Available onlineOU study 1983-2000
(page 5 of 5)Online exhibition theme created by Jenny Meegan, a member of the OU Time to Think Project Team
| Lorcan Fairmichael image : | Maze and Long Kesh Prison |
| Date: | 2011 |
| Austin Treacy clip: | Taking a step back being more reflective |
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| Duration: | 00:02:00 |
| Date: |
| Shelagh Livingstone: | Men studying on the inside while women studied on the outside |
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| Duration: | 00:02:08 |
| Date: |
In 1988 the Compounds at the Maze and Long Kesh Prison were closed and most of the OU students there were released except for a small number who were moved to the H Blocks. From 1992 free association between prisoners in the H Blocks meant that students could come together to study. Tutorials were often held in a large double cell which was used as an extra classroom.
In 1992 there were forty OU students in the H Blocks, twenty-four men and five women in Maghaberry and four in Magilligan. In the 1990s an increasing number of non-political prisoners were studying with the OU in Maghaberry and Magilligan, and this continued to be the case after the closure of the H Blocks in 2000.
Prison Governors, prison officers and other people working in the prisons, among them Probation Officers, priests and police, also studied with the OU. Offering a solution to fill sleepless nights, Prison Governor A said that, "The environment in which we worked for staff was very oppressive." He talks in his interview of the deaths of six of his colleagues, recalling that;
Every time a member of staff was murdered the prisons were locked down until after the funeral.
Prison Governor A
Prison staff studied in OU study centres across Ireland and their tutors would rarely be aware that they worked in the prisons. Due to the very real security risks for police and prison officers, their occupations tended to be listed as 'civil servants'. Davy Connery, a police officer who worked with the prisons recalled;
If I wanted to go to a tutorial a threat assessment had to be completed. I had to fill in a form to say when I was going to tutorials so that the local uniform [police] patrols that were patrolling the area would have come past.
Davy Connery
In the clips on this page Austin Treacy describes studying in the 1980s when he was a prison officer and, unlike the prison students, was able to attend OU Summer School. Shelagh Livingstone, a Member of the Board of Visitors in the H Blocks, describes discussions with a student who was studying the same course.
