Ian Bownes: forensic psychiatrist who assessed mental fitness of IRA hunger strikers in the Maze prison

Abstract

At the height of the Troubles in the early 1980s Ian Bownes, a young trainee psychiatrist in Northern Ireland, was sent into the notorious H blocks in Belfast’s Maze prison to assess if its paramilitary inmates were mentally fit to go on hunger strikes. It would have been an unsettling experience for anyone to go inside the Maze, which mainly housed republican prisoners. For a young Protestant like Bownes, however, it must have been even tougher. That Bownes did so for many years spoke to his “quiet heroism,” how much his professional opinion was valued, and how fully he was trusted to uphold the confidentiality on which his access depended, says friend and former colleague Harry Kennedy, a professor of forensic psychiatry at the University of Dublin. When Bownes first went into the Maze, republican prisoners were escalating a campaign of protest against the British government. This included demands to reinstate special category status as political prisoners. By October 1981, when their hunger strike ended, 10 inmates had died, including Bobby Sands, an IRA leader and elected MP, who had refused food for 66 days. Bownes would go on to become Northern Ireland’s pioneering “giant” of forensic psychiatry services—work that often placed …