Dramatic Jail Visit Revives N. Ireland Talks

In a dramatic gamble of grit and desperation, a British Cabinet minister journeyed to the notorious Maze prison here Friday and persuaded Protestant terrorists not to kill flagging peace hopes in Northern Ireland.

Northern Ireland Secretary Marjorie “Mo” Mowlam spent nearly three hours inside the prison where 537 Protestant and Catholic terrorists live in separate communities. After she left, about 130 prisoners of a Protestant paramilitary band called the Ulster Freedom Fighters voted to withdraw their objection to continuing talks.

That will enable the prisoners’ political representatives to attend negotiations when they resume under American statesman George J. Mitchell on Monday. But salvaging the talks does not mean that progress will necessarily follow. After four months there is still not even an agenda.

“The prisoners felt the talks were going nowhere but . . . talks are the only way forward, and unless they participate in that, nothing but negative events can happen in Northern Ireland,” Mowlam said at the prison. At the same time, she apologized to some relatives of terror victims who complained that Cabinet ministers should not go to jail to treat with murderers.

Army paratroopers as usual guarded the prison perimeter, and reporters accompanying Mowlam shot hoops in the Maze gym while she met for 50 minutes with five UFF leaders, among them Johnny “Mad Dog” Adair. A prison official said no refreshments were served, possibly because a British newspaper cartoon on Friday portrayed Mowlam, teapot in hand, politely asking an ominous hooded figure, “More tea, Mad Dog?”

Prisoners on both sides are central to the search for peace. To go against their wishes would destroy the credibility of allied Protestant and Catholic political parties participating in the talks.

The prisoners are regarded by militants as soldiers suffering for their cause. They represent generations of struggle.

Out of jail, many would be leading strategists in both communities. They are “the hard men.” One of the senior prisoners Mowlam met Friday, for example, is Robert Stone, 42, whose goatee and graying ponytail give him an arty look. Stone killed six people in a gun and grenade attack on an Irish Republican Army funeral in 1988.

The prisoners’ fervor burns undiminished inside a prison about half an hour from Belfast that contains them at once fiercely and gingerly.

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Built in the 1970s on the site of a World War II fighter base, the fortress-prison is a formidable--and sometimes risible--symbol of a province bloodied by three decades of sectarian violence.

A carefully searched visitor shepherded to the heart of the Maze soon lost track of the number of one-way gates, single-file passages and 20-foot steel-mesh walls topped with razor wires. On Friday, the walls fileted rays of a weak winter sun. In a stinging wind, plastic balls bobbed like lobster buoys from overhead guy wires designed to prevent helicopter escapes.

Since 10 IRA inmates starved themselves to death in the 1980s, the British government has treated detainees, who consider themselves political prisoners, with kid gloves.

Prisoners control their own communities within H-shaped blocks rigidly segregated not only among Protestants and Catholics but among different and often rival subgroups.

Inmates have been angered and the government embarrassed by British press reports of lax treatment within the prison. Prisoners are not locked down--in fact, their cell doors are never locked. They wear what clothes they choose, enjoy amenities like personal TVs and computers, order their food and decorate their blocks with war murals.

“Better to die on your feet than to live on your knees in an Irish Republic,” reads the mural in the block where UFF prisoners reside.

Yet prisoners of every stripe deny newspaper reports of drug use and sex romps with visitors. Over Christmas, 160 prisoners--more than one in four--went home on parole.

They all came back, but a convicted IRA murderer walked out of the Maze dressed as a woman among the wives and children of prisoners who had come for a Christmas party. It was the first escape from the Maze since 1983, when 38 IRA prisoners escaped in a truck.

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On Dec. 27, the Maze and the peace process came undone. Three of the 17 members of an extremist IRA splinter group killed Protestant extremist Billy Wright with pistols smuggled into the prison.

By the new year, there had been two retaliatory killings of Catholics by Protestant terrorists, who have at least nominally observed a cease-fire for more than three years.

Then last weekend, citing no progress, the group of Protestant prisoners withdrew their support for talks. That set the stage for Mowlam’s high-risk rescue mission.

Mowlam, an affable, articulate academic-politician and longtime friend of Prime Minister Tony Blair, is Northern Ireland secretary in the British Cabinet, meaning she is chief executive of the London-based provincial government.

Mowlam said she offered “no concessions and no guarantees” to prisoners who believe, like much of the Protestant majority in Northern Ireland, that she has shown favoritism to the IRA and Sinn Fein, its political arm, in an effort to keep them committed to talks.

Early release of prisoners, sought by both sides, can be addressed only in the context of progress within the talks and an unswerving commitment to democratic nonviolence, she said.

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David Adams, speaking for the political party that represents the prisoners Mowlam met, said later that her visit was the first time that the government had specifically included prisoners as part of an overall solution.

Mowlam’s visit interrupted the day’s schedule at the prison gym Friday. Its weights, treadmill and indoor soccer and basketball courts are heavily used by prisoners--but never by members of different communities at the same time, one gym instructor said.

“The Protestants are good at soccer, the IRA don’t seem to be very athletic, and both are terrible at basketball,” he said.