Éire-Ireland

Weinstein, Laura.
The Significance of the Armagh Dirty Protest
Éire-Ireland - Volume 41:3&4, Fómhar/Geimhreadh / Fall/Winter 2006, pp. 11-41

Irish-American Cultural Institute

Laura Weinstein - The Significance of the Armagh Dirty Protest - Éire-Ireland 41:3 Éire-Ireland 41.3&4 (2007) 11-41 Muse Search Journals This Journal Contents The Significance of the Armagh Dirty Protest Laura Weinstein Beginning in february 1980, a group of female inmates held in Armagh Women's Prison decided that they preferred to live in absolute filth rather than accept prison conditions as dictated to them by the officers. These women, mostly in their early twenties, refused to wash or use toilets. They refused to change into clean clothes or to accept clean bedsheets from the prison staff. Rather than using the toilets of the jail, the women smeared their own excrement and menstrual blood on their cell walls when their chamber pots overflowed. As punishment for this action, the women were locked in their waste-encrusted cells for twenty-three hours every day. They were permitted an hour for exercise daily. Each day the women hoped that there would be rain to wash off some of the dirt from their bodies. For thirteen months the young women endured these miserable conditions, "with only their belief in the cause to sustain them." The cause was the Irish republican movement, grounded in the belief that Britain's authority over the six counties of Northern Ireland was unjust. The Armagh women, and the republican men in Long Kesh, who had been on their "dirty protest" since 1978, were mostly in jail for offenses committed on behalf of the Irish...