The ex-hunger striker making fashion items from a H-Block blanket

The market for wall calendars is pretty crowded. If your life can be edified with fresh monthly images of fluffy kittens, laughing nuns or a pouty Poldark on the kitchen wall, look no further.

Laurence McKeown's calendar, entitled We Wore the Blanket, shrugs at calendar convention. It runs for 19 months from March 2018 to September 2019 and no-one is laughing. Each of the 19 weathered faces gazes at the camera, reflective, inscrutable, above a minimal caption. Each is dressed in garments made from, or trimmed with, the same houndstooth fabric – the Blanket of the title.

Mr April 2018, Seamus Kelly, hands in pockets, poses in a bow tie and waistcoat in that distinctive fabric: "Born 1953. Interned 1971-1972. Interned 1973-1974. Imprisoned 1974-1975. Imprisoned 1977-1984". Sinead Moore wears a red-lined grey coat, with the contrasting houndstooth on lapels and pockets: "Born 1958. Imprisoned 1977-1984".

McKeown himself, representing December 2018, wears an elegant grey jacket trimmed with the blanket fabric: “Born 1956. Imprisoned 1976-1992”.

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The IRA was very "moralistic", McKeown insists. "But when there is a war on, terrible things happen . . ."

Now a playwright and film-maker with a doctorate – his thesis was Unrepentant Fenian Bastards – from Queen's University, he has come a long way from the 16-year-old who ran off to join the IRA. Anyone looking for apologies for IRA actions will be disappointed. "There were people in the IRA who did terrible things as individuals, who committed domestic violence. . . Some were executed for using IRA weapons for carrying out robberies." The IRA was very "moralistic", he insists. "But when there is a war on, terrible things happen . . .".

It reveals something of his journey that his last play, Green and Blue, based on Garda and RUC archives and on interviews with both sides, was performed in the PSNI's country club in the presence of the Chief Constable.

The symbolism of the blanket is powerful for those of an age to recall the black and white images of prison cells smeared with excrement, of cold, indignity, straggly beards and long hair, skeletal bodies, agony, starvation and death. All brought closer to home by the sense of tragedy, menace and foreboding as funeral corteges wound their way through small Irish towns festooned with black flags.

A blanket usually represents comfort, says McKeown. “As a newborn, you’re wrapped in a blanket and when an emergency ambulance comes, you’re wrapped in a blanket . . . That very comforting thing had become a symbol of protest, resistance and associated with that very hard time. I do like the idea of moving forward – not of forgetting, I remember very clearly the past – but I am not a victim of it, I am not captive to it.”

And so he conceived the idea of moving the blanket out of that harrowing mindset. Some years ago, an original Maze blanket was “obtained” during the part-demolition of the compound. “I kept it in the attic but it was meaningless sitting there so I thought of this – of transforming it into something of the present day, something you’d be very happy to wear.”

He asked a professional dressmaker to fashion it into a bow tie, a tie, a waistcoat, a Crombie coat and several scarves. She also altered a dress jacket of his to include elements of the blanket. "Then I wanted to take elegant photographs of people who were proud of the contribution they had made and who today 'wear the blanket', and to set them amidst nature – grass, flowers, trees – in contrast to prison cells and steel doors . . . In Long Kesh now, there are trees growing up through the concrete which obviously makes it a very powerful statement of man-made things suppressed . . ."

The thread seen on some of the garments is the blanket hem stitching, which prisoners threaded to religious medals then tied around objects such as cigarettes and letters to propel them from cell to cell. “So the blanket symbolised not just the protest, but the material.”

The project, begun on the 40th anniversary of the commencement of the blanket protest, evolved into the unconventional calendar, beginning with the anniversary of the "criminalisation" policy, encompassing the hunger strikes and resulting deaths, the 1983 mass escape and the end of the IRA campaign in July 2005, announced by Seanna Walsh. He is the face of July 2018: "Born 1956. Imprisoned 1973-1976. Imprisoned 1976-1984. Imprisoned 1988-1998".

It is just over 40 years since another summer's night when a 20-year-old Laurence McKeown lay in a hedge with a "slow" rifle waiting to ambush a police Land Rover. Nobody died that night though it wasn't for want of trying. The attack would lead to his conviction and 16 years imprisonment for attempted murder among other offences.

The year 1976 was significant for the men who ended up in Long Kesh, rechristened HMP Maze. The British government withdrew prisoners’ Special Category Status – which had included, crucially, the right to wear their own clothes. New inmates convicted of “scheduled terrorist offences”, entered the newly built H-Blocks as common criminals rather than political prisoners.

McKeown's foreword in the calendar explains what happened next: "On 14th September 1976, Kieran Nugent, aged 18, became the first Irish republican prison to be sentenced under the newly introduced British government policy of 'criminalisation'. Kieran was already no stranger to prison. Aged 16, he had spent 5 months on remand in the Crumlin Road Prison and was 17 when interned without trial in Long Kesh for 9 months.

