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continued centred on beatings designed not to leave marks, on psychological torture and threats, blackmail and the use of supergrasses.
    12. Severe punishments were inflicted on prisoners who refused to do prison work and wear prison clothes in the 1976–81 period.
    13. Degrading stripping naked of the women prisoners in Armagh Prison 1982–1986.
    14. 18 innocent Irish people were imprisoned for long years by police action and judicial procedures in Britain which were contrary to human rights.
    15. Some Irish political prisoners in British prisons were treated with cruelty.
    16. The Prevention of Terrorism Act brought great suffering to many thousands of Irish in Britain.
    When those charged with upholding the law appear to violate it with impunity in this way, the foundations of respect for law and order disappear. The question is: will the new Northern Ireland with a radically restructured police force, with strict regulations re appointment of judges, magistrates and coroners, avoid political prejudice, guarantee the human and civil rights of all citizens, provide independent modes of investigation of police and legal abuse, and will citizens in positions of power show concern for justice regarding security and social justice? We hope so
    My Introduction to Oral Submissions from Relatives for Justice and from the Campaign for the Right to Truth to the Forum for Peace and Reconciliation, Dublin Castle, 11 April 1995.
The British Media and Ireland, 1979

    On 13 March 1977 British media workers formed the Campaign for Free Speech on Ireland and in 1979 published a pamphlet The British Media and Ireland – Truth the First Casualty . It listed some television programmes from 1970 to 1978 dealing with Northern Ireland that had been banned and carried articles by journalists and other commentators on the difficulties of reporting on Northern Ireland, censorship and distorted images of Ireland. The blurb on the back of the pamphlet has a quotation from a BBC television news sub-editor, ‘I’ve always assumed that the official line is we put the army’s version first and then any other’.
    At the inaugural meeting of the campaign Jonathan Dimbleby, Thames television reporter, said, ‘Those who have access, anywhere, at any time, to our media, should be pressing to ensure that in those media Northern Ireland is put in context, the events there are explained, the possible future analysed. Otherwise it will continue to deny the British public the kind of information it needs to form a judgement about the most important political issue that any government has had to face’.
    I contributed the following piece to the pamphlet. It was written for the Theatre Writers’ Union conference on censorship in London on 28 January 1979:
    â€˜The one means of redress left to people in the north of Ireland is publicity. There has never been in the past ten years proper machinery for the hearing of complaints regarding the violations of human rights – murder by security forces, torture and brutality in interrogation centres, imprisonment without trial, excessive punishments in prisons. It is quite clear that the sanction for these violations came from the British government itself. It therefore used the law and counter-terrorism as part of its war effort. In short, people with a grievance were asking the very people responsible for the violations of law against them to hear their complaints and grant justice.
    â€˜The British government therefore exercised great pressure at home and abroad to distort the truth, their simple case being that they were honest peacemakers caught in the middle of a savage war between Catholics and Protestants.
    â€˜On the unjust killing of civilians the army and RUC always got their story to the media – they were fired at first, the civilian was carrying a weapon, etc. The British media accepted the army spokesmen as did Radio Éireann often. The big lie was one of