The Five Techniques: British state torture of Irishmen, 1971-1975

The torture centre and the hooded men

There doesn't seem to be anything on Boards about this spine-chilling Irish Times story. It's the most read story on The Irish Times this weekend. Susan McKay's 'The torture centre and the hooded men' is about the British-government sanctioned Five Techniques used to torture people arrested from 9 August 1971, the day Operation Demetrius began. Between then and December 1975, 1,981 people were interned, 1,874 of whom were nationalists/republican and 107 of whom were unionists/loyalist. The first loyalist was interned in February 1973.

The Five Techniques were:

(1) wall-standing: forcing the detainees to remain for periods of some hours in a "stress position", described by those who underwent it as being "spreadeagled against the wall, with their fingers put high above the head against the wall, the legs spread apart and the feet back, causing them to stand on their toes with the weight of the body mainly on the fingers";

(2) hooding: putting a black or navy coloured bag over the detainees' heads and, at least initially, keeping it there all the time except during interrogation;

(3) subjection to noise: pending their interrogations, holding the detainees in a room where there was a continuous loud and hissing noise;

(4) deprivation of sleep: pending their interrogations, depriving the detainees of sleep;

(5) deprivation of food and drink: subjecting the detainees to a reduced diet during their stay at the centre and pending interrogations.

The reality was far more savage, as McKay makes clear from her interviews with survivors and by using interviews with survivors collected in the 1970s:

After some preliminary violence Shannon was brought to a barracks, where a gun was put to his head and fired – but turned out not to be loaded. Then he was hooded and bundled into a helicopter.
“One of the guys said, ‘We are over water now. Throw him out.’ And they did, but we were only a few feet from the ground. Then came seven days of oblivion. They messed with your mind, as well as the punches and kicks, and having to stand on your toes against the wall with your arms up, head back, your weight on your fingers and your legs apart. You’d be left to stand till you collapsed, and then you’d be forced into position again.
“There was this terrible noise, like steam escaping from a valve, and sometimes it dropped down and you felt relief, and then it got louder again. They’d put a polystyrene cup of water in your hand, but they’d only lift the hood up to below your nose, and you couldn’t tilt your head back, so you couldn’t get more than a sip. Your mouth was so dry.
“Sometimes the hood would be lifted and there was this figure in silhouette firing questions and abuse – telling you your wife had done filthy, terrible things and your kids were in care. I was sure they were going to kill me anyway, so I just said, ‘Aye, dead on.’ ”
He had no idea how long this had been going on when he was brought to a washroom and his hood was removed. “The scariest thing was I didn’t recognise myself in the mirror. My eyes were like two pissholes in the snow. I looked like a werewolf, a rabid dog. I had a beard, and it was matted with saliva.”

.... At 4am that day Seán McKenna was taken from the family home by the British army, along with his son, also called Seán, who had just turned 17.
“It said ‘Seán McKenna’ on the paper they had, and they didn’t know which one it meant, so they took the both of them,” Mary McKenna says. The family did not know where he was for more than a week, only that he was not with hundreds of others at the internment camp at Long Kesh, or at any of the other holding centres. When they did see him again, at Crumlin Road, they were shocked. “Daddy’s black hair had turned white, and he just sat there crying,” McKenna says.

Seán McKenna was never able to fully describe what had happened to him during the week when he was missing. He was released from internment on medical grounds in October 1972 and gave an account of his ordeal to the priests Denis Faul and Raymond Murray.
They published a detailed report on the hooded men in 1974, demanding that those responsible for their ordeals should be tried and jailed, “Otherwise there is no justice, but tyranny.”

In his account Seán McKenna describes extreme physical brutality, sectarian abuse and humiliation and how, after a few days of this, he was hooded and taken to a place he called the madhouse, where he was tortured and interrogated. “My head was spinning . . . my mind went wild, I was crying, I couldn’t stand up and I was trying to grip the wall . . . I couldn’t even remember my name or my children’s names . . . My head still won’t focus right . . . I detest being alone . . . I never imagined anyone could be so cruel to his fellow man . . . I don’t think I will ever be the same again.”

He never would be. Mary McKenna remembers his return home. “He was a totally different person,” she says. “The happy, jolly Daddy that played with you on the front grass was gone, and what you had instead was a broken soul. There was no normality any more. He was like a 75-year-old. Childhood was just over.”

McKenna remembers her father telling her that while he was being tortured he had seen his dead mother. Because he could no longer do his job the family was evicted from the caretaker’s house. Although he hated to be alone their father could no longer live with his family. “He had to go into the mental hospital, and then he had to go and live on his own in a cottage in Co Louth. He could not stick noise. Mum had to hold it all together for the family.”

In the next two years Seán McKenna had a series of small heart attacks. A psychiatrist who examined him found that he had a feeling that he was going to die, and a few months later, in June 1975, he had a final, fatal heart attack.

.... McLean does not want to talk about what happened, because it reawakens the trauma. In their report Frs Faul and Murray record notes that he wrote on envelopes shortly after his ordeal. Under “sounds” he lists: “Compressed air escaping all the time. Morning. Death services hymns. Execution order. Protest poems. Firing squad singing.”

He listed 22 torture techniques practised on him, including being kicked in the groin, being choked and being handcuffed and hung up.

.... When McGuigan needed to relieve himself he was told that there was no toilet and that he had to go in the boiler suit. He too believed that he would not get out alive. He resolved to end the torture himself.

“I remember the noise coming in the top of your head and out your toes and in every sinew of your body. I was chained to a radiator pipe, and I bashed my head against it again and again, to try to kill myself, till the blood was running down my face.”

