Mr. Peter Bunting:

To answer the question, I can keep repeating what I have said previously, but it is terribly frustrating. I do not know how the two of us have survived. Perhaps I will get a pension from the Northern Ireland Prison Service or something; I do not know. To be serious, from our perspective there is both a sectarian attitude and political interference in respect of these people. My view is that the references to legacy issues are nonsense. They are utilised as an excuse.

There have been extraordinary changes. There is a person in a control centre outside the campus who simply has to press a button for all the gates to lock. He is untouchable. He is in a bunker. No one can get at this person. He simply has to press a button if trouble starts and the whole place closes down. Therefore, it is nonsense to suggest that people are under attack. There is controlled movement of people. For example, let us suppose I want to go for a shower. Three prison officers come to my cell and take me. They do not handcuff me or anything. I dander over to the door across the way and go into the shower.

In the interim, if the prisoner next to me wants to go somewhere else, he has to wait until I get back to my cell and then these three merchants have to come back and unlock his door to take him to the next door. It is absolute nonsense. To me, it is oppression. That is what it is. Even allowing for the fact that there is a danger of somebody smuggling gelignite or whatever in some orifice or other, the machine we saw in Portlaoise has no difficulty detecting that. It can detect explosives and it can detect drugs. I know Mr. John Finucane talks about drugs generally. The prison officers admit that there are no drugs in any of the dissident republican landings. They do not exist there and the prison service accepts that, by the way.

Even allowing for that, these things could happen and that is what the detecting machines are for. We called the Maghaberry Prison service on its bluff. We got on to the prison authorities in Portlaoise through the Prison Officers Association in the Republic of Ireland. I spoke to a person I knew who said he could get a body orifice security scanner, BOSS, chair up to Maghaberry. He said that there was one lying around there, that he could put it on the tractor or the trailer and could have it up in Maghaberry Prison the next day. I told the prison service we would get it one tomorrow. Previous to that, one would have to put in an order and it would take a year to go through the procedures, processes and all that carry on. Therefore, I said I could get one for them on loan the next day. All of sudden, they brought it in. However, that was still not good enough. It is in the agreement that if detection led to intelligence, the officer would strip search the prisoner, but that has never happened. It is used as a tool to suppress and intimidate people.

We have to look at the big picture. Do we really want to build a peaceful and just society in Northern Ireland? If we do, whether we like it or not, we have to do deal with these people. It the same with everyone else. We have to talk to everyone. If nobody talks to them, it only adds fuel to the fire. It is absolute nonsense to ignore them or isolate them. What will happen can be seen in republican history. People might go on a dirty protest. What we all fear is somebody going on a hunger strike. All of the oxygen would then be given to the dissidents and taken away from those people in the current Sinn Féin Party who have done a good thing by embedding the peace process. It is the sort of a place to which there is no rationale or reality. If we could sit down for the next six months, we still could not come up with an acceptable reason for what is happening in that prison and why it is still happening to this day.

The danger of it is that it will leave open an opportunity in which some other prison officer could be killed. Sometimes one might believe that these mysterious people who run this system must think prison officers are expendable in order to justify their reasoning. I am serious about that. These things are outside my ken. I can never understand it. Throughout the course of six years, we have came close numerous times to breaking point or to moving away from it. We still hang in there. Maybe we are gluttons for punishment. It is because we believe that the agreement we had was the best we all could have got. Everybody signed up to it. Despite all the agreements in the Maze, in Long Kesh and everywhere else, it was the only signed agreement by prisoners and the prison service alike in the history of the prison service in either the Republic of Ireland or Northern Ireland. That agreement is there and it really should be built on.

Perhaps this committee should seek a meeting with the Secretary of State and the Minister of Justice in Northern Ireland and demand to know when we will ever have agreement and progress. It is not the case that anybody would move to free and full movement immediately. It would be a gradual system of movement in which more prisoners could get out monthly on the premise that there would be peace and that it would be a conflict-free prison. In negotiations, the prison service could say that there could be seven prisoners out on the landing by Christmas, but if the prisoners mess around, intimidate somebody or hit somebody, then they return to square one as before. In that way, it would be in everyone's interest to reach the situation in which there is a conflict-free environment, unless somebody decides to beat themselves up or something, but that is a matter for another day. We will not discuss that now. We live in expectancy that we could get a progressive agreement over a period of time that would suit everyone involved.