SEARC'S WEB GUIDE - Felim O'Hagan (born 1955)

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20th Century Ireland - Felim O'Hagan (born 1955)

Felim O'Hagan was born and educated in Lurgan, Country Armagh. On July 2nd, 1977 he was arrested and charged with alleged IRA activities and in April, 1978 he was sentenced to life imprisonment. O'Hagan was imprisoned in Long Kesh where he partook in the Blanket and No Wash Protests for political status.
In 1991 O'Hagan edited a pamphlet by Republican prisoners in Long Kesh entitled Éirí na Gaelaí, Reflections on the Culture of Resistance in Long Kesh (1991).
This extract is from O'Hagan and fellow Republican prisoner Laurence McKeown's article in Éirí na Gaelaí in which they discuss 'The Culture of Republican Wings: Individual and Collective Development'. O'Hagan and McKeown edited Nor Meekly Serve My Time (1994) with fellow republican prisoner Brian Campbell. Felim O'Hagan was released from Long Kesh in 1994.©

The roots of our cultural struggle can be traced back to the Blanket. In a curious way our enemies freed us then to see the struggle in very stark terms; they stripped us of every material possession and of every petty privilege that a prison regime grudingly doles out, and in our nakedness we discovered enormous depths of resistance and forged unbreakable bonds of comradeship. In the extreme and extraordinary conditions of the protest, Republicans had to adapt to a radically different life-style rarely encountered even in the prison. What grew out of this collection of individuals in a particular set of circumstances was a new type of culture. This entailed more than the developing interest in learning and speaking Irish, story-telling singsongs and so on. It was about how people related to each other, how they managed their communal lives, how they treated one another and basically how they communicated.
Values inbred since childhood were challenged and new thoughts on our struggle took shape as what can be termed a 'culture of criticism' began to develop. There were certainly disadvantages in being cut off from literature, newspapers and TV but the benefit of such a situation was that we looked to ourselves to find the truth. Discussion and debate flourished and since each person was locked in his own cell it meant that the tyranny of the classroom could not be enforced - no one could cast himself in the role of teacher so as to dominate the debate and expect the rest to sit dutifully in awe of his knowledge. Discussion had to be interesting and relevant in order to hold the audience. Equally, there had to be a recognition that if everyone shouted out the door at the same time then no one would be heard. A new method of communication developed.
The Blanket was a great leveler in that everyone lived in exactly the same conditions, sharing the same deprivations. Republicans in jail have traditionally organised themselves along hierarchical lines, establishing a command structure with OC, Adjutant, Quartermaster and so on. While there were camp and Block staffs on the Blanket, these did not exert a militaristic type of control where orders were given and carried out more or less unthinkingly.
Our whole existence was dedicated to one end - the defeat of the criminalisation policy - and we were all vitally affected by the progress of the protest. There was constant discussion, both formal and informal, about strategy and tactics, and all were encouraged to take part. Discussion would often go on long into the night and be continued over the following days. The result was that people felt they had a real input into and responsibility for decisions that were being taken. When the protest finally ended and we were deciding how best to organise ourselves in our new conditions, there was a determination that we should not fall back into the hierarchical structures of former times but that we should create new structures which would both reflect and facilitate a more conscious commitment and involvement in the struggle.
Through the period of intense debate in the few years after the Blanket, thoughts turned to the development of a structured education programme for the camp. Some of us had stumbled upon the writings of Brazilian educationalist Paulo Freire and, in particular, his book Pedagogy of the Oppressed. We discovered that we were unknowingly already implementing some of his ideas about education and this discovery had a powerful and encouraging effect on us. His approach to education, in which the active learning process is rooted in the student's own experience of the world and she/he is not just a passive recipient of what others define as knowledge, related very closely to what we ourselves had discovered to be the best approach...
Primarily, our education is about us as imprisoned Republican activists. we seek to use our time to develop our thoughts on our own struggle and on how best to make an input into that struggle while still in jail and eventually upon release. We strive to breakdown any notion we or others outside might have that we are 'poor prisoners'. Our whole aim is to be conscious political activists and to render meaningless the physical barrier of prison walls. That gives strong motivation and commitment to our study and to our personal development. The terms 'struggle' and 'education' have become synonymous to us. We have built carefully upon those early faltering steps during the Blanket. Our education is never complete and is always developing so we can never become complacent about it.
A lot of what we have learned is now part of our lives, not simply information stored in our heads. We regard that as the success of our approach. We are not so arrogant as to claim that we have built a prison Utopia, nor that people emerge from here as some kind of Republican supermen. What we have consciously tried to establish in our prison community is a culture wherein individual initiative and creativity are encouraged and harnessed towards the collective good. We have sought to develop democratic structures in which the worth of each person is recognised and where mutual and comradely support is offered in order to build individual confidence. If we have learned one lesson over the years, it is that rigid hierarchical structures stifle initiative and retard the progress of all.
Dependence for instructions upon the people, leads inevitably to the creation of a bureaucracy and the proliferation of mere functionaries at other levels. Nor is it enough for 'top people' to simply declare that all positions in the structures are open to everyone. The reality of our upbringing is such that we are taught to depend for guidance upon our 'betters' - whether priests, teachers, parents, etc - and, therefore, the taking of personal responsibility, the realisation that we all have it within our power to change things, is often not easy. © Searc's Web Guide 1997-2008

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