The victims of violence aren't the only ones who are going to have to transcend themselves when the jails of Ireland empty out. There are over 500 prisoners convicted of "scheduled" offences now hoping for release in the North, and about 30 in the South.
In the Dail debate on the Belfast Agreement Desmond O'Malley was particularly scathing about politically-motivated prisoners. But neither he nor any of the rest of us have a right to indulge in righteousness. Not unless we have made an effort to understand how these prisoners see themselves. And not until we have considered that they have difficulties of their own - difficulties that just getting out of prison will not solve. The people they have so harmed have had to make sense of death. But the perpetrators have to make sense of their lives.
Has Desmond O'Malley ever had occasion, I wonder, in a long life in public affairs, to stand in the Felons' Club, on the Falls Road in Belfast? Has he felt the utterly different resonances of the words "ex-prisoner," North and South? In the South, if you think about ex-prisoners you think of a nicotine-stained Portakabin where some earnest but underfunded attempt at rehabilitation is going on. But most people don't think about prisoners at all. Most people don't know anyone who has been a prisoner.
Stand in the Felons' Club and you see things in a very different light. For one thing, it is directed and run by ex-prisoners, of whom there is absolutely no shortage. Because, not least, of internment, about 20,000 people have known imprisonment in Northern Ireland over the last 25 years or so. This makes it a very different society from ours, everything else aside.
In the Felons' Club, you see former prisoners placed at the very heart of Belfast republicanism. You see them perceived as exemplary figures, and above all as figures in an almost apostolic sequence, stretching from 1798 through 1916 to the present day - as the best and the brightest, made prisoners of war in every generation for their beliefs. The place proclaims a rooted pride in this heritage. It would be Government Buildings, you feel, if Belfast republicanism were ever a government.
The building is the size of a guest house, say, painted green, and it flies the biggest, crispest Tricolour in Belfast city. Inside there is a series of bars and lounges and dancefloors, extremely comfortable and well-kept. The place is an entertainment centre, a community centre and an informal but expert welfare centre. It has 10 full-time and six part-time staff. The turnover in financial terms must be huge. And all this developed from a club started by "Forties men" - Belfast republicans, apparently, are called after the decades in which they were active - including Gerry Adams's father. They formed The Irish Republican Penal Servitude Prisoners Club "to foster and develop" the bonds formed in prison, and as a self-help group. Former prisoners then and now have all kinds of difficulties to overcome in the wider society.
You can't just walk into the Felons' Club - there are security procedures to do with iron gates and buzzers and so on. But if you could get in, I'd recommend you to do so, and not because the pint is £1.60 and shorts, £1.40. It is that there is no such shrine to a particular kind of Irish culture and politics anywhere else in the country. The decorative craftwork is of the highest quality - engraved glass, beaten copper, wrought iron, lettered polished granite, stained glass, carved wood. And all of it is in the style of the late 19th century Celtic revival. The motifs are round towers and wolfhounds. In the foyer, 32 glass panels are dedicated to the name - in Irish - and the arms of each county in Ireland. A painted collage on one wall involves Bantry Bay, Parnell, the GPO in flames and much more. Opposite it there is a poster with photos of prisoners at present held in Britain. "We Have our Nelson Mandelas," it says.
The bars are decorated with great panels of Celtic motifs, and with paintings and photographs of countless dead republicans, from Tom Clarke to Bobby Sands. He and the other hunger-strikers - there are 13 commemorated here, rather than 10 - are pictured on a large stained-glass plaque, which is lit from behind. Upstairs, beside the disco and ceili place, there's a display of intricate artefacts made by prisoners in Long Kesh. A rocking-chair. Lamps. Memorial carvings. An impressive harp "done by Gerry Kelly. At least he says he did it." The whole place is a world of its own. It is much more like a huge, family parlour, than conventional licensed premises. It isn't an expression of the ancient, native, Irish-language culture like the Culturlann is, based around the Irish-language school, further down the Falls. The Felons' Club uses a different iconography; one which, apart from on the covers of copy-books and on painted back-drops in convent theatres, and on the costumes of step-dancers, we don't use any more.
The release of prisoners is surely a highly problematic matter at the best of times. How do they fit back into their marriages or other relationships? What do they substitute for the camaraderie of jail? How does their standing and authority work out when they re-enter their communities? Do they challenge the local leaders? The human problems for the ex-prisoner and the people around him or her must be immense. As are the practical problems. How do they get jobs? How do they sort out pension rights, or insurance or passports or things like PSV licences? But above all - how do they get over being exceptional - of having had the experience of imprisonment which they can never convey to the ordinary people around?
These are questions that might be asked of any ex-prisoner. But the political prisoner, at least on the republican side, has a whole series of extra questions - internal questions - to answer. A visit to the Felons' Club makes that plain. How are they to accept that they are to be the last in this line of Celtic warriors? What ideal will they live by? The Northern Ireland prisoners' aftercare body, NIACRO, recently ran a thoughtful seminar with a man from the South African Truth and Justice Commission. But even the ANC, surely, weren't as planted in a version of history and culture as deeply as the Felons' Club plants the IRA. How are republican ex-prisoners to consign all that they have lived by to the past, so that eventually it will be no more stirring - no more a call to action - than our pausing to look at the statue of Cuchulainn on the way to buy stamps in the GPO?
A subtle, retrospective air which will have to take hold in places like the Felons' Club - and its loyalist counterparts - if there is to be peace. We can't help bring that change about. But we can at least respect the difficulties involved. And give the two words "former" and "prisoner" their due.
