Response to Brendan Hughes' BBC Article on the Maze Prison

Written by #FrazerMacdonaldHay

Brendan Hughes’ recent article on the Maze Prison offers a succinct overview of a complex and deeply contested site, yet it ultimately underplays the political, architectural, and cultural stakes at play in decisions about its future. While the article captures the renewed public interest and political deadlock surrounding the site, it glosses over the long history of contention and quiet erasure that has defined the Maze/Long Kesh since its closure.

The Maze is not simply a "former prison" or a "contentious location" awaiting consensus. As your analysis makes clear, it is one of the most potent architectural remnants of the Northern Ireland conflict, an era that left not just political scars but a charged and uneven topography of memory. Built on the bones of a former RAF base, Long Kesh’s transformation into a high-security prison during the Troubles turned it into a symbol of state power, political struggle, and, for many, martyrdom. From internment and interrogation to hunger strikes and escapes, its H-Blocks and Nissen huts were the mise-en-scène of both trauma and resistance. Its architecture is not neutral, it is saturated with memory, meaning, and dispute.

Hughes notes the friction between Unionist objections and Republican aspirations, particularly regarding the defunct Peace and Conflict Resolution Centre. But the article leaves unexamined the broader processes of what Yifat Thakar and others have called "strategic forgetting", the systemic obliteration of painful material history in the name of political expedience or economic redevelopment. As archaeologist Laura McAtackney has argued, the partial demolition of the Maze was not merely a practical step in repurposing land, it was a symbolic act, part of a wider trajectory of erasure, an attempt to de-materialise the Troubles, and by extension, to depoliticise memory.

It is telling that the current vision for the site, reduced to hosting dog shows and archery championships, seems determined to render the past inaudible. The retreat from ambitious redevelopment plans, especially those involving EU funding and Libeskind’s much-criticised Peace Centre design, was not only political but ideological. It signals a turn away from acknowledging the Maze’s uncomfortable legacy in favour of a neutralised, commercial future, one that can be sold to both investors and tourists without risk of controversy.

Hughes’ article does hint at this impasse, but doesn’t interrogate it. Nor does it confront the paradox at the heart of Northern Ireland’s post-conflict society: a peace process predicated on forgetting, even while physical divisions—such as Peace Walls and segregated communities, persist and proliferate. In this regard, the Maze is emblematic. It is not merely stalled in terms of redevelopment; it is suspended between remembrance and oblivion, peace and discomfort, progress and denial.

More than a contested site, the Maze is a test of how we choose to engage with difficult pasts. Will it be erased, repurposed without context, or transformed into a place that allows for critical engagement, even if that means confronting deeply divergent narratives? The history of its planned demolition, partial preservation, and stalled reinvention reflects the fragility of post-conflict memory in Northern Ireland. It also mirrors wider global patterns in how post-conflict societies seek to turn sites of trauma into engines of peace, or profit.

If the site is ever to fulfil the lofty ambitions once attached to it, as a model of post-conflict transformation, it will require more than consensus. It will require courage: to confront discomfort, to protect complex heritage, and to trust that peace does not come from silence but from dialogue, however difficult that may be.

#MemoryPolitics #PostConflict #TransitionalJustice #SitesOfConscience #RememberingTheTroubles #ContestedHistories #Peacebuilding #MazePrison #LongKesh #TheTroubles #NorthernIrelandConflict #PeaceProcessNI #MazeSiteDebate #NorthernIrelandHistory #ArchitecturesOfConflict #ConflictHeritage #CulturalErasure #HistoricPreservation #AdaptiveReuse #BuiltMemory #ArchitectureAndMemory #TruthAndReconciliation #LegacyOfViolence #ConflictResolution #DesignForPeace #PublicHistory #HeritageDebate #PeaceThroughMemory #Brendanhughes