British policy granting some prisoners Special Category Status

British policy granting some prisoners Special Category Status was at the centre of a struggle over how paramilitary prisoners should be classified and treated. For republican prisoners, the issue was not a label alone: it concerned whether they were to be treated as ordinary criminals or as political combatants, and whether prison rules would erase the distinction they believed defined their cause.

Political status and the meaning of imprisonment

Internment had allowed paramilitary suspects to be detained without charge or trial, sometimes for years. Although that system had serious costs, internees were generally allowed to wear their own clothes and associate freely with their paramilitary colleagues. The end of internment altered the conditions of imprisonment as well as the official language used to describe the conflict.

After internment officially ended towards the close of 1975, suspects were to be charged like ordinary criminals. To the British government, the distinction was a matter of classification; to the Irish republican movement, calling volunteers criminals denied the basis on which they had taken up arms. Republicans regarded themselves as soldiers and expected captured members to be treated as prisoners of war. Special Category Status was sought as a way to secure that political distinction in prison, effectively classifying those who received it as prisoners of war.

From ordinary uniforms to the blanket protest

The change was made concrete in the new H Blocks at Long Kesh. Convicted prisoners were confined in individual cells and issued prison uniforms, regardless of whether they were republican volunteers or ordinary thieves. The uniform made the policy visible: prisoners who saw themselves as political combatants were made to wear the same clothes as other convicted offenders.

In autumn 1976, republican prisoners refused to wear the issued clothing and began the blanket protest, wrapping themselves in blankets instead. Their demand for Special Category Status was refused. The protest thus challenged both the clothing rule and the government’s refusal to recognise their political status. Prisoners’ resistance soon extended beyond what they wore: relations with the guards worsened, and restrictions and beatings during trips to wash or use the toilet helped drive further escalation.

Escalation and the limits of refusal

When prisoners stopped leaving their cells, guards had to empty their chamber pots. The prisoners began tipping them, sending urine under the doors and into the corridors. The blanket protest had become a no-wash protest and then a dirty protest. As commanding officer inside the prison, Brendan Hughes was asked what prisoners should do with their faeces; he suggested smearing it on the walls. Prisoners covered their cells with waste, while maggots and the threat of disease brought guards in to remove them, hose them down, and clean the cells with water and disinfectant. The conflict over status had become a physical contest over who could make the prison’s conditions intolerable and who would yield first.

The terms prisoners sought were comparatively specific: not to wear prison uniforms, to associate freely with other prisoners, and to receive mail. The authorities’ refusal to grant the status therefore shaped more than prisoners’ formal designation. It governed daily life, separating prisoners in individual cells while denying them the clothing and association they considered appropriate to their political identity.

An earlier demand and a continuing political fault line

The same dispute over political imprisonment was already apparent after Dolours Price and Marian Price were convicted following the London bombings. Held as the only women in the overcrowded, overwhelmingly male Brixton Prison, the sisters demanded repatriation to serve their sentences as political prisoners in jails in Northern Ireland. They had stopped eating before arriving and took only water; Hugh Feeney and Gerry Kelly joined their hunger strike from other prisons. Their demand was refused, and the British government feared that a death on hunger strike could trigger retaliatory violence.

On 3 December, after two and a half weeks of the strike, officials force-fed Dolours Price. She was restrained in a chair bolted to the floor while a wooden device held her mouth open for a rubber tube; the food mixture included raw eggs, orange juice, and liquid Complan. Afterward she told Marian Price she did not think she could endure the procedure again, and Marian said she could leave the strike. The episode shows the bodily stakes of the sisters’ demand, while the later protest at Long Kesh shows how the refusal of political status became an enduring prison conflict. Across both settings, the dispute turned on whether imprisonment would recognise a political identity or impose the government’s criminal classification in every aspect of prison life.