fully the events that led to their deaths’. Elaborating further on this, he felt that ‘I had no right to paper over the truth or to deny the families and the Irish people my first-hand account of what had happened’ (O’Rawe 2016: 215). While others have challenged O’Rawe’s interpretation of events, belatedly setting the record straight – or at least the historic record as he saw it – helped assuage his guilt over his earlier inactions during the hunger strike itself. In doing so, O’Rawe prioritises his loyalty to his dead blanketmen comrades over that to the IRA leadership.
Cognisant of the emotional toll his hunger strike had taken on her, McKeown discusses the first visit he had with his mother after she had saved his life. While his mother was feeling ‘apprehensive’ about the visit, McKeown (2021: 234) showed remarkable empathy for the position he had placed her in. Intervening against his wishes was not, as McKeown realised, an attempt to undermine the blanketmen during the ‘jail war’ but was the natural maternal urge to save him from death. Rather than criticise his mother for her intervention, McKeown (2021: 234) ‘had the maturity to recognise that for what it was – love’. Just as McKeown acknowledged his agentic guilt for hurting his mother, his ‘positive guilt’ prevented him from criticising her for making what she believed to be the best choice a mother could make for their son. Here McKeown’s prevailing identity is not that of the blanketman waging the ‘jail war’ but one of a son accepting the love of a mother who could not let him die.
Conclusion
The memoirs of Kearney, McKeown and O’Rawe show how political prisoners can experience
Building on the ‘emotional turn’ in carceral studies (Kilty et al., 2025), these authorial voices evidence the need for a contextual and nuanced approach to emotions like loyalty and guilt. The memoirs show how loyalty is, to draw from Kleinig (2014: 2), simultaneously a ‘neglected friend’ and a ‘dangerous enemy’. On the one hand, loyalty as ‘joint commitment’ was essential to surviving the ‘jail war’. Yet, on the other hand, this demanded ‘loyalty costs’ of foregoing self-interest for the collective good. The memoirs also reveal that loyalties change once the ‘jail war’ passes (Schaar 1957: 7). Additionally, the memoirs show the multi-faceted nature of the guilt felt by political prisoners. ‘Solidarity guilt’ felt when comrades sacrifice themselves for the common good is substantively and contextually different from agentic guilt experienced through recognition of our capacity to hurt others. And these are substantively and contextually different to ‘positive guilt’ (Misheva, 2019). Likewise, even if O’Rawe feels morally uneasy about his conduct while in the prison leadership, Kearney and McKeown show that recognising that our decisions have hurt others is
If, as the historical criminology literature argues (Bosworth, 2001), our understanding of historical phenomena can inform the conceptual and methodological lenses through which we view these same experiences today, then insights from the ‘jail war’ hold contemporary relevance within
More generally, insights from the ‘jail war’ remain important because, as Kenney (2017: 9) observes, ‘political opponents of all stripes are still going to prison, all over the world, in the name of causes that may inspire admiration or scorn’. The proscription of Palestine Action, the jailing of climate activists, and convictions of individuals for far-right disorder shows that even in the UK alone, there is much recent substance to Kenney’s point. 9 The insights from this case study of the ‘jail war’ can help inform how the ‘emotional turn’ in carceral studies methodologically and conceptually engages with the lived experience of those claiming the mantle of ‘political prisoner’ today.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
This article is based on a paper delivered at the launch of the Affect & Emotions Research Network at Queens University Belfast on 11th September 2024 and a subsequent paper delivered at the Socio-Legal Studies Association Conference at the University of Liverpool in April 2025. The author thanks the organisers and attendees of those events for their insightful comments and feedback on those papers. He also thanks the anonymous peer reviews and the editors for suggested revisions that strengthened the piece.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.