Imprisoned IRA Fighter Calls for Use of Words Instead of Weapons

Joseph Doherty, who has fought British rule in Northern Ireland with rocks, rifles and machine guns, has a new weapon of choice clipped to the breast pocket of his orange prison overalls.

“I’ve come to believe that the pen is mightier than the sword,” he said in an interview at the federal jail where he’s spent 7 years.

“That’s my message when I do an interview or answer a letter. I don’t say: ‘Up the IRA!’ or ‘Send more arms.’ I don’t mention the IRA. I stress what you can do politically to change things.”

Doherty, who pronounces his name DOCK-erty, has ample time to reflect on the advantages of the ballot box to the bomb. He has been at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Manhattan longer than any inmate in its history, longer even than most of its guards. He has done his time under three wardens and four captains.

Doherty’s path to the federal jail began a decade ago with a gunfight in Belfast, Northern Ireland, between his IRA unit and British troops. Doherty was captured and convicted of murdering a British officer. Facing two life terms, he escaped from jail and fled to New York City, where he was arrested by the FBI in 1983.

The British demanded his extradition, but a federal judge accepted Doherty’s argument that the killing was not a common crime but a political act, part of the IRA’s campaign to drive the British from Northern Ireland’s six counties and reunite the province with the Irish Republic. Doherty could not be extradited.

Doherty’s case has since bounced from court to court; the British have not been able to get him back, but he has not been able to go free, despite more than half a dozen court rulings in his favor. His case has become a metaphor for his homeland’s intractable troubles.

To Irish nationalists and human rights activists, Doherty is “a symbol of the battle against tyranny,” according to Paul O’Dwyer, former New York City Council president and an activist for the Irish cause. Doherty’s prison visitors have included Cardinal John J. O’Connor, the Rev. Jesse Jackson and 10 congressmen. In his victory speech, Mayor David N. Dinkins demanded “Justice for Joe Doherty!”

More than 100 members of Congress have signed resolutions supporting his requests for bail and asylum, and similar measures have passed several dozen state, county and local legislatures.

But Doherty’s musings about the limits of armed rebellion have upset some Irish nationalists.

Late last year, the New York Daily News quoted him as saying that the IRA’s armed rebellion “can’t go on,” that its “strategy hasn’t worked,” and that it should consider a unilateral cease-fire.

“I see another soldier shot dead by the IRA and I think, I read this five years ago, 10 years ago, 20 years ago,” he said. “If we carry this war on another 20 years, it’ll be such a waste of life.”

In an interview two days after his 35th birthday in January, Doherty smiled ruefully and shifted in his chair when he was asked about the reaction to his relatively dovish comments.

“A lot of people have said to me: ‘You’re in prison, Joe, you’re away from the situation.’ ”

One of his critics is Michael Flannery, an elderly IRA veteran and its best-known American supporter. He said Doherty’s emphasis on political rather than military tactics shows “he doesn’t know Irish history.”

Politics and diplomacy have failed the Irish in the past, Flannery said, because they lend legitimacy to British-created institutions yet do not strike at the source of British power.

Doherty said some of his remarks have been taken out of context; he still supports the IRA and does not regret having fought the British.

But he also said that since his imprisonment his views have changed. He described himself as part of a generation that is determined to end the war that flared 20 years ago when British soldiers, sent to protect Northern Ireland’s Catholic minority from Protestant attacks, clashed with a revived IRA.

“My generation is taking over now, and we’re more flexible, more willing to compromise, less nationalistic,” he said.

One summer Doherty was visited by an 11-year-old nephew who was about to return to Belfast. Doherty said that when he asked the boy what he was going to do when he returned home, he replied: “I’m going to join the IRA and shoot British soldiers.”

“I don’t want little Sean to be sitting at the kitchen table, stripping a Thompson machine gun like I was,” Doherty said. “I don’t want this to get passed to another generation.”

Doherty repeatedly expressed optimism, rare in discussions of Northern Ireland, that political and diplomatic initiatives could soon bring peace.

“Look at Eastern Europe. The world’s changing so fast,” he said, snapping his fingers. “This puts a lot of pressure on the British. They’ll soon be the only nation in Europe with troops on the street.”

He said the consolidation of the European Economic Community in 1992 will make the border between Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic seem all the more absurd and offer the British a convenient excuse to go home.

The IRA should consider a cease-fire, he suggested, and measure the British response. The British, he predicted, would grab a chance to negotiate a gradual pullout.

Doherty states his case calmly and eloquently. Since the age of 17, he has spent all but 18 months of his life on the lam or behind bars, and the jailhouse has been his schoolhouse. Virtually illiterate when he left school, Doherty learned Gaelic, Irish history and debating in a camp for IRA prisoners outside Belfast.

Doherty’s education has continued at the federal jail, even though his maximum-security status forbids classroom attendance. He subscribes to many publications, answers 20 to 30 letters a day and writes messages for rallies and meetings, many of them related to his defense.

He also writes poetry. Two of his poems have won prizes in federal prison system competitions; one brought him a check for $25 courtesy of Edwin Meese III, whose decision as attorney general had kept him in jail.

Despite his frustration over his case, which now is before the U.S. Court of Appeals in New York, Doherty is confident about Northern Ireland.

“The war is coming to an end, after 800 years,” he said. “As soon as the British leave, I’ll burn my (IRA) beret. The IRA is only the symptom, the product of a situation that never worked.”