Derry, Northern Ireland
Martina Anderson is a lifelong Irish republican, former political prisoner, and veteran political leader from Derry’s Bogside. Arrested in the early years of the Troubles, she spent nearly fourteen years in prison, including a decade in England, before her release under the Good Friday Agreement in 1998.
Following her release, Martina unexpectedly found herself in public office, serving as a member of the Northern Ireland Assembly, a Junior Minister in the Executive Office, and later as a Member of the European Parliament for Sinn Féin, where she represented Northern Ireland for more than seven years.
She was also among the first Sinn Féin representatives appointed to the Policing Board, helping oversee reforms aimed at increasing accountability and human rights protections in post-conflict policing.
Derry, Northern Ireland
“We will ensure that what happened to us is not done to them.”
On the experience of being a prisoner:
“Ellen Dwyer, my comrade and friend, who on the 6th of June tomorrow will be one year dead, died of natural causes here, but not natural causes. She struggled with the trauma of all that we endured in prison.
We were put in Brixton prison. Brixton prison is a man’s jail. There were 600 men and we were the only two women. We were subjected not just to daily strip-searching, but they began to humiliate us. We were being strip-searched six times a day. We were subjected to vile sexual abuse from some of the male prisoners.
We were on remand for 13 months. We were sentenced to life in prison and moved from Brixton prison to Durham prison.
We were quite relieved to get out of Brixton. We arrived in Durham and it was a women’s wing inside a man’s jail. Durham prison had been closed previously when it held a small number of men because it was regarded as too claustrophobic. The British establishment spent millions upgrading it security-wise and put 40 women in it.
There were no toilets in the cells. The sewer system would block up every winter. The sewage would spill out into the area where one would eat. It was infested with cockroaches. At night you would hear them scraping. If you wanted to use a room they euphemistically called the gym, you had to go in and brush the cockroaches up and put them in bags to make a space for yourself.
So we fought a campaign for better conditions. We wrote to as many people as we could to bring attention to what was happening.
The thing about being away as well, it gives you time to reflect and to look from afar and to be strategic about what you’re seeing. We had arrived at a point of a stalemate in our struggle … and sometimes that involved compromise. Never compromising our right to resist, never compromising who we were or what we represented, but compromise in trying to get to the goal that we were working toward.”
On the kind of Ireland we want:
“The Good Friday Agreement, when that came about, provided us with an opportunity to have, for the first time, a peaceful democratic process to reunite this country. … The work that I’m involved in at the moment is ensuring that our movement and our party is ideologically grounded in socialist principles and the legacy that we will leave behind is a generation of Republicans who will feel as compassionate about this country as we do.
Because it’s not a matter if there will be a referendum on Irish unity. It’s when it will be. And then it’s what kind of Ireland we want and how do we ensure that it’s an Ireland that’s going to embrace everyone that lives in it, and that includes people from the Protestant Unionist community having a space and a place that they can call home.
We will ensure that what happened to us is not done to them.”
On the meaning of peace:
“Equality, human rights, international law and respect. Integrity. People being able to live their lives and being treated equally. No differentiation based on race or creed or color of one’s skin. As human beings, who we are, we are all born equal into this world and need to be treated equally in the world we find ourselves in.
Peace for me is ensuring that you have a government that is going to have policies in place that serve the people and not serve oligarchs and elites and global corporations, but look after people’s needs.
It’s peace of mind. It’s peace of heart. It’s peace of environment. And of course, as human beings, we will have differences of opinion. But when you’re treating people with dignity, with integrity, and you’re upholding international law, then peace has substance. It can’t just be something that’s all fluff. It has to have substance for it to have meaning.”
On the meaning of the Good Friday Agreement:
“For the prisoners, whilst the release of political prisoners was part of the Good Friday Agreement, we didn’t go to jail for Sinn Féin negotiators to get us out of jail into the same conditions that we came out to. We went in wanting that we would have the ability to reunite this country peacefully and democratically.
So the governance of Ireland … our right to self-determination being won in the Good Friday Agreement … for us, a new beginning to policing, an end to the brutality of the RUC, human rights legislation, where people could not be discriminated against based on religion or ethnicity or gender …
The Good Friday Agreement offered us a pathway for a peaceful democratic reunification of this island.”
On why change is possible:
“States tell lies. They lie about oppression. They lie their way in courts. And when they don’t like the laws, they change the laws.
States lie their whole way through every conflict. Every state atrocity that has taken place, they tried to bury the truth and they tried to bury the hope of those people who are seeking truth and justice.
But they fail because people will not give up. It will be transgenerational and people will challenge. It will take time—it always does. But I believe that right will emerge.”
To read the introduction to this series, follow this link.
The Troubles: Finding a Path Toward Healing in Northern Ireland
To listen to our podcast, follow this link or find us on the platform of your choice.
A Peace of My Mind on Buzzsprout
Credits:
Interview and photos: John Noltner
Field production: summer interns Kate West, Sawyer Garrison, and Kaitlin Imai
Audio engineering: Razik Saifullah