Out of the Maze:
Today the last of Ulster's 428 political prisoners are released. The next challenge is adjusting to life on newly peaceful civvy street
John Mullin

The Guardian
July 28, 2000

Just after 8am today, the rusting, rickety turnstile out of the Maze prison and into the visitors' car park will begin to clatter. It will fall silent only after midday, when the last of 76 men will leave jail to rejoin the world outside.

It is the culmination of the early release scheme of the Good Friday agreement, the two-year cut-off point at which all qualifying prisoners yet to benefit from the handsome increases in remission are free to go. Only 15 inmates will be left behind and the Maze, once home to 1,700, will close shortly. Today marks the biggest one-day exodus from the Maze, 10 miles west of Belfast, and marks a fulcrum in the peace process. And it will be the most painful moment of all for victims' relatives as the atrocities involved are still so recent. The scheme has released 428 convicted terrorists ahead of schedule, 143 of whom were life-sentence prisoners. Those freed will include 192 loyalists and 226 republicans, such as Sean Kelly, 26, the IRA bomber who murdered nine with the Shankill Road bomb, and Torrens Knight, 30, Ulster Freedom Fighter and murderer of 11.

No one is sure exactly how many terrorists have served time. It is estimated to be between 25,000 and 30,000 during the past 30 years.

The Northern Ireland Office figures indicate little recidivism. Of 456 life-sentence prisoners released between 1983 and the start of the early release scheme, only one was recalled to jail. Only one prisoner freed under the agreement has had his licence revoked and been returned to custody for suspected terrorism. He was an IRA volunteer who served a five-year term before defecting to dissident republicans, and was held this year when police intercepted a car carrying explosives at Hillsborough, Co Down.

Ten more prisoners benefiting from the scheme, believed to be mostly loyalists, have since been charged, though none for terrorist offences - the charges include assault, drug-dealing, and driving offences and those held include three life-term prisoners.

Each prisoner leaving the Maze this morning will receive a pounds 52.20 discharge payment, and some will qualify for a pounds 100 clothing grant. Prisoners' groups have been in the Maze this month to ensure all will have filled out benefit forms and applica tions for housing. Employ- ment is the biggest single problem facing prisoners, and it worries Garnet Busby, 46, a former Ulster Volunteer Force member who now works for the Sandy Row Residents Group in south Belfast. He served 16 years of a life term for murdering an IRA member.

'Most prisoners will have no means at all to earn,' Mr Busby says. 'They are coming back into a much more affluent Northern Ireland, and they are going to be excluded from that. They will be bored, and some will be tempted to get involved in crime unless government takes some action to bind them in to the peace process."

Thomas Quigley, 44, jailed for the IRA attack on Chelsea Barracks in 1982, in which two were killed, was released last year after 16 years. He is now working with Tar Isteach, one of 20 republican prisoners' groups, the first of which was founded in 1995.

'Even now, prisoners are worried about their security when they come out,' he says. 'They are unhappy venturing close to interfaces. That cuts down on the jobs open to them, and it is not as if there is much choice in deprived areas like north Belfast."

Research in working-class republican areas suggests long-term unemployment for prisoners may be as high as nine in ten. It is likely to run around the same level within loyalist districts. Mike Ritchie, project director of Coiste na n-Iarchimi, an umbrella organisation for the republican groups, is campaigning for convictions to be wiped. (He hopes that the government may back that in a few years if political progress continues. Most employers demand details of criminal records, dismissing anyone later caught lying. All convictions above 30 months are never spent, and access to many public sector jobs is ruled out.) According to Mr Ritchie, 'Many ex-prisoners end up working on the black taxis, the favoured transport in west Belfast, or as security men on the doors of pubs and clubs. Some might get work as labourers or on building sites, but the black economy is very important. Many end up in the funded sector, mostly working as volunteers."

Prisoners' groups liaise with social services and the housing executive, and also offer retraining programmes. They are also becoming involved in counselling which was unthinkable when the Troubles were at their peak.

Former Ulster Defence Association member Billy McQuiston, 43, who spent more than 12 years at the Maze for offences including armed robbery, says: 'The rate of marriage breakdown is high. Men who have married a quiet girl come out to find she rules the roost at home and they are the stranger. There is an enormous strain."

Prisoners' groups also aim to become involved in commercial activities; one republican group, in Derry, has branched out: it has opened a gym in the Creggan area.

European funding through peace and reconciliation schemes is running at pounds 4m over five years to prisoners' groups on both sides; but there are doubts about its future. The groups say there is no government cash on top of that, and feel it is insufficient. Victims disagree. They say they get virtually nothing at all, often having to haggle hard even for their funeral expenses.

The families of the so-called disappeared - victims abducted and secretly murdered by the IRA - were enraged yesterday at news they would each receive compensation of pounds 10,000. Nine families qualify. Willie Frazer, spokesman for Families Acting for Innocent Relatives, who has lost five family members, says: 'We have people coming out of the Maze who were laughing when they were jailed last year for a total of 640 years. They knew they would be out soon.

'They will be feted as heroes and their own organisations will look after them. And what do the victims get - a cup of tea and a bun with Prince Charles? It is sickening and a new level of madness."

John Mullin is the Guardian's Ireland correspondent.