The internment period during the Northern Ireland conflict

The internment period during the Northern Ireland conflict was marked by detention without charge, but its significance extended beyond the people held. It became a test of whether republican volunteers were to be treated as political prisoners or as criminals. When internment ended, that dispute moved from detention policy into the prison system, where uniforms, isolation and denied political status provoked escalating resistance.

Detention and the security campaign

The period’s legacy appears in the account of the internment raids and their aftermath. After those raids, the British Army and the Royal Ulster Constabulary Special Branch intensified efforts to cultivate sources inside both loyalist and republican paramilitary groups. In 1972, Brendan Hughes, then a commander in the IRA’s D Company, suspected that one of his volunteers, Seamus Wright, might be an informant. Wright had been arrested earlier that year and, afterward, would disappear from Belfast from time to time.

Hughes investigated through Wright’s wife, Kathleen, asking her to travel to England and try to bring her husband home. She returned from Birmingham with confirmation that Wright had been turned by the British and was accompanied by a handler. Wright wanted to escape his handlers but feared execution if he returned. Hughes guaranteed his safety, hoping to learn how British intelligence recruited double agents. The episode shows a security struggle that continued after the raids: detention and recruitment were part of a wider contest over control of information and loyalty.

The end of internment and the loss of status

Toward the end of 1975, internment officially ended. Suspects would now be charged and prosecuted as ordinary criminals rather than held indefinitely as political prisoners. The change was not merely a matter of terminology. For the IRA, its volunteers were soldiers in a war; criminal classification denied the political legitimacy on which, in their view, their armed struggle rested.

Internment itself had allowed detainees to wear their own clothes and associate freely with paramilitary colleagues, even as they could be confined for years without charge or trial. The replacement regime imposed a different kind of control: those convicted of paramilitary activity were held in individual cells in the H Blocks at Long Kesh, wore prison uniforms, and were treated under the same rules as ordinary offenders. The ending of internment thus changed the form of confinement without resolving the argument about what the prisoners were.

Prison protest and escalation

In autumn 1976, republican prisoners refused to wear prison-issued clothes, wrapping themselves in blankets in protest. They sought Special Category Status, which would effectively recognise them as political prisoners, but the authorities refused. The dispute over status became a daily confrontation over clothing, association and communication. Guards beat prisoners on trips to shower or use the toilet and restricted their use of towels; prisoners then refused to leave their cells. Chamber pots were emptied by guards, but inmates tipped them so that urine ran beneath the doors and into the corridors. The protest became a dirty protest, and Hughes, the prisoners’ commanding officer, advised them to smear their faeces on the walls.

The resulting cells, coated in waste and infested with maggots, were repeatedly hosed and disinfected by prison staff. Moving a prisoner to a clean cell did not end the protest: the cycle began again. The bodily degradation was deliberate resistance to institutional rules, but it also intensified the confrontation. Prisoners wanted to avoid uniforms, associate with one another and receive mail; each escalation appeared only to harden the authorities’ refusal.

The policy’s political aftermath

By the time Margaret Thatcher took office, several hundred men were participating in the dirty protest. Prison officers were being targeted and killed by the Provos, yet the British government continued to reject political status. Roy Mason had described IRA prisoners as thugs and gangsters when internment and Special Category Status were ended in 1976. Thatcher maintained that there was no political murder, bombing or violence and that there would be no political status. Her position gave the earlier change in detention policy a lasting political consequence: the dispute no longer concerned only who could be held without trial, but whether the state would recognise republican prisoners’ claim to a political identity.

In autumn 1980, Hughes escalated the protest by announcing a hunger strike and asking for volunteers. A hundred or more prisoners came forward; seven were selected, with Hughes leading them. His decision to join the strike reflected his stated refusal to ask a subordinate to undertake what he would not do himself. The hunger strike grew out of the unresolved status conflict that followed internment’s end. In that sense, the period’s conclusion was not a clean break: the system of detention changed, but the struggle over political recognition continued in new and increasingly dangerous forms.