SUNDAY coming marks the 50th anniversary of a turning point in Britain’s approach to the Troubles.

From March 1 1976, Special Category Status was abolished, so that anyone convicted of a scheduled offence would be treated as a criminal and sent to the newly-opened H-Blocks in the state-of-the-art Maze prison.

It had taken a couple of years to work out the new policy.

After the joint efforts of unionist parties and loyalist terrorists had brought down the Sunningdale experiment in 1974, Harold Wilson’s government accepted that the Troubles, as the insurrection became known, weren’t going away.

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Until then the response to the violence had been ad hoc, often copying the responses to previous colonial uprisings that many of the senior civil servants and military officers had dealt with elsewhere.

After all, Britain had been kicked out of Aden only in November 1967. The SAS was still engaged in aid of the Sultan of Oman until 1976.

As the north was part of the UK, an EEC member, things were a bit trickier.

The British government appointed Lord Gardiner to produce a report to enable them to act “consistently within the terms of the ECHR (European Convention on Human Rights) for the protection of human rights and fundamental freedoms”.

In other words, how to get rid of internment and use some other means to curtail the violence.

Gardiner duly reported in February 1975, enabling internment to be ended by December that year and abolishing the Special Category Status that the north’s first proconsul, Whitelaw, had agreed with the IRA in 1972.

British governments hated it because the Nissen huts in compounds like POW camps lent legitimacy to the existence of political prisoners in the UK. That had to go.

So, after a year of ceasefires on and off, and secret negotiations with the IRA and Sinn Féin, suddenly Britain would now refuse to accept there was any political motive in the organisation whose members they’d been talking to.

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Abruptly they were all designated criminals. The IRA formally ended its ceasefire in January 1976.

The British government’s language changed too. Politicians began to talk about ‘godfathers of terrorism’, gangs, criminal conspiracy.

There was much repetition of the notion of “a small group of evil men” who didn’t represent anyone.

The aim was to separate the IRA from society and insist they had no support in any community.

It was a futile policy drafted by people who either knew nothing of Irish history, or if they did, decided to disregard it. It had disastrous consequences.

Inevitably, the first IRA man convicted in September 1976 under the new regime, Kieran Nugent, refused to accept criminal status, wear prison garb or do work.

Confined to his cell, he wore only the blanket supplied. So began the blanket protest. By Christmas 1976, there were more than 40 ‘on the blanket’.

Meanwhile, alongside the criminalisation policy came ‘ulsterisation’ – the increased use of the unionist militia, the UDR.

The RUC, instead of British troops, would now have primacy. The British government thought it looked terrible to have British troops patrolling the streets and lanes of a part of the UK.

It was also costing a fortune and made it difficult to fulfil their NATO requirements in West Germany.

It cost over £40,000 to train an artillery NCO in the use of tactical nuclear weapons, only to have him shot in an ambush in south Armagh. Locals were cheaper.

The talking shop Constitutional Convention was wound up on March 4 1976. Essentially both sides settled down for a long conflict in what British officials considered an abnormal society.

There was no pretence of politics. 1976 had the second highest death toll of the Troubles at 308. The new policy wasn’t working in any respect at all.

More and more people were being convicted in single-judge Diplock courts, many in highly dubious circumstances, including forced ‘confessions’ after maltreatment in custody.

The prison protest was escalating into the ‘dirty protest’ after repeated brutal assaults on prisoners by prison officers, who were almost to a man from the unionist community.

In the end, we all know what happened. Hunger strikes began in 1980, culminating in the deaths of 10 men in 1981.

British prime minister Margaret Thatcher said the IRA had “played its last card”. John Hume said: “On the contrary, she had dealt them a full hand.”

During the long, agonising process, Bobby Sands, a convicted IRA man, was elected MP for Fermanagh/South Tyrone.

The policy adopted in March 1976 to criminalise the IRA and isolate them as a criminal gang with no support had backfired spectacularly.

The operation of the misguided policy had demonstrated that the reverse was true and produced a watershed in the north’s politics.

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