Loyalism in Development

ultimately lead to the blanket protest (by republicans and some loyalists), the ‘no- wash’ protest (republicans), and the hunger-strikes of 1980-1981 which would lead to ten Irish republican prisoners including Bobby Sands, starving themselves to death. In the aftermath of the Good Friday/Belfast Agreement, the Maze Prison was closed in July 2000. Just before closing, 80 loyalist and republican prisoners were released under the terms of the Good Friday/Belfast Agreement (and 16 more were transferred to Maghaberry Prison). The H-Blocks at the prison had once housed In 1968 prior to the conflict beginning, the prison population in Northern Ireland was only 727; but by 1972 it was 1,174 and by 1979 3,000 people were in jail, mostly as a result of their involvement as part of either loyalist or republican paramilitary groups (see Dwyer, 2007, p.783). 1978/1979 was when the prison population was at its peak (Butler, 2016). Indeed, over the course of the ‘Troubles’, political prisoners were approximately two-thirds of the total prison population in Northern Ireland (McEvoy, 2001). The number of prison staff also grew exponentially to cater with the huge increase in prisoners – from 292 prison staff in 1969 to 2,184 in 1976 (McEvoy; 2001; Butler, 2016). Long-term committals in terms of prisoners were only 2% in the late 1960s, but by 1977 long-term committals had risen to 29%. Indeed, by 1987 ‘lifers’ accounted for 28% of all sentenced committals and 40% of those imprisoned for political reasons (Butler, 2016). It is interesting to note that at the end of 1968 there were only 11 ‘lifers’ in prison in Northern Ireland, but ten years later in 1978 there were 221; by March 1987 there were 449 loyalist and republican ‘lifers’ (Green, 1998). Yet there is no agreed upon figure of how many paramilitary or politically motivated prisoners there were in Northern Ireland during the conflict. Estimates suggest there were 25,000 republicans and loyalists incarcerated for a politically motivated offence (McAuley et al., 2009; Shirlow, 2018), with up to one-third of these prisoners being members of loyalist organisations (McAuley et al., 2009). The ‘From Prison to Peace’ resource estimates that between 18,000 republicans and between 5,000-10,000 loyalists went through the prison system between 1969 and 1998 (CFNI, 2011). No rationale is provided for the less accurate figure given for loyalists, and there is also no available breakdown in figures as to how many of these loyalist prisoners were affiliated either to the UDA/UFF or the UVF/RHC (nor to how many prisoners were incarcerated per organisation per year). It is estimated that alongside those imprisoned, there were between 100,000- 200,000 family members of politically motivated prisoners – indicating that a sizeable minority of the population were directly impacted upon by the experience of incarceration. more than 1,700 prisoners at any one time. Numbers of prisoners during the conflict

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