Fifty years since the Blanket Protest began

Posted by Jim on September 10, 2026

Fifty years ago on Monday, a young republican prisoner entered the newly built H-Blocks of Long Kesh and refused to accept the British government’s attempt to redefine him as a common criminal.

On September 14, 1976, Kieran Nugent became the first prisoner sentenced under the new regime to refuse prison clothing. He was stripped, beaten and put into a cell, where he wrapped himself in a blanket rather than put on the uniform. The act marked the beginning of the Blanket Protest, a prison struggle that would continue for almost five years and culminate in the 1981 hunger strike.

The protest was not simply about clothing. At its heart was the refusal by republican prisoners to accept criminalisation.

In March 1976, British Direct Ruler Merlyn Rees ended Special Category Status for people convicted after March 1 of offences connected to the armed struggle. Prisoners sentenced under the new system were to be treated as ordinary criminals, required to wear prison uniforms and undertake prison work. The purpose was clear: to deny the political nature of the conflict and present the British state as dealing merely with criminals.

The H-Blocks were purpose-built for that new regime. Unlike the compounds of Long Kesh, where prisoners had lived collectively, the new prison placed men in individual cells inside a heavily fortified complex. The architecture reflected the policy: isolation, discipline and the attempt to impose an ordinary criminal regime on men who regarded themselves as political prisoners engaged in a national struggle.

Nugent’s response was immediate and uncompromising. He would not wear the uniform.

He was followed onto the blanket by increasing numbers of republican prisoners. By Christmas 1976 more than 40 were refusing prison clothing, and the numbers continued to grow.

The blanket became a symbol of resistance.

The prisoners were effectively stripped of everything that distinguished them from ordinary prisoners, and they responded by refusing to cooperate with the regime. Their protest meant living naked except for the blankets, enduring punishment and isolation while refusing to concede the principle that they were criminals rather than political prisoners engaged in a national struggle.

The British government had believed that removing political status would remove the political problem. Instead, the prisons became another front in the conflict.

The struggle intensified in 1978 when the prisoners’ refusal to accept the prison regime developed into the no-wash or dirty protest. Prisoners refusing to leave their cells to wash were subjected to beatings and other punishment. Their chamber pots were emptied back into their cells, leading prisoners to smear their excrement on the walls in an attempt to prevent it being thrown back at them. By then hundreds of republican prisoners were involved.

The conditions were deliberately degrading, but the prisoners refused to surrender.

Their demands eventually crystallised around five basic rights: to wear their own clothes, to refuse prison work, to receive visits and parcels, to associate freely and have access to educational and recreational facilities, and to have restoration of remission lost through the protest.

Outside the prison, families and activists increasingly organised around the prisoners’ demands. The struggle that had begun with one young man’s refusal to put on a uniform was becoming a wider political campaign.

Yet the British government remained determined to maintain criminalisation.

That determination had consequences far beyond the prison walls. The protest exposed the fundamental political question behind the British government’s policy: whether the conflict in the north was to be treated as a criminal matter or recognised as a political and national struggle.

There was never any doubt. The prisoners were not seeking special treatment. They were refusing to accept the legitimacy of a British attempt to criminalise the republican struggle.

The Blanket Protest therefore became about something much larger than prison conditions. It was a confrontation over identity, political status and the authority of the British state.

The protest also changed the republican movement itself. The campaign gradually drew greater political participation outside the prisons and helped create the conditions in which the prisoners’ struggle could become a mass political issue.

By 1980, after years on the blanket and the dirty protest, the prisoners concluded that another escalation was necessary.

On October 27, 1980, seven republican prisoners began a hunger strike. The action was suspended in December after the British government appeared to offer a basis for resolving the dispute, but the prisoners subsequently concluded that the promises had not delivered the political status they sought.

The following year brought the final and most devastating stage of the struggle.

The 1981 hunger strike saw ten republican prisoners die rather than accept criminalisation. Bobby Sands was elected to the Westminster parliament during the strike, while the electoral successes of the Anti H-Block campaign demonstrated that the prisoners’ struggle had become a major political force outside the prison.

The British government eventually conceded many of the practical elements for which the prisoners had fought, including the right to wear their own clothes, free association and exemption from prison work.

But by then the political consequences of the prison struggle could not be reversed.

The Blanket Protest had begun on September 14, 1976 with one prisoner refusing a uniform.

It became a five-year confrontation involving hundreds of prisoners, their families and a growing movement outside the prison walls. It passed from the blanket to the dirty protest, from the dirty protest to hunger strike, and from the H-Blocks into the political life of Ireland.

Fifty years later, the significance of that first act of defiance remains.

The Blanket Protest remains one of the defining chapters in the history of Irish republican resistance to British rule, in which prisoners endured years of punishment and degradation, rather than accept the British state’s claim that the republican struggle is a crime.