Seana Walsh is on an all-time high. He admits it himself. The former IRA member has just been released from prison - 12 years early - under the terms of the Belfast Agreement. Though released to take his place as a citizen in today's Northern Ireland, this sallow-skinned tribute to the three square meals and regular exercise of prison life seems more assured when talking of his past than when grappling with his future.
He is resolute when recounting the strategies he and his fellow prisoners deployed to counter the prison regime; certain of each date, down to the month, of every event in his life since 1973; exact in detailing the intricacies of the remand, trial and sentencing systems and eloquent on the passions which underlay the three-and-a-half-year-long blanket protest and hunger-strikes of 1981. However, the 41-year-old looks almost dizzily to the present.
Having spent 21 of the past 25 years locked away, for a former prisoner post-Troubles Northern Ireland must seem a strange if exciting place.
"Optimistic" inadequately describes the man who sits before me on the upper floor of Conway Mill, location of Sinn Fein's Falls Road press centre, in Belfast. Crisp sunlight streams through the tall, broad old window and Walsh basks in the rays, relishing the simplicity of it all.
"It's still pretty euphoric to be honest with you. People were saying `Are you going to get away?'; `Are you going to get a holiday?' But this is a holiday. "See," he says, "when you're in jail you get a half-hour, maybe an hour-long visit a week. You can sit down, have a cup of tea, have a talk, give the kids a cuddle. And that is the high point of your week. Now I can do that maybe 10, 15 times in any one day - call relatives, go for a coffee, meet for a pint. It's just wonderful."
To date 192 paramilitary prisoners have been released early under the Belfast Agreement in the North and 75 in the South. It is expected that approximately 400 prisoners will be released in the North by the end of next year but the Department of Justice says it is unable to estimate the corresponding figure for the South.
How they react to the new society, and how it reacts to them, will determine how successfully they integrate into it. The perhaps natural reaction of many - particularly victims' families - has been one of abhorrence at the idea that paramilitaries are to be released before they have completed their sentences. The fact that one former loyalist prisoner, who had been out for about a year, committed suicide recently - "because he couldn't cope with the pressures of being an ex-prisoner", in the words of the loyalist ExPrisoners' Information Centre (EPIC) - is some indication of just how difficult the adjustment can be. Walsh is originally from the Short Strand area of east Belfast. He was arrested in Carryduff during an armed robbery in January 1973. Just 16 years old, he was sentenced to five years imprisonment that May, though released in May 1976. He was re-arrested in possession of a rifle in August of that year - for which he was sentenced to 10 years. He was released in March 1984 and in November 1988 was arrested a third time, in possession of mortars and explosives and sentenced to 22 years. He was released for a third time - as part of the British government's commitment to the peace process - at 10 a.m. on Thursday, September 17th, 1998.
"When I went to jail last I had one daughter who was 18 months and one who was two weeks old. The strange thing now is that I'm trying to come to terms with these two young people. One is 10 next week and the other is 12. It's like walking on egg-shells. Their mother has always been their figure of authority, so I'd be trying to talk to them, asking them to do things and they'd just look at me as if to say, `Aye Da', `All right, yeah'. They're testing me, seeing `How far can we push our old da before he blows?'
"Another thing is that they can be clingy - which is wonderful," he muses. "If I'm sitting reading the 'paper then one would come over and toss aside whatever I'm reading and plop herself on my lap. Then the other will be maybe doing her homework, watching out of the side of her eye. If the one on the knee gets up the other one then runs over to sit in her place. So there's this kind of competitive thing between them.
"A couple of nights ago I was lying on the settee watching the TV and the wee girls were at the swimmers. The youngest one came running in and she just jumped on me. And she says: `Do you love being out, Daddy?' " That moment felt, he says, like "a million dollars".
Caral Ni Chuilin, co-ordinator of Tar Anall, a republican prisoners' drop-in and advice centre in Andersonstown, says that the reaction of all prisoners on release is one of euphoria, heightened by great expectations.
"It's all very well getting out," she says, "but after the excitement dies down, and they have to start looking at the practical level - issues such as finding accommodation, employment, finding their place in society which will have changed hugely - that's when the problems can really begin."
Michael Richie, information research manager with NIACRO (the Northern Ireland Association for the Care and Resettlement of Offenders), agrees that the world many left may seem to have turned utterly upside down when they return, causing dislocation, distress and often a sense of not knowing where or how they will "fit in".
"Relationships will have moved on; workplace technologies will have changed; buildings will be different; there will be new fashions. A big issue is the value of money and financial responsibility." When released, Walsh was given £50.35 by the Prison Service as his first, weekly unemployment payment.
"And then there are all the small tragedies which keep going on. Last Saturday I was at the funeral of the wife of a guy who just got out," says Walsh. "The day he got out, she took a brain haemorrhage. He had been married for 25 years, in and out of jail. Then he's on the street for good and . . . bang - his wife is dead. Awful. So it's not just all over. There are still the residual tragedies and that's the way it's going to be."
Confident of finding work after Christmas, until then Walsh says he is going to "take it easy". He points out that he has earned degrees from the Open University in Irish and French and that he is still studying history, though Ni Chuilin says that for a former prisoner even a Masters or a Phd is no guarantee of well-paid employment.
"There is the aspect of discrimination. Former paramilitary prisoners who might feel they had done well at interviews then can't see why they haven't. As soon as the question comes up of where they have been for the past 14 or 15 years, there is an automatic chill-factor."
All former prisoners face practical problems but, for some, the most painful questions with which they must grapple, are emotional.
Walsh himself seems genuinely "together" and aware of the pitfalls to which some succumb. Though he is not living with his wife, he says they are "trying to build a future", and that she is conscious that they must have their own space "and not be clinging onto each other".
He smiles, recalling how pleased she was when he was sent away in 1988. "Yeah you're in prison," she said to him, "but at least I know you're safe."
He says that some who go into prison aged 17 or 18 and come out 20 years later "think they're still 17 and go out leading that crazy life-style, partying all night and chasing younger women".
He points out: "In the community here in nationalist Belfast, one in six are ex-prisoners. I know I have friends here I can talk to about the problems. There are support networks for prisoners and their families. I know I'd be very conscious of the mistakes other prisoners have made."
Amongst his regrets, he numbers immediately the fact that he was "caught red-handed three times. And of course I regret all the things I missed - my brothers' and sisters' weddings, my wee girls' birthdays. And I missed the whole punk-rock thing. But I don't regret my actions.
"At the end of the day I lived my life on the basis of decisions I took. If someone who was 16 came up to me now and said they were going to join the IRA I'd tell them to take themselves off. But then, in 1972, in Belfast, it was bedlam. Anyone who cared about anything was involved in some way. It was the situation I was in and as a young man living in nationalist Belfast, I would say I had no choice.
"Things have changed a lot. Before I went into prison, the only time I went into the citycentre was to go targeting somebody. Town was a unionist bastion. We didn't go there to shop.
"But now, and it hits you starkly, if you walk into one of the big new buildings, like the Castle Court shopping centre or Marks and Spencer's, the first thing you hear is the names people are calling after each other. You hear Padraig, Caoimhe, Mairead. You look at the kids and half of them are wearing GAA jerseys or Celtic shirts. And the penny drops. This is it. This is our town too.
"I could sit here and cry crocodile tears for what has happened, but actions speak louder than words. Where we go from here," he concludes, "is to try and move the situation on, in some way with the unionists. I can't say whether it was worth it until it's over."
