Conclusion: An Irish Century of Camps

With Learning behind Bars, I provide the first comparative analysis of Irish republican prisoners on both sides of the Irish border and a long-term examination of Irish republican prisoners over three decades of the Northern Ireland conflict. The book, moreover, places the prisoners’ minds at the centre of research, while the literature over the past three decades since the end of the high-profile hunger strikes has overwhelmingly focused on the prisoners’ bodies. The prisoners’ minds developed in the interplay of political education and resistance. Depending on the prison regime, the republicans sometimes had unrestricted access to education and free association,