Long Kesh H Blocks

Long Kesh H Blocks were the prison buildings at the centre of a struggle over how republican prisoners would be classified and treated. Their individual cells and issued uniforms made the distinction between political prisoner and ordinary criminal part of daily life; prisoners answered with the blanket protest, then the dirty protest and hunger strikes. The blocks became more than additional prison capacity: they were the setting in which institutional rules, bodily defiance and political strategy collided.

Expansion and criminalisation

In the mid-1970s, Gerry Adams and Brendan Hughes could see new installations taking shape at Long Kesh. The H Blocks were being built to house many more paramilitary detainees, a visible sign that the conflict was not ending with a decisive military victory. The expansion took place as the Provisional IRA’s early expectation of one final push gave way to the prospect of a prolonged struggle, while public support had begun to taper after years of violence.

The blocks also belonged to a new policy of imprisonment. Internment ended in 1975, and paramilitary suspects were thereafter charged and convicted as ordinary criminals rather than detained indefinitely as political prisoners. The distinction was not merely administrative. Republican prisoners regarded themselves as soldiers who, if captured, should be treated as prisoners of war. Under internment, they had generally been able to wear their own clothes and associate freely with fellow paramilitaries. In the H Blocks, convicted prisoners were placed in individual cells and given prison uniforms, the same as other inmates. Classification became a uniform to put on and a cell in which to be confined.

From the blanket protest to the dirty protest

In autumn 1976, republican prisoners refused to wear the issued clothes and began the blanket protest. Naked beneath blankets, they rejected the prison uniform as an imposed identity. Their demand was for Special Category Status, which would effectively recognise them as political prisoners or prisoners of war. The authorities refused, and the dispute grew through a series of escalating confrontations rather than a single decisive encounter.

At first, the protesters left their cells to shower and use the toilet. Guards sometimes beat them on these trips and restricted their use of towels. The prisoners then refused to leave their cells at all. Guards collected chamber pots, but prisoners tipped them so that urine ran beneath the doors and into the corridors. The protest, having become a refusal to wash, developed into the dirty protest. The prison’s routines turned bodily waste into the means by which prisoners could contest confinement and the terms imposed on them.

Hughes, the commanding officer inside the prison, was asked what the prisoners should do with their faeces. He suggested smearing it on the walls. The men, naked, unwashed and growing long, matted hair and beards, painted the cells with their own waste. Maggots appeared and the threat of disease increased. Guards removed prisoners, hosed them down and cleaned their cells with water and disinfectant; moving a protester to a fresh cell did not resolve the standoff, since the protest could begin again. The episode was grotesque in its material details, but its governing question was stark: prisoners sought the right not to wear uniforms, to associate with one another and to receive mail, while each side’s response hardened the other’s resistance.

Hunger strikes and bodily stakes

The H Blocks also became the setting for hunger strikes. By the time Margaret Thatcher took office in 1979, several hundred men were participating in the dirty protest. Prisoners persisted despite the violation of basic habits of hygiene and the killings of off-duty prison officers by the Provisional IRA. Thatcher rejected political status, insisting that crime should be treated as crime. In that climate, the protest’s demand for recognition met an uncompromising public refusal.

In autumn 1980, Hughes announced another escalation: a hunger strike. More than a hundred prisoners volunteered, and a team of seven was selected, led by Hughes, who chose to take part himself rather than ask a subordinate to undergo what he would not. The men began refusing food in the last week of October. Hughes grew weaker in his cell as the strike continued. The hunger strike carried the conflict over status beyond clothing and association: prisoners made their own bodies the stake in a dispute about how their actions and political identity would be named.

A prison turned political symbol

The protests at Long Kesh were part of a wider conflict over criminalisation and republican strategy. Outside the prison, Gerry Adams argued that military victory alone could not build a republic, while keeping close contact with Hughes through smuggled communications. The prison struggle and the movement’s political turn therefore developed alongside one another, even as the prisoners’ immediate demands remained focused on their treatment inside the blocks.

The book’s later account of the conflict stresses how difficult it remained to establish a shared public memory after the peace process. Gerry Adams continued to deny that he had been in the IRA, while Sinn Féin was described as maintaining a powerful narrative of republican armed struggle. A later report also suggested that the continued authority of paramilitary organisations helped their leaders restrain members and prevent violence from reigniting; critics including Hughes saw the leadership’s intolerance of opposition as self-interested and cruel. Against that unsettled background, the H Blocks stand as a concrete setting in which the conflict’s larger questions took bodily form: a uniform, an individual cell, a blanket, and a protest that could not be contained by moving its participants to clean rooms.