Why is the maze called long kesh

Long Kesh Inside Out. Murtagh, T. Parallel Stories. A selection of clips from the archive exploring the theme from different perspectives. The prison authorities referred to them as compounds but we as prisoners referred to them as cages. View Transcript. Watch the clip of William. We all had designated jobs. You were simply left to your own devices. The canteen hut, it was burned to the ground. Larry and Paddy. View Film. Links to NI Curriculum. Related Content. Download our teacher's notes.

Coming Soon. View More Lessons. Contact Instagram Facebook. Project Supporters and Partners. We use cookies on our website to give you the most relevant experience by remembering your preferences and repeat visits. A dozen or so cages, a hundred men to a cage, cannot be controlled, as the burning down of Long Kesh in October demonstrated. A single man in a cell can be intimidated and made biddable.

This was the official thinking. But the state invariably underestimates the resolve and resourcefulness of politically motivated prisoners. A young republican called Kieran Nugent, the first to be convicted after the cut-off date for political status, was to show exactly how hopelessly naive British reasoning was.

Nugent refused to wear the prison garb and became the first "blanketman". Over the coming months and years hundreds of prisoners went on the blanket. The blanketmen endured beatings and abuse and squalor. They escalated their protest by refusing to slop out: they tipped their urine under the cell doors into the corridor and smeared their walls with their own waste.

The beatings continued. In they took their demands for the right not to wear prison clothing and the right to free association to the ultimate level: hunger strike. I do not know that I have ever seen a film as powerful, beautiful, haunting and individual as Hunger , Steve McQueen's movie about the dirty protest and the hunger strike.

Obviously, having been in Long Kesh, some of the movie's impact on me is particular, though I was never in the H-blocks I was released, suddenly, before the blanket protest began. But as a writer I was, frankly, awed by McQueen's art and vision, by writer Enda Walsh's superb and unusual framing of the story, by Tom McCullagh's stunning production design, and by the authenticity and breathtaking dedication that actor Michael Fassbender brought to the role of Bobby Sands, the leader of the hunger strike and the first to die, on May 5 , by which time, as well as being a convicted IRA prisoner, he was also MP for Fermanagh and South Tyrone.

With Hunger, McQueen and Walsh have thrown away the film-making rulebook. Eschewing explication, they have allowed what is implicit in each scene to emerge unforced and unstressed. The film's producers and backers - Blast! Many, even most, producers would have insisted on the need for backstory.

Who are these prisoners? What have they done? What do they want? Why are they smearing their own shit on the walls? What do they believe in? Are they good guys? Are they bad? What is their story? McQueen and Walsh throw us as viewers in at the deep end, trusting that what we see will eventually make us understand.

Instead they rely on McQueen's powerful visual lyricism. One example: we cut to a man in the prison corridor. The character is unknown to us and does not appear again. He is in rubber boots and protective clothing.

He wears a face mask. He sprays the urine-drenched floor with disinfectant then takes a squeegee and starts to push the piss-disinfectant mix in front of him, cleaning the corridor as he goes. There is no dialogue, we can see no expression on his face. After perhaps 10 or 20 seconds - in movie time that's long - you think the director and editor will cut the scene. How useful is the clip of David for an historian studying prisoner experiences of the H-Blocks in the later years of the conflict?

Explain your answer, using the clip and your contextual knowledge. You were in a bare cell with the 4 walls. No books, no writing materials, no pens, pencils or paper.

So we had to improvise. We had to bring in tobacco — which was always a lifeline for any prisoner. We had to smuggle in the biros out of pens. You had to smuggle in the wheel out of a lighter and the flint and the tube of a pen so that we could use a mechanism with a wheel for striking to light the cotton so that we could light the cigarettes.

We had to smuggle out communiques which were official comms from the jail to the leadership, as well as letters, personal letters.

And all the letters were folded up into a comms which would end up about the size of the tip of your finger. So they were cigarette papers folded again and again. Some people had the roofs and all blacked out with black paint, fluorescent stars and all on them and all, so when you turned the light out at night it was like you had the stars above, you know.

We had our own tvs in our cells. Near the end you were allowed to buy tvs, you were allowed to buy music stations, ghetto blasters, out of the Argos book you were allowed to buy them. And we all purchased our own wee ghetto blasters, we had our wee cd systems and all going. And basically what that was about was that we were seeking to use that period to prepare for the escape, the 83 escape. The prisoners ran, they ran the Blocks effectively, everybody knows that. And they could either admit you or exclude you.

Which is entirely wrong. It was as if it all gathered together and was extruded like a shape being extruded into a piece of plastic, that what we have here in the remnants of the architecture of the H-Blocks is something that in its own strange way signifies the horrific nature of the conflict and the hostility that has existed in our society. It was a seminal period in the history of the troubles, when 10 IRA prisoners died after refusing food.

It was the culmination of a longer campaign over prison conditions and political status, the first man to die was year-old Bobby Sands, the leader of the Provisional IRA in the maze. We walked along the eerily quiet corridor and made our way to cell eight. It was where Bobby Sands spent his final days. Some people crossed the threshold and took a moment; others didn't feel comfortable going inside. One woman told me she felt it was "too personal and too private".

As the guide took us further along the block we saw the cell where Patsy O'Hara had died. At the heart of the tour was a sense of just how depressing it must have been for anyone involved. Whether it be the prisoners, their families or the prison officers. It was a dangerous and frightening place with heightened tensions that threatened to spill over at any point.

In a prison meal lorry was hijacked and 38 republican prisoners escaped. It was the largest breakout from a British prison. During the breakout four prison officers were stabbed, including James Ferris, who died of a heart attack, six others suffered gun shot wounds or stabbings.