Long Kesh Prison, later renamed Maze Prison, was more than a place of confinement in the history recounted here: it became the setting for a dispute over whether captured Irish Republican Army volunteers were criminals or political prisoners, and over whether the state could impose that distinction through prison routines. Individual cells and issued uniforms gave physical form to the government’s policy; the blanket and dirty protests made the prison itself the arena of resistance. The book retains the name Long Kesh because that was the name most republican prisoners continued to use, allowing the site’s history to remain legible through the language of those who lived it.

Name and institutional change

The prison appears in a period when the end of internment changed the conditions under which paramilitary suspects were held. By late 1975, suspects were to be charged as ordinary criminals rather than detained indefinitely as political prisoners. For the republican prisoners, this was not a merely administrative change. They understood themselves as soldiers in a war and believed that, if captured, they should be treated as prisoners of war. The British government, which would not call the conflict a war, refused that status.

The contrast was built into daily life. People held under internment had generally been allowed to wear their own clothes and associate freely with their paramilitary colleagues. After internment ended, those convicted of paramilitary activity were confined individually in the new facility at Long Kesh, in the H Blocks. Prison-issued clothing made no distinction between an Irish Republican Army volunteer and a common thief. The uniform therefore did more than identify a prisoner: in the republican account, it enacted the government’s refusal to recognise the political meaning prisoners attached to their actions.

Long Kesh was later renamed Maze Prison. The book nevertheless uses Long Kesh throughout, explaining that most republican prisoners in its account continued to call it by that name. The choice preserves a distinction between the official renaming of a prison and the vocabulary carried forward by its former inmates. It also keeps the site connected to the conflict’s earlier phases, rather than allowing a later name to obscure the setting in which its most consequential protests began.

Confinement and attempted escape

The prison’s routines did not produce passive compliance. Gerry Adams tried twice to escape while held at Long Kesh. His attempts place the prison within a wider contest over control: the institution confined prisoners through walls, cells and schedules, while escape offered a direct challenge to that confinement. The attempts did not establish a successful departure, but they show that resistance at Long Kesh was not limited to collective protest over status and clothing.

Adams and Brendan Hughes were also connected across the prison’s internal and external political worlds. When Adams was released in 1977, he and Hughes walked in the yard and discussed strategy. Adams left with his belongings in a brown paper bag, while Hughes remained to keep order among prisoners. Their parting marked a divergence in their immediate circumstances, not an end to contact: Adams remained in close communication with Hughes through smuggled messages. The prison thus served both as a site of separation and as a place from which political organisation continued beyond the walls.

The protests inside the H Blocks

In autumn 1976, republican prisoners rebelled against wearing the clothes issued by the prison. They wrapped themselves in blankets instead, beginning the blanket protest. Their demand for special category status meant, in effect, recognition as prisoners of war. The refusal of that demand left the prisoners and guards locked in an escalating confrontation. Although the Price sisters had also wrapped themselves in blankets after their arrest in London, the protest at Long Kesh developed under its own prison conditions and became a sustained collective action by republican prisoners.

The conflict extended from clothing to movement and bodily privacy. At first, protesters still left their cells to shower and use the toilet. Guards sometimes beat them during those trips and restricted their access to towels. Prisoners then refused to leave their cells. Guards had to collect and empty chamber pots, which prisoners began tipping so that urine ran beneath the doors into the corridors. The protest, already moving from refusal of uniforms to refusal to wash, became the dirty protest. Each imposed routine met with a further refusal, and each refusal altered the physical conditions of the prison.

Hughes, the prisoners’ commanding officer inside Long Kesh, was asked what the men should do with their faeces. He suggested daubing it on the walls. The prisoners, naked and filthy, with long, matted hair and wild beards, spread their waste into patterns across the cells. Maggots appeared and disease became a threat. Guards removed the prisoners, hosed them down and cleaned the cells with water and disinfectant, but transferring a protester to a fresh cell did little to resolve the confrontation: the cell could be fouled again. A visiting priest compared the men to people living in sewer pipes in the slums of Calcutta. The grotesque conditions were not incidental to the protest; they made visible the bodily cost of a dispute over political recognition.

The prisoners’ demands remained comparatively simple: the right not to wear prison uniforms, to associate freely and to receive mail. Yet successive acts of resistance hardened the resolve of their opponents rather than producing agreement. The protests made Long Kesh a prolonged test of endurance in which the administration controlled the cells but could not readily compel the prisoners to accept the identity those cells were designed to impose.

Long Kesh in the conflict’s memory

The prison’s history in the book connects institutional control with the later struggle to account for the conflict. Its name persists because prisoners continued to use it, even after Maze Prison became the official name. That persistence is modest but consequential: it shows how the language of imprisonment survived the state’s attempt to reorganise the status of those held there. Long Kesh names not only a facility but a remembered setting for the collision between criminalisation and republican claims to political identity.

The book’s wider account describes a peace settlement that left no side an uncontested victory and no formal process for deciding how the conflict should be remembered. Gerry Adams’s refusal to acknowledge membership in the Irish Republican Army fed a continuing culture of silence, while the leadership of Sinn Féin sought to preserve a particular account of the armed struggle. In that setting, Long Kesh’s history cannot be reduced to its walls or official renaming. The prison’s protests show how a policy could be experienced as an assault on identity, and how resistance to that policy could leave a record both physical and political. Its enduring name carries that unresolved history into the post-conflict struggle over who may describe the past.