Long Kesh prisoners’ blanket and dirty protests

Long Kesh prisoners’ blanket and dirty protests transformed a dispute over prison status into a drawn-out confrontation conducted through the prisoners’ bodies and the conditions of their cells. Beginning with the refusal to wear issued uniforms, the protest escalated from nakedness under blankets to the deliberate fouling of cells. Its material degradation was inseparable from its political demand: republican prisoners wanted recognition as political prisoners, while the prison treated them as ordinary criminals.

Background and Political Stakes

The protests followed the official end of internment towards the end of 1975. Under internment, paramilitary suspects could be detained indefinitely without charge or trial, but those held were generally allowed to wear their own clothes and associate freely with their colleagues. The new policy instead treated people convicted of paramilitary activity as ordinary criminals. At Long Kesh, prisoners were confined individually in the H Blocks and issued the same uniforms as common thieves. The change in clothing and confinement expressed a larger attempt to recast armed republican volunteers as criminals rather than soldiers.

The prisoners’ demand was for special category status, which would effectively classify them as prisoners of war. Refusing prison clothes was therefore not simply a matter of comfort or personal choice: the uniform made the state’s classification visible on the prisoner’s body. In autumn 1976, republican prisoners rebelled against that imposed identity. They wrapped themselves naked in blankets, as Dolours Price and Marian Price had done after their arrests in London. Their refusal was also a rejection of the idea that serving a sentence as an ordinary criminal could settle the political meaning of their imprisonment.

From Blanket Protest to Dirty Protest

At first, the blanket protest did not mean refusing every ordinary prison routine. Prisoners would leave their cells to shower and use the toilet, but guards sometimes beat them on these trips and restricted their use of towels to cover and dry themselves. In response, the prisoners stopped leaving their cells. A protest over clothing and status thereby became a confrontation over movement, bodily privacy, and the terms on which prisoners could maintain basic cleanliness.

The guards then had to visit each cell to collect and empty chamber pots. Prisoners began tipping the pots, sending urine beneath the cell doors and into the corridor. The protest had passed through a no-wash phase and become the dirty protest: urine spread through the prison, and guards were left to clean it. When the prisoners raised the problem of what to do with their solid waste, Brendan Hughes, the commanding officer inside the prison, suggested that they smear it on the walls.

The prisoners used their own waste to cover the cell walls, working it into swirling patterns. Their naked bodies, blankets, and fouled surroundings made the protest impossible to separate from the conditions in which it was conducted. The prison responded by sending teams into the cells to drag the prisoners out and hose them down while other staff washed the spaces with water and disinfectant. Moving a protesting inmate to a clean cell did not end the cycle: the cell could soon be fouled again. Maggots appeared, and the threat of disease became part of the conditions. A visiting priest compared the prisoners to people living in sewer pipes in the slums of Calcutta.

Escalation and Leadership

The escalation involved both sides in a grinding contest. Prisoners refused uniforms, then declined to leave their cells; guards beat them on trips to shared facilities, restricted towels, and entered the cells to remove prisoners and clean them. Each response altered the conditions of the protest without resolving the demand for special category status. The prisoners sought the right not to wear uniforms, to associate freely, and to receive mail. As the confrontation intensified, the authorities remained unwilling to grant the status they wanted.

Hughes’s position gave the campaign an internal point of leadership: when the prisoners asked how to handle their waste, it was he who proposed smearing it on the walls. Outside Long Kesh, Gerry Adams remained in close contact with Hughes through smuggled communications, even after Adams had been released. The prison struggle was thus connected to broader questions of republican organisation and strategy, though the protests themselves centred on the prisoners’ treatment and political classification.

Meaning and Afterlife

The dirty protest could appear grotesque or absurd, but the book sets that spectacle against the prisoners’ relatively specific demands. Their actions were not presented as an end in themselves: they answered the denial of political status and the constraints imposed on clothing, association, and communication. The campaign made the conflict over criminalisation tangible in uniforms, blankets, chamber pots, soiled walls, hoses, and disinfectant. The authorities could clean a cell, but that did not settle the dispute that had produced the protest.

The protests also belong to a larger struggle over how the conflict would be remembered and described. The book’s epigraph observes that wars are fought again in memory, and its later account describes a peace that did not produce a shared settlement about the past. It notes Gerry Adams’s refusal to acknowledge membership in the Irish Republican Army and Sinn Féin’s efforts to maintain a particular account of the conflict. In that later atmosphere, the prisoners’ refusal to accept the criminal label remains an example of how the classification of violence and imprisonment continued to be contested. The protests did not end the argument over political legitimacy; they gave that argument a stark physical form.