Doing and using time in Long Kesh

If you leaf through the digitised Long Kesh journals, freshly curated by the University of Galway, you might be tempted to sneer at them as the naïve doodlings of young men with too much time and too little sense. There’s a grain of truth in that — but it’s a lazy truth, the kind preferred by people who never had to endure a single day of lock-up, let alone years.

What leaps off the pages is not naivety, but ingenuity. Here were young men under the thumb of the state, carving out a culture in biro and coloured pencil. They stitched together illustrated journals, poetry, essays, even the odd cartoon — a flourishing of art in a place designed to suffocate it.

The journals also strip bare a convenient lie: that these prisoners were nothing but “blood-drenched killers” undeserving of thought, let alone sympathy. In fact, they were educating themselves — wrestling with Irish history, language, culture, and the long, knotted story of resistance. It was hardly a university campus, but in its way, it was a more rigorous education than many of their contemporaries were getting outside.

Yes, the tone is youthful, sometimes wildly optimistic — but so what? They were young. Optimism is the proper currency of youth, and without it, no political transformation ever takes root. Those idealistic scribbles became the groundwork for broader and deeper thinking in later decades.

And there is comradeship, too — not the kind of empty solidarity you find on a sports team or in an office away day, but the hard comradeship forged in hunger, confinement, and the knowledge that you might not make it out.

So ask yourself this: what did you spend your twenties doing? Scrolling, drinking, maybe chasing a promotion? Compare that with men in their twenties building a cultural and political counter-world behind barbed wire. Whatever else you think of their politics, the self-sacrifice and sheer creative defiance on those pages is undeniable. To dismiss it as naïve is to miss the point — and perhaps to reveal a deeper naivety of your own.

Heere’s the link to the Galway collection:  https://digital.library.universityofgalway.ie/p/ms/categories/paddy-mcmenamin?utm_source=chatgpt.com