Available onlineOU study 1983-2000
(page 4 of 5)Online exhibition theme created by Jenny Meegan, a member of the OU Time to Think Project Team
| Tommy Quigley clip: | I got those skills from the OU |
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| Duration: | 00:02:00 |
| Date: |
| Geraldine Ward clip: | 1998 was a very different year |
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| Duration: | 00:03:13 |
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In the 1980s and 1990s Republican men and women studied with The Open University in English prisons. In the 1990s after a sustained campaign they were transferred to prisons in Ireland.
Study conditions in English prisons ranged from the purpose built Special Secure Units in Parkhurst and Leicester, to the chapel in the nineteenth-century Durham Gaol. In the first clip on this page Tommy Quigley describes using skills learned from his OU study to draw up submissions for his transfer to prison in Ireland.
In 1986 Armagh Women's Gaol, which had been the primary women's prison, was closed and moved to the newly built Maghaberry Prison. The following year the men's prison at Maghaberry was opened. Some wings in the H Blocks at the Maze and Long Kesh Prison closed and some students from the H Blocks moved to Maghaberry.
During the 1990s ten Republican women in Maghaberry studied with The Open University. Numbers of imprisoned women were small although in the late 1990s every Republican woman there was an OU student. In the second clip on this page Geraldine Ward, the last woman to be released under the Good Friday Agreement in 2000, describes being given parole to attend the Sinn Féin Ard Fheis (party conference) that year and receiving her OU results on the day she was finally released.
