How IRA prisoners shaped Sinn Féin policy during the NI peace process

Western European prisons have been described as spaces of radicalisation towards political violence and terrorism. Contrary, Provisional IRA in the 1980s and 1990s played a crucial part in supporting the Northern Irish peace process. Moreover, Provisional Irish republican prisoners held in the high-security prisons on both sides of the Irish border had a decisive role in shaping the politics of the political party Sinn Féin and winning support for the emerging peace process. In this paper, I will present a theoretical framework to analyse the learning processes of political prisoners and how political prisoners can shape political developments outside the prison walls. To do so, I will use the Northern Ireland Troubles as a case study. Of the many groups supporting the Northern Irish peace process in the 1990s, former inmates of internment camps and prisons are one of the most remarkable. This group is noteworthy because it was formed of collectives of political prisoners who were almost entirely self-educated. The paper examines how the informal self-education courses evolved in the 1970s and 1980s, and, subsequently, the republican internees and prisoners used the newly acquired knowledge to influence political developments outside the prisons, particularly during the peace process in the 1990s. In essence, this paper shows how Irish republicans supported the peace process from within the prisons. Moreover, the paper’s argument challenges the politicisation/de-radicalisation thesis, dominant in the Troubles’ scholarly analyses. It replaces this perspective with a more profound and subtle argument about the informal education and political subjectification of Irish republican prisoners. It is an approach that foregrounds prisoners’ agency during these years of fierce armed conflict and their essential role in the peace process. Particular focus is given on the question of how prisoners discussed and informed crucial political changes of the political party Sinn Féin, such as the dropping of abstentionism to Dáil Éireann, the establishment of a Sinn Féin Women’s Department, the internationalisation and adoption of a leftwing political programme by Sinn Féin. In sum, the paper presents empirical data and a theoretical framework to analyse the learning processes of political prisoners beyond the Northern Irish Troubles. In so doing, I demonstrate how the prisons provided an environment for developing critical thinking and how prisoners used this experience to initiate the debates that eventually led to the acceptance of the peace process in Northern Ireland. Furthermore, I demonstrate how prisoners can shape the politics of political parties aligned to their militant social movements. The paper is based on 34 qualitative, semi-structured interviews with former Irish republican prisoners and archival material in Dublin, Belfast, and Galway.