I work in HMP Maghaberry, a prison in County Antrim, Northern Ireland. I teach "creative writing" one day a week and, as luck would have it, I was there on the long Good Friday, the day the peace talks came to an end and we took another faltering step towards peace in God's own country after nearly 30 years and 3,300 murders.
I arrived at the prison at 2pm and went to the education department. I usually have no difficulty getting in because there is always a prison officer in the pod behind the grille. But this afternoon, no one.
"Hello," I called, "anyone home?" I looked through the metal bars. The corridor beyond was deserted. Was everyone at church or mass? After all, it was only an hour away from the Lord's crucifixion time, at 3pm. Then I saw a tell-tale flicker on a patch of ceiling; it was a television flicker, and after a lot of shouting and rattling of bars, I got the attention of the duty officer who, like everyone else in the department, was watching the telly in the staff room. The exception was the prisoners in the braille unit who were getting ready to type up a braille text of the agreement. They didn't have a television but they didn't need one, did they? They would have it from the horse's mouth when the text arrived.
But for the rest of us it was television that told us what was happening. My overriding memory of this day is of television absolutely everywhere. A little later, when I got into the jail proper, as I was wandering the wings looking for this prisoner who'd written a poem and for that prisoner who'd written a short story, the plummy, concerned, confident voices of political pundits and television news reporters followed me everywhere. Every television in the jail was on (and with one in each cell that makes for a lot of televisions). And everyone in the jail, it seemed, had been up most of the night, waiting to see if what was supposed to happen was actually going to happen, and now that it had happened, they were still watching. They still couldn't quite believe it had happened (as I couldn't) and they all wanted to know more. They wanted to know what was really in the document-the detail-and that was why they kept watching.
One thing that was already known on Good Friday afternoon was that some "political" or "paramilitary" prisoners were likely to receive 66 per cent remission on their sentences-in other words, they will serve just a third of their tariff. It has long been expected that something like this would be incorporated into any settlement; the early release of prisoners is one of those rare areas where the fringe Loyalist parties and Sinn Fein are in complete agreement.
But what is it they say about not being able to please all of the people all of the time? When I found Clancy in his cell, instead of the normally optimistic and ebullient Ordinary Decent Criminal serving a life sentence for murder with whom I always looked forward to spending ten minutes, I found a grim looking fellow staring, yes, what a surprise, at his television.
"We'll have that off," he said as I came in, and off went the set. Ah, blessed silence. And then Clancy started his tirade. Why were "they" (the paramilitaries) getting remission? he asked. Why not him? Why not all the Ordinary Decent Criminals? As he saw it, either everyone in jail in Northern Ireland had committed a crime and therefore should stay in prison until they had served their sentence. Or no one had committed a crime, in which case everybody should get 66 per cent remission.
For more than 25 years, he continued, paramilitaries had been treated by the courts as criminals, and described by most politicians and commentators as criminals. But now, apparently, they weren't criminals any more. A wand had been waved. They'd been decriminalised. As for everyone else, himself included, they were still criminals, and they were staying in.
Up to this moment I had felt, well, if not exactly optimistic, not exactly pessimistic either about the peace process. Something amazing had been brokered and maybe, just maybe, it might work.
As I listened, I thought: Clancy wants out of prison-who wouldn't? Of course he's going to focus on why others get remission and he doesn't. He wouldn't be normal if he didn't. But after I said goodbye and walked up the landing, it occurred to me that Clancy was behaving exactly as everyone else will, myself included-he had just got there more quickly than the rest of us.
It is an awkward truth about human nature but we have to face it; the fact is, although most of us in Northern Ireland are committed to peace and sickened by what has happened here, we are also selfish and self-centred and have a well-developed capacity to view legislation, not in terms of what it does for everyone, but in terms of what it does for us. We are also very talented at seeing legislation not as something that advances or corrects or ameliorates, but as a mechanism that creates-winners on the one hand, and losers on the other.
The phrase "The devil's in the detail" is one I love, but given our national habit of asking the questions "What's in this for me?" and "Am I losing out here?" I suspect this old adage will be uttered so often in the next few weeks that I will turn against it.
