Political education within the prisons helped the Provisionals embrace the move from armed struggle to parliamentarianism
But with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, as the foremost republican propagandist Danny Morrison told Reinisch, a “lot of [prisoners] got their eyes opened, and there was a move away from this purist ideological approach to a more pragmatic form of politics”.
When the Maze prison finally closed in 2000, its library had amassed some 20,000 books illustrating how prisoners placed such an emphasis on education. Reinisch argues that “political education was a form of resistance to the criminalisation of the prisoners” and that through education “republicans found a way of showing the outside population that they were not the same as ordinary criminal prisoners”.
Learning Behind Bars is an interesting, informative and scholarly work that demonstrates how prisoners did make a crucial contribution to ending the Troubles. It also reminds us how in the Republic as well as in Northern Ireland the issue of paramilitary prisoners was a constant challenge that sorely tested the authorities.
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