The Irish Republican Army has always had a complex relationship with the English prison system. For an IRA activist, there were always only two options – death or incarceration – and so the stories of the prison experience have long been woven into IRA narratives of protest against British rule.  For the British government, its long battle with the IRA over the status of IRA prisoners has always been about a refusal to allow the IRA to control the political narratives of occupation and resistance. In subversive ways, the IRA has wrenched that control out of British hands and used the incarceration experience as a think tank and laboratory for political violence and resistance. 

In 1969 Sean MacStiofan emerged as Chief of Staff of the newly formed IRA and seized the role of chief strategist.  He had previously been in charge of its intelligence and used his extensive knowledge to move the IRA campaigns from defensive to offensive by drawing assets and ammunition from both sides of the Border.  MacStiofan had spent eight years in Wormword Scrubs prison for his part in a bungled arms raid on British Army barracks in Essex, and used his time in prison productively.  He befriended EOKA guerilla fighters who had been imprisoned for their actions opposing the British occupation of Cyprus and studied their methods of resistance intently. Through these prison conversations, elements of the nationalist anti colonial movements of the 1950s influenced MacStiofan’s refashioning of IRA strategies. Nicknamed ‘Mac the knife’, MacStiofan was a strong believer in the use of high levels of violence to oust the British from Northern Ireland. He is widely believed to have instigated the use of the P.O’Neill signature which was attached to all IRA communiqués and messages to validate their authenticity, thus submerging any IRA internal divisions into one collective bloc in its dealings with the British security forces. 

In 1971, the Northern Irish Minister introduced internment to the penal system in an attempt to quell some of the sectarian violence that was tearing Belfast apart. Partly influenced by MacStiofan’s ambition to demonstrate that the IRA could carry out major bombing campaigns and partly as a reaction to oppressive British military actions on the streets of Belfast, the city had become the site of escalating levels of paramilitary violence. With the introduction of internment, the prison services became the third arm of the British security response to the IRA. Concurrently, many of the IRA’s leaders continued to run the movement from within the prisons, shifting the movement’s decision-making power into the heart of the British system. Brian Keenan, for example, spent fourteen years in prisons but remained an important figure in the IRA during and after his incarceration. At this time, the IRA faced a dilemma. A lack of response to the escalation of British security operations in Northern Ireland would undermine their position as guardians of Irish nationalism; however, outright sectarian warfare on the streets would destroy the movement from within. The IRA had little popular support in the community which was weary with the violence, lack of progress in ousting the British and lack of strategy from the IRA leadership. 

It was in this environment that Long Kesh prison became the site of the IRA’s strategic rebirth. Gerry Adams, Brendan Hughes and other leaders were arrested in 1973 and sent to Long Kesh to serve their sentences. Gerry Adams, writing under the name Brownie, stressed the need to avoid narrowing the republican struggle down to a military campaign in the North. Cage 11, where Adams was housed after sentencing, along with Cage 9 became the centre of a long stream of criticism against the IRA’s leadership. One of Adams’ main concerns was the increasing distance between the IRA and the people the movement claimed to represent. Adams, in a series of articles, outlined new policies and tactics for the IRA which would see the movement become politically active in local issues, suggest actual economic and political policies rather than focus solely on taking an anti-British stance, and form a Northern Command that would reflect the realities of the campaign in the Six Counties. The strategic concepts and political thinking that emerged from Cages 9 and 11 would see the IRA expand its stage of operations, engage in a wide range of political initiatives that were important to the local community and restructure its internal systems in revolutionary ways. Alongside the political, Adams was also responsible for drawing up plans to reshape how the IRA conducted its military operations. Adams’ plan included an Internal Security Unit, secretive four-man cells, and a permanent leadership that would no longer take an active role in IRA operations. Adams, along with other IRA leaders, hoped that these new plans would rescue the IRA from what even the most disinterested observer could see was a movement losing credibility and support from the very people it claimed to represent. 

During Adams imprisonment, Cages 11 and 9 became virtual think-tanks for new IRA strategies and tactics. The IRA could now make the issue of their “prisoners of war” a significant component of the movement’s activities. The experience of arrest and imprisonment added lustre to the image of the paramilitaries as battle-hardened fighters while the emergence of a body of thinking on tactics and strategy from within the prison system gave the IRA a more revolutionary and political aura. The IRA could refresh the narratives of grievance and commitment that had become tarnished by lack of progress and internal feuding. IRA prisoners bought with them into the prisons, an identity and culture that could now be shown to have withstood contact with the British custodial system. Their military command structures and political ideologies were as much a part of the prison experience as attempts by the prison officers to strip them of their identity and merge them into the general prison population. 

These changes were not apparent to the people of Northern Ireland but within the prison system a new confrontation was about to explode onto the scene that would draw in everyone from the inmates to the IRA leadership to the local population. In 1976, the category of Special Prisoner Status, which conveyed on the IRA the label of political prisoner, was revoked. The revocation of Special Prisoner Category was intended to depoliticise the IRA and to strip IRA prisoners of any linkage with political protest or narratives of grievance and resistance to domination. Failure to comply with normal prison rules would now be seen as a criminal act, subject to punishment rather than a political protest. IRA prisoners were no longer “political detainees but regular criminals subject to prison regimes. 

IRA prisoners had been allowed to wear their own clothes, but under the new regime, they were required to wear prison uniform. The uniform was a symbol of compliance and surrender, and it failed to distinguish between social groupings. An IRA prisoner wearing a prison uniform was indistinguishable from a thief, rapist or conman. Foucault has described how hierarchical power structures function by making component pieces visible and in the penal system, a uniform is a visible marker that a prisoner has entered a regime that he recognises as having power over him. Further, the uniform reduces the prisoner to a unit in a long series of units; it inserts him like a cog into the machinery of incarceration. Refusal to wear the uniform was a strong declaration of identity for Republican prisoners, a refusal to recognise the legitimacy of the prison regime.  By refusing to acknowledge or participate in the induction rituals of prison – the exchange of civilian clothes for uniforms, the repetition of the prisoner’s identifying number – the IRA prisoners refused to recognise the legitimacy of the prison regime by refusing to undergo its rituals of entry.

