On 28 July 2000, the final group of paramilitary prisoners walked free from the Maze prison outside Belfast, completing the early release scheme set out in the 1998 Good Friday Agreement and marking the effective end of one of the most contentious chapters of the Northern Ireland peace process.
Around 78 prisoners were freed that day, drawn from both sides of the sectarian divide. The releases were staggered by group: eight members of the loyalist Ulster Volunteer Force went first, followed by men from the UDA/UFF, the Loyalist Volunteer Force and the Irish National Liberation Army, with 46 members of the Provisional IRA the last to leave. Including that day's releases, a total of 428 loyalist and republican prisoners had by then been freed early under the terms of the 1998 accord.
Who Walked Free
Among those released were some of the most notorious figures of the Troubles. James McArdle, jailed for 25 years over the 1996 London Docklands bombing, was freed that day, as was IRA gunman Martin Mines, who had been sentenced only the previous year to 50 years for conspiracy to murder and possessing arms, having reportedly shouted "see you in 18 months" when the sentence was handed down. Loyalist paramilitary Michael Stone had walked free days earlier as part of the same wave of releases.
Only around 14 to 15 prisoners convicted of terrorist-related offences remained in custody in Northern Ireland afterwards, serving out the minimum two-year sentence required before they too would qualify for early release.
The Deal Behind the Releases
The releases stemmed directly from the Good Friday Agreement, under which prisoners convicted of qualifying paramilitary offences became eligible for release once they had served two years of their sentence, regardless of the length of the original term. It was among the most difficult and emotive elements of the entire negotiation. According to accounts from those involved in the talks, had the release period been set at one year, as republicans had wanted, the negotiations could well have collapsed entirely; instead, the two-year compromise held, and the agreement survived.
The scheme also drew fierce criticism from some quarters. One retired prison officer later recalled confronting Tony Blair in 1998, accusing the then Prime Minister of "walking on the graves" of police officers, soldiers and prison officers killed during the Troubles, and describing the celebrations that accompanied some of the releases as "obscene." A quarter-century later, the issue remains, in the words of one commentator, "an open wound" for many victims and their families, even as others have taken a more pragmatic view, arguing that without the prisoner release scheme, the peace process itself might never have succeeded.
The End of the Maze
The Maze, originally opened as an internment camp in 1971 on the site of a former RAF airfield and known to many as Long Kesh, had at its peak held up to 1,700 prisoners and become notorious for hunger strikes, mass escape attempts and violence between rival paramilitary factions. It was there that IRA prisoner Bobby Sands died in 1981 after a 66-day hunger strike.
Following the 28 July releases, only a handful of prisoners remained. The last four were transferred to other Northern Ireland prisons in September 2000, and the Maze formally closed shortly afterwards. The future of the 360-acre site would go on to be debated for years, with proposals ranging from a museum to a multi-purpose stadium, before parts of it were eventually redeveloped.