The blanket protest

The blanket protest was a republican prisoners’ refusal to wear prison-issued uniforms at Long Kesh, and a struggle over whether their actions would be treated as ordinary crime or as part of a political war. Beginning in the autumn of 1976, the protest made the prisoners’ bodies and clothing the means through which they challenged the state’s classification of them. Its escalation into the no-wash and dirty protests exposed the brutal conditions produced by that conflict, while its slogans preserved the prisoners’ claim that Ireland’s political struggle could not be reduced to criminality.

Prisoners, uniforms, and political status

The circumstances that preceded the protest were shaped by the end of internment. Until late 1975, suspects could be detained indefinitely without charge or trial; despite the harshness of that system, interned men generally wore their own clothes and could associate with paramilitary colleagues. The change to prosecution and conviction as ordinary criminals therefore carried more than a practical consequence. For republicans, being labelled criminals denied the political meaning they attached to taking up arms and to the conflict itself.

Under the new arrangements, convicted paramilitary prisoners were held in individual cells in the H Blocks at Long Kesh. The prison supplied uniforms, and an IRA volunteer and a common thief were made to wear the same clothes. This imposed sameness was precisely what the prisoners contested: the uniform was not merely an item of clothing, but a visible sign that the authorities’ criminal classification would govern their identity inside prison. The protest answered that classification with a refusal to dress as instructed.

The book connects this action to an earlier episode of republican imprisonment: the sisters Dolours Price and Marian Price had also wrapped themselves in blankets after their arrest in London. That parallel makes the blanket a recurring alternative to the uniform, rather than a symbol confined to the men at Long Kesh. In both settings, the prisoners’ clothing—or refusal of clothing—made their rejection of the imposed status physically legible.

From refusal to the dirty protest

In autumn 1976, republican prisoners began the blanket protest by refusing the clothes issued by the prison and wrapping themselves naked in blankets. Their demand was for special category status, which would effectively recognise them as prisoners of war. The authorities refused. The initial dispute over clothing thus hardened into a daily confrontation over recognition, discipline, and control within the prison.

At first, the protesters still left their cells to shower and use the toilet. Guards sometimes beat them on these trips and restricted their use of towels to cover and dry themselves. The prisoners responded by refusing to leave their cells at all. This changed the conditions of protest: the guards now had to collect and empty chamber pots, and the prisoners began tipping them so that urine ran beneath the cell doors and into the corridor. The refusal to wear uniforms had become a no-wash protest, then a dirty protest.

The escalation did not end with the urine in the corridors. Faced with the problem of what to do with solid waste, the prisoners’ commanding officer inside the prison, Brendan Hughes, suggested daubing it on the walls. The prisoners smeared excrement across their cells, making the protest an assault on the clean, controlled environment the prison was meant to maintain. The book describes guards hauling the scrawny men from the encrusted cells and hosing them down while other staff cleaned with water and disinfectant. Moving a protester into a fresh cell did not resolve the confrontation: the next metabolic cycle gave him the means to defile it again. The protest’s most shocking methods were therefore not separate from the institutional conflict; they were its consequence and its continuation.

The protest’s language and stakes

A ditty sung by the protesters condensed their objection to the prison’s attempt to define them. Its opening rejected the convict’s uniform and meek service of a sentence; its closing linked that refusal to the claim that Britain had branded Ireland’s fight as a crime. The song’s language made the prison uniform part of a larger political argument: wearing it would appear to accept the state’s account of what the prisoners were and why they were imprisoned.

The requested special category status gave that argument a concrete institutional aim. It would, in effect, place the prisoners in the category of prisoners of war rather than ordinary criminals. The authorities’ refusal meant that the dispute over political identity remained unresolved, while the prison’s disciplinary routines and the prisoners’ escalating resistance made that unresolved question materially present in every cell. The book does not describe the blanket protest as securing the status the prisoners sought; its account instead follows the confrontation as it intensifies.

Place in the wider account

The blanket protest is presented as part of a continuing conflict over how republican prisoners would be named, treated, and remembered. The prisoners’ rejection of uniforms followed the end of internment and preceded later prison protest and hunger-strike episodes in the book. That sequence places the protest within a longer struggle around imprisonment, without making the blanket protest itself synonymous with the hunger strikes that followed.

Its force lies in the contrast between the political claim and the means available to make it. The prisoners could not compel the authorities to grant special status, but they could refuse the clothes that expressed the authorities’ decision, and they could turn the cell into a site of resistance. The progression from blankets to the no-wash and dirty protests reveals the cost of that refusal: as the state maintained its classification, resistance became increasingly bound to the prisoners’ exposed and degraded bodies. In this way, the protest gives physical form to the book’s broader account of a conflict fought not only on the battlefield but also through competing accounts of its meaning.