Two women on different sides of the republican divide

Sunday Tribune
by Suzanne Breen
February 11, 2007

During the war, there was so much that united them. Peggy O'Hara and
Martina Anderson, two strong republican women from Derry, both paid a
heavy price for opposing British rule. O'Hara lost her son, Patsy, on
hunger-strike. Anderson lost her freedom: she spent 13 years in jail.

Now, in peace time, they are divided. Anderson is a strong supporter
of the Sinn Féin leadership. She endorses the Police Service of
Northern Ireland (PSNI) and forming a power-sharing government with
the DUP. O'Hara still believes in smashing Stormont, opposing
a "British police force" and asserting traditional republican
principles. Next month, both women go head-to-head in the Assembly
elections in Foyle.

"I'm standing for Patsy and his comrades in Derry, all the other wee
fellows who suffered or died at the hands of the Brits," says O'Hara,
the independent republican candidate. "Patsy has no voice now, so I
have to be his voice. He would never have approved of Stormont or the
PSNI.

"My sons were beaten black and blue by police. 'Self-inflicted' I was
told. When Patsy was 17, his face was burned with cigarettes at
Ballykelly. He grew a beard to hide the scars. They can change the
police's name and bring in more Catholics, but it's still imposing
British rule."

O'Hara, 76, is recovering from a stroke. While she will be out
canvassing, she will rely heavily on her election team – a coalition
of anti-Agreement republicans. She denies her age and ill-health are
detrimental: "I'm not looking for a political career. I'm standing
out of principle, not ego. Besides, Ian Paisley is four years older
than me!"

Anderson, 44, a former beauty queen, is going places. She's a cert to
be elected and will then be groomed to challenge Mark Durkan for his
Westminster seat, although success there seems unlikely. Once, she
would have wanted to blow up the House of Commons. She was part of
the IRA team behind the Brighton bomb at the 1984 Tory conference,
aiming to kill the Thatcher cabinet. They escaped but five people
died.

Now, she sees constitutional politics as the way forward. Signing up
to the PSNI and the criminal justice system would "remove another
pillar of the corrupt state from the enemy's hands", she told last
month's special ardfheis. "If war is the continuation of politics by
other means, then this is the reverse." Despite several requests to
speak to Anderson, Sinn Féin said she wasn't available for interview
to the Sunday Tribune.

In Peggy O'Hara's living-room is the gold crucifix Pope John Paul II
blessed and sent her son before he died. Patsy left it to his
parents, with a note thanking them "for the loving sacrifice and
support you have shown me". He was 23. A painting of Patsy, a member
of the Marxist INLA, hangs on his mother's walls – beside a dozen
pictures of Padre Pio, the Blessed Virgin, the Child of Prague, and
several popes.

O'Hara wasn't urging her three sons to war when trouble erupted in the
North. "Somebody told me my eldest, Sean Seamus, was marching outside
the Guildhall with a placard about civil rights. I went straight down
and asked him 'Who gave you that?' 'Fionnbarr O'Dochartaigh,' he
said. So I took the placard off him, went over to Fionnbarr, strung
it around his neck, and hit him with my umbrella."

She began attending civil rights' marches herself – just to keep an
eye on her boys. "What I saw changed me – peaceful protestors beaten
to the ground. I decided armed struggle was justified. I was proud my
sons joined up, I was proud of all the lads."

Patsy joined the Fianna at 13, and Sinn Féin the following year. At
14, he was shot in the leg by the British Army. At 16, he was
interned.

On release, he joined the INLA. The family home was raided regularly.
O'Hara took her own revenge: "No matter how early the police came,
4am or 5am, I'd put on the bacon and eggs. The police could smell the
lovely fry and my family would sit down to eat and the police
wouldn't get a bite."

Like Patsy O'Hara, Martina Anderson joined the IRA as a Bogside
teenager. Her father was a Protestant, her mother a staunch
republican. Their home, like the O'Haras', was regularly raided.
After any incident, they "expected the door to be booted in and
surrounded by British soldiers with guns," Anderson has said.