“When taken to the H-Blocks, Kieran was stripped and ordered to wear the prison uniform. He refused. ‘You’ll have to nail it to my back,’ he said. He was beaten and thrown naked into a cell where he wrapped himself in a blanket. Thus began the ‘Blanket Protest’.”

McKeown was among them. In 1978, he says, there was “a noticeable change, a deliberate attempt to break us and people were coming on the protest badly beaten”. This led to the no-wash protest and to prisoners defecating in their cells and throwing the excrement out the window. “They would throw it back in. . .” Prisoners began to smear it on the walls and every couple of weeks, they were moved around to facilitate cell cleaning.

He didn't wash for three years – "until the day after Bobby Sands started the hunger strike". He was able to shave the "straggly" beard and shower with the white prison-issue "buttermilk" soap. It was only when he used a popular scented variety sent in a family food parcel, that his skin reacted. It burned red, as if from an allergy. "Just showed which was the more natural product," he says cheerfully.

By the time he joined the hunger strike in June 1981, four hunger strikers had died. By his 69th day, six more had starved to death and he was down to seven stone. At his court sentencing years before, his mother Margaret, a quiet woman and devout Catholic opposed to his IRA membership – “though she never said it”, he says – had told the judge: “He is my son. I love him”.

Now as he lay dying and power of attorney was passed to her, it was she who had the burden of deciding to intervene. When he protested that he must be allowed to die, he says, "She said to me: 'You know what you have to do, and I know what I have to do'". Next day, when he fell unconscious, she gave instructions that he be fed intravenously. He accepted his fate; he was too exhausted to agitate or care. But he is still trying to track down Paul Lennon, a medical orderly in the prison, who may well have saved his life by asking the doctor to authorise a family visit at that crucial point.

Margaret died from a brain haemorrhage a couple of years later, at just 61. “It took its toll on her,” he says now. His father died five years later of a heart attack, aged 59.

He served another 11 years in the Maze and speaks almost affectionately about them. For several years, he was in charge of republican-prisoner education, started a prison magazine and took an Open University degree in sociology.

The upshot of those last years in prison is that he is surprisingly rounded in his view of the whole experience. “I have other memories of this space because of the years afterwards . . . What I discovered working with Coiste na n-Iarchimí [an umbrella organisation of republican ex-prisoner groups] – and this would go against all academic studies – was that the people who got out of jail during or immediately after the protests, all they remember is brutality . . . But we transformed that place into poetry workshops and discussions and meetings and having craic . . . We ended up on first-name terms with prison guards and having conversations about our children’s education.” And they ended up wearing their own clothes.

A united Ireland will come eventually, McKeown says – when the people in the south get over their "phenomenal ignorance" of the situation

While considering how to mark the 40th anniversary, McKeown thought of Kieran Nugent, the IRA’s first “blanket man”, nicknamed “Header”, “an ordinary boy from the Falls Road”. He was only 15 when a loyalist opened fire from a car, shooting him eight times in the upper body and killing his friend. By 16 he was interned and barely 18 when he became the first blanket man. “The unfortunate thing is that he was released prior to the first hunger strike and in that period was doing the publicity – which was probably fairly traumatic for him. He’d had no time to adjust and settle down and not much thought was given to what was going on with him. Probably nobody understood that he needed that support . . .”

Reckless with his own life and safety, Kieran Nugent, the first blanket man was dead by 42. In a Sunday Tribune interview about ex-prisoners some years ago, one ex-IRA prisoner, Brendan Hughes, said: "They called him a 'river rat' because he spent his last days drinking by the river in Poleglass".

Laurence McKeown once said if he hadn't been imprisoned, he would probably be dead. Despite problems with his eyes and stomach, he seems well and happy as he heads off to Saturday theatre matinee in Belfast.

He is close to his daughters from a previous relationship; one is at Queen's studying film-making, the other has been accepted to NUI Galway to do politics and human rights. "They weren't baptised. They were reared in no religion, just to be open-minded and questioning, and to respect people regardless of colour or religion or anything else."

A united Ireland will come eventually, he says – when the people in the south get over their "phenomenal ignorance" of the situation. Belfast is "blossoming" and the DUP of all people are talking in relaxed fashion about the Pope including the North in his trip.

“There will always be ups and downs but it will never go back – because we’re now aware of the past, that’s why there should be more discussion, so we learn from it. The 12th [Orange Order] parades this year were the quietest ever. Unionists said at the start of the process, ‘sure the republicans will just go back to what they’ve always done’, which is just nonsense. It ignores the passing of time, the changes in demographics and consciousness that have been brought about . . .”

And what about Brexit? “There is going to be no such thing as a frictionless Border, no matter what spin they put on it. There’s going to be issues around that. . . And if there really was a really hard Border, with the British army, that would be problematic now.”