Sarah Clarke was an Irish civil rights activist, nun, educator, and writer. She campaigned for more than thirty years for the rights of the Guildford Four, Birmingham Six, and the Maguire Seven.
Background
Sarah Clarke was born on November 17, 1919, in Eyrecourt, County Galway. She was the daughter of farmer Michael and Brigid Clarke (née Claffey). Clarke brought up with her brother in the village of Eyrecourt, where her parents ran a pub, shop, and farm. In 1939 Clarke entered the Sainte Union convent at Killashee and took the name of Sister Mary Auxilius. However, thirty years later, when she had a more public role, she found that people had difficulty pronouncing it, so she reverted to her baptismal name.
Education
Sarah Clarke studied at Carysfort teacher training college in Dublin in 1941, where she received a bilingual certificate in Irish and English. Besides, she attended Chelsea School of Art in 1960 and the University of Reading to study typography and ergonomics.
Career
Sarah Clarke was a Roman Catholic nun of the order of La Sainte Union in Ireland in 1937-1985. Her first job was at Our Lady's Bower School in Athlone, where she remained for sixteen years. She took particular pleasure in teaching art and used advanced methods, but found the school very strictly run. In 1957 Clarke was transferred, at her request, to the United Kingdom, where she began teaching in the Sainte Union convents at Southampton, at Herne Bay, Kent, and Highgate, London.
In 1970 Sarah Clarke discovered the cause that was to occupy the rest of her life: the Northern Ireland civil rights movement, and specifically the rights of republican prisoners. Her reverend mother allowed her to join the movement. Clarke was briefly the movement's London secretary before becoming disillusioned with it and leaving to work alone for many years, liaising with activists such as Father Denis Faul. After her 1973 visits to the Price sisters and others accused of the Old Bailey bombings, she was not permitted to meet category A prisoners but would bring letters and parcels for them, act as a contact for their families, and lobby politicians about their conditions. In 1976 her order released her from teaching duties and allowed her to buy a car. A few years later, she helped set up the Relatives and Friends of Prisoners Committee, which had as its principal aim the repatriation of republican prisoners to Ireland.
From the late 1970s, Sarah Clarke achieved renown because of her leading role in the campaigns to clear the names of the Guildford Four, Maguire Seven, and Birmingham Six. In 1978 the prison authorities gave her permission to visit Giuseppe Conlon, and she was one of the last people to see him alive before his death in 1980. Clarke also helped the journalists Chris Mullen and Ronan Bennett in their books on the cases. When the Guildford Four's convictions were finally quashed in 1989, Paul Hill was asked to pose for the Observer newspaper. He agreed on the condition Clarke pose with him, and the photo appeared on the front page. Paddy Hill of the Birmingham Six called her the "Joan of Arc of British prisons." After 1995 Sarah Clarke was cleared to visit three categories A prisoners and, although she went blind in old age, she continued her work.
Furthermore, Sarah Clarke was a writer. She was the author of an autobiography, No faith in the system.
Religion
Sarah Clarke's Catholicism was profound and orthodox, but it was a sermon on the mount Catholicism, leavened with profound compassion and a down-to-earth understanding of human frailty.
Politics
Sarah Clarke's autobiography, No faith in the system, shows some sympathy for republicanism. She blamed the Irish Republican Army bombings on grave injustices in the six counties and wrote that until 1994 "the British government did not take Irish nationalists seriously enough to enter into talks with them," which ignores the many talks held with the Social Democratic and Labour Party and the meetings between William Whitelaw and the Irish Republican Army in 1973.
Views
Sarah Clarke was a civil rights campaigner. She did not discriminate between guilty and innocent. When she was asked in a television documentary about her life and work how she could justify visiting men who had planted bombs and killed civilians, she quoted Christ: "I was sick and in prison, and you visited me." Clarke maintained it was possible to "hate the sin, but love the sinner."
Quotations:
"That I had a special sympathy for Republican prisoners stems from the belief that had it not been for the political situation they would never have been in jail nor would their families have suffered, or seen the inside of a jail."
