New life as a wind farm is one alternative suggestion to Sinn Féin's dream of a museum in the old Maze prison, writes Fionnuala O'Connor
The republicans Gerry Adams leads want to preserve their own Maze history: its origins in second World War Nissen huts that housed "compounds" of internees at Long Kesh, which many called it to the end; the blanket and dirty protests as republicans fought to win back the status and privileges of political prisoners first granted, then withdrawn; the 1981 hunger strike.
Many think this is tiresome propaganda. There's more than enough reason to flinch from Maze history, old and more recent: men wrapped in blankets with matted long hair, the gruesomeness of prisoners smearing their own excrement to cover cell walls, the horror of hunger strikes, death-bed scenes relayed in detail by agonised relatives, the upsurge in IRA violence and bitterness between Protestants and Catholics that went with the strike, and much else.
The IRA killed 23 warders. Loyalists killed other loyalists inside the jail: INLA prisoners shot loyalist leader Billy Wright dead, sparking a round of murderous retaliation on the streets.
For many, history is painful enough to live with: when prison issues are probed, people turn away. Which is what Sinn Féin, with their version of the Maze wrapped up, would like to do now that dissident republicans are "the shit-spreaders", as one veteran observer puts it.
This past while, two unrelated prison issues have demanded attention: the question of asylum-seekers and other immigrants held in a northern jail, unlike the practice in Britain or the Republic, and dissident republicanism's latest bid for significance, fighting for notice against daily reports from the Dublin trial of the alleged leader of the "Real IRA".
When the Maze emptied three years ago and the custom-built Maghaberry a few miles up the road took over as the North's biggest prison, the new jail became part of the new deal. The 447 early releases helped bring overall prisoner numbers down to 1,000 in the year 2000 from a Troubles peak of almost 3,000. Official statistics note that "the majority of prisoners today are convicted of offences not related to terrorism".
But convictions for loyalist killings and dissident republican bombings have boosted paramilitary numbers and with them, the traditional jail tensions.
Republicans and loyalists demand separate accommodation. The prison authorities insist that there will be no return to the prisoner-of-war arrangements in the Maze, in which paramilitary discipline ruled rather than the governor. With higher numbers, about 100 prisoners previously in one-man cells have been doubled up. But the prisons minister and officials admit that "no segregation" doesn't mean putting opposing paramilitaries into cells together.
Dissident republicans by contrast claim prison officers are forcing them into proximity to loyalists. Inside a fortnight, they have gone from a rooftop protest to breaking sinks and toilets in cells. "We gave them poes," says an official dourly: excrement-spreading began last week. Sinn Féin, with only a handful of IRA prisoners but their Maze legacy to guard, have said as little as possible. "Can't say they're agin it," said one observer semi-sympathetically, "but don't want to help the publicity".
Maghaberry currently holds 540 inmates: men and women convicted or on remand for non-paramilitary type crime, life-sentence prisoners, all of the North's women prisoners and, since 2001, all those detained by the British Home Office's Immigration Service for questioning and possible deportation. "A very complicated population," the prison's website calls it.
So this week, with the temperature in the high 20s, contractors were brought in to hose excrement off walls. While 94 of 854 Maghaberry warders called in sick and the bitter jail disputes of the past cast long shadows, while former IRA hunger-striker Marian Price was claiming that some excrement-smearers were hosed down and beaten, elsewhere in Maghaberry there were seven Nigerians, eight Chinese, three Algerians and one Ghanaian, none of them charged with any offence.
The number of "immigration detainees" changes from week to week, day to day. A few are released after many months with no further penalty, and no apology. This week's 10 men and nine women is the largest ever total, the women in particular above the norm. Often there are no more than one or two.
Men live in separate accommodation in a male prisoners' block but the women are in cells adjacent to women prisoners.
Prison officials complain that if they provided separate accommodation when there are fewer women they would be accused of cruelty and "keeping them in isolation". The tacit admission is that all females in jail are held together for convenience and economy, and perhaps also because they won't threaten or violently abuse each other.
Maghaberry has enough to worry about without being asked to imprison bewildered and often distressed foreigners.