Strike threat over prison officer attacks

Prison officers in Northern Ireland were today threatening to take strike action after a series of attacks on them inside the high-security Magilligan Jail.

Leaders of the Prison Officers’ Association were meeting Prison Service management to express their frustrations.

For months prison officers have come under attack in their homes from loyalist paramilitaries as part of a campaign to achieve segregation from republicans.

The Prison Service has now granted the segregation to inmates after also being faced with a series of violent clashes in the Co Antrim jail and a dissident republican “dirty protest”.

The prison is now being prepared for the segregation and, according to the POA, ordinary non-paramilitary inmates are having their regime restricted to enable the work to be done – and attacking warders in frustration.

Two officers were injured yesterday in attacks and three more the day before.

Finlay Spratt, chairman of the POA, said: “We are being attacked in our homes and now we are being attacked in the prison.

“Staff are becoming totally frustrated. They are being assaulted on the job because of the lack of resources and they haven’t got adequate security measures at their homes.

“I think officers are ready to take the step of strike action and we don’t make that decision lightly.”

He said the ordinary prisoners in the jail were attacking officers out of frustration after being locked up for extended periods in their cells while the jail was prepared for the separation of paramilitaries.

“Resources are being channelled towards paramilitary prisoners to get accommodation ready for them,” said Mr Spratt, who added that the prison authorities wanted it ready before the Assembly election at the end of November.

Prison Service director general Peter Russell said today that strike action was not the way to address the problems in the jail.

He said: “I don’t think strike action is the way to deal with their frustrations,” and he pointed out that “the law actually forbids prison officers to be on strike”.

He said there was a great deal of sympathy for the difficulties that the prison staff were facing with attacks on them at home and work and added he was anxious to meet Mr Spratt today.

There was a difficult problem to address with the introduction of separation of loyalists and republicans and the Prison Service was “cracking ahead as fast as we can to put in safe and secure arrangements for operating this challenging new regime for separated prisoners”.

Mr Russell said he would not say the two recent assault incidents in the jail were directly connected to the work being carried out, but he accepted: “It is true that if prisoners are locked up in their cells for excessive periods of time it increases tension and the risk of assault.”