Word: prison
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...known as the H-Blocks, Long Kesh, the Cages, Thatcher's Breakers Yard. Northern Ireland's notorious Maze prison drew more grim nicknames - and housed more paramilitary prisoners - than any other jail in Western Europe. Its last inmates were released under the terms of the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, which laid the foundation for an end to sectarian violence in the British province. And after bulldozers razed most of the former prison buildings last year, the site where Bobby Sands and nine other Republican militants died in a hunger strike in 1981 became little more than an abandoned relic...
...Protestants in Northern Ireland's majority Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) view the hunger strikers as little more than convicted terrorists set on suicide, Catholic republicans allied to the DUP's power-sharing partners, Sinn Fein, regard Sands as an iconic political hero. Given the politically loaded history of the prison, agreeing on what the new Maze should symbolize has proved as tricky as an escape from Alcatraz...
...predominantly Catholic games like Gaelic football and hurling, received cross-party support at first, but is now likely to be scrapped for financial reasons. That leaves the most controversial proposal still on the table: an International Center for Conflict Transformation (ICCT) to be partly housed inside the remaining prison hospital, where Sands and other hunger strikers died. The project's backers say the ICCT, with conference suites and an interpretive center, could act as a peace-making laboratory for visitors from conflict-ridden nations...
...Dessie Waterworth, a former prison officer, the proposed ICCT represents little more than a shrine to the IRA. After working in the Maze during the hunger strikes and the preceding 'dirty protests', where inmates smeared excrement on their cell walls, Waterworth has less rosy memories of the place. He has no desire to see the remaining prison buildings salvaged...
...Waterworth has been the target of more than 30 death threats from loyalist and republican paramilitary groups and says his family home has been bombed three times. He is not alone. A total of 29 prison officers from the Maze were murdered during the Troubles and an estimated 50 officers from Northern Ireland jails committed suicide during the same period...