In the context of current debate about how to secure Australia against terrorist threat, it is interesting to reflect that Australia has been integrated in the history of modern terrorism for a very long time. Way back in April 1876, six Fenian prisoners, all of whom were serving life sentences, escaped from the colony of Western Australia on board the barque Catalpa. Their escape was the fruit of ‘secrecy, careful planning and financial control’ and its achievement a persuasive argument in the minds of a particular segment of Irish nationalist militants for the application of the same organisational principles to the dynamiting of British cities. ‘Scientific warfare’ is what they called it, back then, out of confidence in the capacity of a well-placed stick to eliminate legislators instead of ‘innocent soldiers’. Ironically, the planning, fundraising, recruitment and training for the 1880s Dynamitards campaign to destroy the centres and symbols of power in Britain all took place on United States soil.
Who now knows about the climate of fear in England, the emergency Bill to control the possession and use of explosives, and the attacks on train stations, the Home Office, Foreign Office, Colonial Office, the Local Government Board, military barracks, Scotland Yard, London Bridge and The Times. The name of the Bin Laden-like figure, O’Donovan Rossa, and the organisation he directed has disappeared from public memory; in British cities, the ‘deep and profound disgust with Ireland and her people’, which in the 1880s displaced a growing sympathy for Ireland, has in turn given way to a mood that accommodates Irish theme pubs and Irish rock stars, even when it tires of events in Belfast.
Whatever about repeating itself, history certainly echoes, and you can hear those resonances in a recently published account of Irish political prisoners in British jails during the three quarters of a century leading up to the declaration of the Irish Free State in 1922. Sean McConville’s Irish Political Prisoners, 1848–1922: Theatres of War surveys the crimes, the prison experiences and the penal ideas that governed the treatment of these prisoners. The book arrives, at least implicit at a recommendation to democratic governments: locking up (and/or executing) your political opponents is not inevitably a good idea, because that way you grant them political longevity and even, possibly, political triumph. As a rule of thumb it seems to hold, when you consider not just the Irish Free State and