10. The Prisoners’ Struggle¶
Core Argument¶
Here, the chapter traces the evolution of the prison struggle in the North of Ireland from 1976 to the mid-1980s, arguing that the British state’s criminalisation policy—the revocation of special category status won in 1971—provoked a radicalisation from below that the leadership of the Provisional movement ultimately failed to harness. The narrative thrust is that the prisoners themselves, not the external republican leadership, drove the resistance through the blanket and dirty protests, culminating in the 1980 and 1981 hunger strikes. The chapter details the five demands (own clothes, abstention from penal labour, free association, normal visits and parcels, restoration of remission) and presents the British government’s refusal to concede as a calculated act of cruelty, particularly under Margaret Thatcher, who is quoted stating “Crime is crime is crime, it is not political.”
The key evidence marshalled includes the sequence of deaths—ten prisoners, beginning with Bobby Sands on 5 May 1981 after sixty-six days—and the mass mobilisations that followed: 100,000 at Sands’ funeral, riots across the North and in Dublin, and the election of Sands to Westminster. The chapter argues that this mass movement, organised through the National H-Block/Armagh Committee and drawing in Sinn Féin, the IRSP, People’s Democracy, and trade unionists, represented a promising base for revolutionary politics. However, it polemicises sharply against the Provisional leadership’s “Armalite and ballot box” tactic, which it characterises as an “uncomfortable compromise” that papered over cracks and subordinated the mass movement to the armed struggle. The text is critical of Sinn Féin’s initial aloofness from the H-Block campaign and its later insistence on political domination of any mass group, which prevented a sustained, organised opposition to later British tactics such as the supergrass system.
The chapter draws on the historical context of the 1970s prison protests and the 1971 hunger strike that won special category status. It also situates the hunger strike’s aftermath within the broader trajectory of British counter-insurgency: the shoot-to-kill policy, the Stalker affair, the Gibraltar assassinations, and the Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1985, which the text presents as a direct response to the fear that Sinn Féin would overtake the SDLP. The polemic is directed not only at British imperialism and Thatcher’s “obstinate stupidity” but also at the Provisional leadership’s failure to break with parliamentarianism and its inability to offer a genuine workers’ democracy. The chapter concludes by endorsing the 1986 decision to drop abstentionism in Dáil Éireann as tactically correct, while condemning the resulting split and the continued reliance on armed struggle as a substitute for mass revolutionary politics.