ABSTRACT
On 29 December 1972, Elizabeth McKee, aged 19, was arrested during a house raid in Belfast on suspicion of having helped a male Provisional IRA Volunteer to escape from Lagan Valley hospital the previous week (Irish Times 2 January 1973). McKee was taken for interrogation to the joint policy and army holding centre at Castlereagh, along with twelve men and two other women. This first incidence of the detention of women occurred 17 months after the mass arrest and internment of 354 men in response to widespread civil disorder and the escalation of Republican and Loyalist paramilitary violence. The decision to introduce internment had been taken by the Northern Ireland Prime Minister, Brian Faulkner, with the less than wholehearted support of the British Army’s senior military advisers in Northern Ireland (Lee 1993: 437). Amongst the tactical dividends that internment was meant to yield were the opportunity for the army to loosen the hold that the Provisional IRA was gaining in the Catholic working-class ghettoes, exploit the element of surprise in capturing its leadership and detain low-level suspects for intelligence-gathering purposes (Kennally and Preston 1971: 122).1
