Blanket protest
The Blanket Protest was part of a campaign by members of the Provisional Irish Republican Army and Irish National Liberation Army imprisoned in Maze Prison to regain their political prisoner status.
In 1976, then Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, Merlyn Rees, announced the gradual dismantling of the privileges associated with political prisoner status . Among other things, this dismantling stipulated that inmates who had been convicted of terrorist activities would in future have to wear prison uniforms like ordinary criminals and also take part in labor services within the prison. The inmates reacted to the threatened loss of these privileges by refusing to wear the mandatory prison uniforms and instead wrapping themselves in the blankets of their beds or lying naked on the floor of their cells.
The background to this measure was that in 1976 the H blocks were overcrowded and the British Labor government under Wilson wanted to change this status. When Kieran Nugent , a 19-year-old Republican, was imprisoned in September 1976, he was supposed to be the first to change the special status category . He steadfastly refused to put on the prison uniform, and his reply was passed on as follows: "They'd have to nail it to my back" (German: "They would have to nail them [= these clothes] to my back"). When he took this stance it was the beginning of the Blanket Protest . He then moved naked and covered himself with the blankets provided.
Detention conditions were made even worse when inmates refused to leave their cells and go to the washrooms because of the regular abuse of guards on the way there. As a result, the prison inmates were transferred to cells with no toilets or washing facilities, where they were prevented from having any opportunity to dispose of their excrement , so that the only solution that was often left was smearing it on the walls of their cells.
This form of protest soon became known as the dirty protest , but, like the blanket protest, did not lead to the success desired by the prisoners. The protest then continued with the two Irish hunger strikes in 1980 and 1981. The 1981 hunger strike , which killed 10 men, including Bobby Sands , was successful in that the essential requirement to wear civilian clothes was enforced.
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b Melanie McFadyean: The legacy of the hunger strikes on The Guardian of March 4, 2006 . Retrieved December 13, 2010
- ↑ The legacy of the hunger strikes on Irish National Causus on www.irishnationalcausus ( Memento of the original from October 5, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. . Retrieved December 15, 2010
