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Learning Behind Bars: How IRA Prisoners Shaped the Peace Process in Northern Ireland by Dieter Reinisch (review)

2023; Philosophy Documentation Center; Volume: 27; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/nhr.2023.a926405

1534-5815

Aidan Beatty,

Irish and British Studies

Reviewed by: Learning Behind Bars: How IRA Prisoners Shaped the Peace Process in Northern Ireland by Dieter Reinisch Aidan Beatty Learning Behind Bars: How IRA Prisoners Shaped the Peace Process in Northern Ireland, by Dieter Reinisch (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2022, 240 p., hardcover, $70) Historians of the Troubles have not always fared well with oral history writing. The infamous missteps of the Boston College oral history project are, of course, a well-known example. And yet oral history remains an obviously rich source for this field; there is a general (if not total) willingness to speak, and, most practically, many of those who lived through the period from 1969 to 1998 are still alive and available to talk. Dieter Reinisch's Learning Behind Bars is a strong example of what oral histories can do for Northern Irish history. As Reinisch discusses at the outset, his own positionality—Austrian, and so a suitably neutral outsider; sympathetic to republicanism, but not uncritically so; relatively young—clearly played a role in his ability to secure interlocutors. The chapters are organized chronologically, geographically, and thematically, moving from prisoner protests and Sinn Féin's presence in Portlaoise Prison in the early- and mid-1970s to Marxism in the H-Blocks across the 1980s. An outlying chapter in the middle focuses on internment, oscillating between chronicling the history of assaults on internees and recording how they attempted to offset their miseries by using the time to read Paulo Freire, Frantz Fanon, or various canonical republican texts. The book's central concern is how jail time functioned as a forum for prisoners' own personal and political education. As Reinisch shows, Irish Republican Army prisoners engaged in conscious projects of self-development through self-education, but always in a system not controlled by the prisoners themselves. There were obviously fascinating incongruities here. In a sense, what Reinisch is studying, with Michel Foucault probably lurking in the background, is how IRA prisoners' subjectivity was being created by the prison itself, rather than just being self-created within the prison. Of interest beyond Irish Studies, the book contributes to reorienting our focus on subjectivity within carceral institutions. Learning [End Page 141] Behind Bars is essentially an investigation of subjectivity within top-down institutions that are themselves seeking to remake the prisoners' subjectivity. In a final chapter, Reinisch discusses how an increasingly educated cohort of prisoners in the early 1990s understood both the collapse of Soviet Communism (an uneasy development for those who had embraced Marxism in prison) and the emergence of the ultimately successful peace process. In the book's recounting, these were not discrete events but part of the same transnational process of political change. Thus the book closes with a welcome global perspective. That prisoners played a massive role in the development of Irish republicanism since 1969 is well known, and Reinisch certainly succeeds in his stated goal of using oral history interviews to give a sense of what daily life was like for them. In doing so, he moves into new territory compared to high political histories of Sinn Féin and the IRA. Moreover, as Reinisch himself notes, post-conflict oral histories create an archive where none existed, since illegal groups tend not to produce large tranches of self-documentation. And where an empirical archival historian might wrongly assume the printed facts do not lie, Reinisch cautiously notes that his book does not provide an objectively true accounting of republicanism. Rather, a work based on oral histories provides insight into subjective attitudes and identities. Nonetheless, hanging in the background is the problem of whether, and to what degree, we can actually trust IRA prisoners' oral accounts and memories. By definition, Reinisch's list of interviewees skews male—Irish and Northern Irish prisons being gender-segregated spaces—but the rhetoric used, such as claims that they were not "broken" by prison conditions or that these were "the best years of their lives," seems to be something of a slightly different order. Within this male-heavy interviewee cohort emerges a masculinist recalling of their own histories: that they were strong men who could not be broken by the British state. Of the forty-one interviewees...