"It got to the stage that, in the mornings when the milk lorry would
come across the street, my mother would jump out of bed in the belief
it was a saracen." When it was a raid, her mother shouted a warning
to her daughters before the soldiers smashed the door: "That allowed
us to get out of bed and throw on dressing gowns and a pair of shoes
to make ourselves a wee bit more modest!"

At 18, Anderson was charged with possessing a firearm and intent to
cause an explosion. She jumped bail and crossed the Border: living in
a flat in Buncrana, Co Donegal, for several years before going to
bomb Britain.

Whenever O'Hara's sons were arrested, she'd head to the barracks in
Derry: "I brought Tony in custard and stewed apple because I didn't
want him eating police food. But I decided to mix in a few sleeping
tablets because there was only an oul board and no blankets in the
cells and I thought he'd need something to help him sleep.

"He didn't know what I'd done. After eating the food, he started to
feel funny during interrogation, very drowsy and detached. He thought
the police had added something to the water to help break him!"

In 1979, Patsy was sentenced to eight years for possessing a bomb.
O'Hara herself was arrested leaving Long Kesh. She was interrogated
for three days in Castlereagh about smuggling comms (communications)
from the prisoners. "I didn't even know what a comm was," she says.

O'Hara was dismayed when other mothers didn't take their sons off
hunger-strike as they neared death. "I told Patsy, 'I dont care about
Ireland or the world, I'm going to save you.'"

On day 55 of his hunger-strike, a photo of him – taken in jail –
appeared in the newspapers. "The screws tortured him physically and
psychologically for that. They moved him to Bobby Sands' old cell.
The message was 'you're going to die like Bobby'. Patsy went downhill
rapidly. He had a heart attack. He was unconscious but then he'd
drift back. He whispered to me, 'I'm sorry mammy, we didn't win. Let
the fight go on'."

O'Hara honoured his wish. "Watching him die was wild. I'd sit beside
him, moisten his lips, stroke his hair. I know every Derry mother
says the same about her son but my Patsy was gorgeous. He had lovely
dark eyes – in the end he couldn't see out of them. The day before he
died, the screws wouldn't let his father in. I asked to sit with Mrs
McCreesh (another hunger-striker' s mother) for company. They
refused. Sinn Féin has signed up to this prison system – disgraceful!
Many of the same screws from the hunger-strike are still in their
jobs."

Four years after Patsy O'Hara died, Martina Anderson was arrested with
Ella O'Dwyer and three male republicans. The women served 13 months
in the all-male Brixton prison where they were repeatedly strip-
searched. On their first day in the exercise yard, British male
prisoners shouted obscenities.

The trial judge called Anderson a "hard, cynical young woman". She was
sentenced to life imprisonment and moved to Durham jail. Initially,
there was 23-hour lock-up in punishment cells for challenging prison
rules.

"After about six months the governor called the two of us into his
office," Anderson has said. She claims that "he started to go on
about how he was in the jail where Frank Stagg had went on hunger
strike and he said, 'You know I don't care what you both do, I'll
send you home in boxes if I have to. You aren't going to come in here
and undermine my authority'."

In prison, Anderson secured a first-class honours degree in social
sciences. In 1989, she married Paul Kavanagh, an IRA prisoner also
jailed for bombing England. They were transferred back to the North
in 1994 and released under the terms of the Belfast Agreement in
1998. The peace process has benefited them.

The couple laughed at newspaper headlines which declared they'd never
honeymoon "until 2020". Andersons' friends say she can be "a bit too
serious but when Paul's around it's different, she's always smiling.
Even up at Stormont, they held hands and canoodled like teenagers".

Working in Sinn Féin's Stormont office, Anderson initially confided
doubts about being there, a friend says. However, these have since
been allayed. Sinn Féin appointed her 'head of the department for
unionist engagement'. Previously, she was head of 'the all-Ireland
agenda department'. Anderson has been scathing of the 'dissident'
alliance in Derry.

Back home, Peggy O'Hara fusses about her hair and make-up before the
Sunday Tribune photographer arrives: "I was always well turned out
going to the jail for Patsy. I'm not about to give up now."