As IRA inmates protested the changes by refusing to wear their uniforms, prison officials reacted by making conditions inside the prisons more difficult.  Inmates began to wear their blankets instead of the uniform, which was the only clothing provided by prison authorities. Conditions escalated when prison authorities refused to allow Blanketmen two towels to use in the showers – one for coverage and one to dry – forcing them to wash in their cells. Any trips to the showers were accompanied by beatings and verbal harassment, which resulted in the Blanketmen refusing to leave their cells. As the situation escalated, the guards filled each encounter with violent beatings or verbal taunts, providing water logged blankets, inedible food and unhygienic replacement chamber pots or mattresses. Each encounter was met with increasing resistance by the Blanketmen, resulting in refusals to leave their cells for showers, slopping out into the corridors, and eventually refusing to wash. The No Wash protests were met with invasive body searches and forced washings. Gaelic became the language of communication for the prisoners, further separating them from the control of the control of prison officers. By March 1978, the Blanketmen protests had evolved into the Dirty Protest in which prisoners refused to wash or slop out and spread excrement along the walls of their cells as a protest. 

The prison experience, however, did not initially fit into Republican strategies. Despite the changes initiated by Adams and the members of Cages 11 and 9, the Blanketmen protest and even the Dirty Protest were not widely known about, nor were the activities sanctioned by the Army Council. The refusal of IRA prisoners to wear the uniform meant that they were unable to have prison visits or to communicate with the outside world. Few people knew about conditions within the prisons. The practice of ‘ghosting’ or moving prisoners without warning from one prison to another, often the day before a family visit, added to the lack of information and increased resentment. As conditions worsened, it was the prisoners themselves who moved into a new phase of the campaign, often in defiance of the IRA leadership’s instructions.  

Along with internment, the prison services had changed the physical structure of the main prison. Long Kesh had been a series of cells in a compound where IRA inmates were segregated but could associate with each other. The newly rebuilt Long Kesh was based on cell incarceration with minimal contact, in an H shape. Prisoners entered the H Block or the Maze, as it became known, without political status or access to an existing Republican leadership inside and could not form a collective mass.  Bobby Sands argued that the prison yard could bleed the IRA of its vitality and momentum; so therefore, the republican movement had to acknowledge the impact and resonance of the prison experience and its role in revitalising or demoralising the movement. 

This was not a new concept to the IRA but what was new was the shift in emphasis from the fighting units on the streets to the cadres inside the prisons; the new approach was being driven by the prisoners themselves, with little to no consultation with the IRA leaders. 

The approach was troubling for the IRA as it challenged their leadership of the republican movement and their understanding of the mood on the street. The creation of an H Block command was virtually a form of coup aimed at the existing leadership and the physical force tradition of the IRA. The emotional impact of the Protests took the IRA by surprise and placed it at odds with the very community that it claimed to be representing. Popular support for the protesters took the form of murals depicting them as martyrs, complete with Blanket shrouds and barbed wire crowns, mass street prayers, and intense media coverage as the Dirty Protests evolved into a series of hunger strikes by the prisoners. Bobby Sands, an IRA inmate and an elected member of government, who starved to death in 1982, galvanised the community and drew internal attention to the conflict. The hunger strikes were planned entirely within the prisons, each new one beginning after the mass funeral and public mourning of the last inmate to die. As the parade of coffins continued to leave the prison, the IRA had no choice to but to recognise that a fundamental shift in ethos has occurred from within the prison. The political had raced past the military as the way that the IRA would have to evolve if it was going to continue as the representatives of Irish nationalism. The intense concentrated violence of bombings, assassinations and kidnaps that was the modus operandi of the IRA was no match for the emotive, transformative nature of the prison protests on the local community and the wider watching world. At times, the IRA leaders were simply bypassed by events inside the prisons and faced vocal opposition from the very people they claimed to be representing. 

The IRA would eventually move to a combined political and military strategy – the ballot box and the Armalite – as if it were part of a natural evolutionary progression. The Protests, including the 1981 Hunger Strikes, would merge into Republican histories as though something novel and different had never taken place. The Protests were drenched in the emotive imagery and religious language that had always worked so well for the on-lookers of the Republican movement and the leadership, once they had made the decision to back the Protests, were quick to capitalise on it. 

From the strategic refashioning of the IRA to the evocative stories of the Dirty Protests and the Hunger strikers, the prison experience is a critical component of the IRA’s evolution.  Prisons have served as incubators for changes to strategy, ideology and tactics at pivotal moments in the movement’s internal debates on whether political means are more effective than violence in achieving an independent, united Ireland. Additionally the IRA have been quick to capitalise on the iconography of martyrdom, sacrifice and suffering of the Blanketmen, Dirty Protest, and the Hunger Strikes during the 1970/80s and use it to revitalise the movement during periods of stagnation or unpopularity by linking it to the 1916 Easter Rising. In the last few years, as former prisoners have begun to write their own books and tell their own stories of the experience of prison and protest, the prison stories have grown more nuanced, evoking questions about how secretive movements like the IRA can control the political storytelling of inmates that may be at odds with the movement’s preferred interpretations of events. If history is anything to go by, the IRA will move quickly to reframe the narratives and subsume them, separating allies and betrayers into easily recognisable categories, moving to use the techniques of information management and public relations to incorporate the latest prison experiences – the telling of the stories – into the wider movement.