.... Brian Turley suffered for years from nightmares. “I’d wake up drenched in sweat after facing skeleton-faced RUC men about to put a bag over my head.”

“When I saw pictures of hooded prisoners in Iraq I knew it was the same thing happening again,” says Patrick McNally. “It is just totally outrageous that they got away with it and that they are still at it.”

.... In 2013 she was trawling through a batch of files copied from declassified documents at the British national archives, in Kew, when she came across a reference to interrogations at Ballykelly, which is a few kilometres up the coast from Derry.
Intrigued, she and other researchers began to look for more documents. They found plenty, including a memo that referred to the need to keep the location of the interrogation centre secret.
Checking the European Court of Human Rights ruling, they became convinced that Britain had misled the court not just about the venue but also about responsibility for the treatment of the hooded men, about the intensity of the interrogations and about knowledge of the impact of the Five Techniques on their victims...

"... But as the journalist Ian Cobain points out in his 2014 book, ‘Cruel Britannia’, Compton confirmed that the “Five Techniques” used at Ballykelly were authorised at the highest levels and that “ill treatment of selected prisoners had been an integral part of British military doctrine for years”....

"Parker’s report – formally the Report of the Committee of Privy Counsellors Appointed to Consider Authorised Procedures for the Interrogation of Persons Suspected of Terrorism – published in 1972, found that some of the techniques constituted criminal assaults but that, with ministerial approval and the presence of an army officer and a doctor with psychiatric training, they should continue.

The Parker report revealed that the techniques had been used in Palestine, Malaya, Kenya, Aden, Malaysia and other former British colonies.

“In fact they had been experimenting going back to the second World War, right up to Oman in 1970, so they had well-developed techniques by the time they got to Northern Ireland in 1971,” Cobain says.

“In 1972 Heath responded with a remarkable sleight of hand: he appeared to ban the use of the Five Techniques ‘in all future circumstances’ but actually allowed for their continued use in training.”

The British, mindful that “the security forces will be on international trial and we must do everything possible to minimise the risk of losing this battle in the propaganda war”, denied that the Five Techniques amounted to torture.
The European Commission on Human Rights found in 1976 that the British were indeed in breach of article 3 of the convention, which prohibits both inhuman and degrading treatment, and torture. It made a finding of torture.

But when the matter came before the European Court of Human Rights in 1978, the court ruled that although the breach of article 3 remained, because of “inhuman and degrading treatment”, what had been done did not constitute torture, as a “special stigma” attached to torture as “deliberate inhuman treatment causing very serious and cruel suffering”. It is this finding that the Irish Government is seeking to have reviewed."

To think this case would never have seen the light of day but for a historical researcher came across evidence where British government ministers admitted, in writing, that they had authorised a policy of torture - having denied it to the ECHR back in 1976. For decades it was denied, as was a shoot-to-kill policy and much else.

More:

Hooded men torture case a reminder of the double standards of the 1970s

The hooded men: British torture centres in Ireland

Amal Clooney to represent 'hooded men' who accuse Ted Heath of authorising torture in Northern Ireland

Ireland says UK tortured IRA suspects in 1971

Here's a very poignant, but banned, 1974 documentary about internment. It is based on the testimony of some of the internees mentioned in Susan McKay's article.

Ireland: Behind the Wire (1974)

Teyla Emmagan

Excellent article. I had actually forgotten about those poor men until the description of the "helicopter treatment" brought it back. Spent most of Saturday then thinking about poor Sean McKenna who came back an unrecognisable and shattered man, robbing his children of a loving father and his wife of a husband. Horrific stuff.

To a certain extent I do not understand this new "lets put it behind us and move on" attitude. Some things are too appalling to be swept under the carpet. I really think these men deserve recognition and compensation for what they went through, at least to cover the medical bills that will only increase as they get older. Their lives were robbed. They and their families are still living with the outcome of these actions.

Moved to Northern Ireland Politics. Please read charter before posting.

K-9

Deleted User wrote: »

Moved to Northern Ireland Politics. Please read charter before posting.

Mod:

Some posts deleted that wouldn't meet the politics board standard.

Seeing as the article linked to is very long I think the large quotes in the OP are ok so people get the general idea of the piece. Normally we don't allow large amounts to be quoted.

For those who think this is old news and we should all move on, the ECHR judgement is still relied on by US and Israeli Governments and similar techniques have been used in Iraq and other places.

DarkyHughes

British state forces tortured Irishmen from 71 - 1975 & up to the 90's that's true.

"Irish state" forces tortured tortured Irishmen from 1922 - 1923 as well.

Wars war of course people are going to be tortured. Americans & Israeli's torture people in Arab countries probably right now.

Full Marx

DarkyHughes wrote: »

British state forces tortured Irishmen from 71 - 1975 & up to the 90's that's true.

"Irish state" forces tortured tortured Irishmen from 1922 - 1923 as well.

Wars war of course people are going to be tortured. Americans & Israeli's torture people in Arab countries probably right now.

One mustn't forget about the heavy gang too.

DarkyHughes

Full Marx wrote: »

One mustn't forget about the heavy gang too.

Or the ones who tortured the Guildford 4 & Birmingham 6. That was some real disturbing sh!t.

Sand

K-9 wrote: »

For those who think this is old news and we should all move on, the ECHR judgement is still relied on by US and Israeli Governments and similar techniques have been used in Iraq and other places.

While Gerry Adams and Martin Guinness are leading SF and are credited as peacemakers, we should all move on.