In terms of famous lock-ups, the Maze ranks right up there with prisons such as Alcatraz and Sing Sing, emerging over two decades as a potent symbol of the Northern Troubles for those on both sides of the political divide.
It was originally established as a prisoner-of-war camp on the site of Long Kesh RAF airfield, 15 miles west of Belfast. There, in a compound peppered with Nissen huts and cages, thousands of republicans and loyalists were interned without trial. In the mid-1970s, the erection of the H-block complex was sanctioned by the then Labour government as a temporary home for paramilitary prisoners. Uniquely, the complex comprised a series of prisons within prisons.
The eight H-blocks each housed around 100 individual prison cells located in the legs of the H. The complex also housed workshops, sports pitches, a tuckshop, a mobile library service, two chapels and a gymnasium. The design was drawn up by British government architects and took its name from the nearby Maze village. Inmates, members of five different paramilitary factions, were located in separate wings of the prison and refused to recognise the name change, continuing to refer to the prison as Long Kesh, which was associated with their status as political prisoners.
The world became familiar with the Maze after a decision was made that prisoners convicted after 1976 would lose this status. The decision led to hundreds of inmates going "on the blanket" during a period when the distinctive aerial photo of the complex was to become a regular sight on the television news. The blanket protests saw prisoners refuse to wear prison uniform and soon afterwards the dirty protests began, with inmates smearing their excreta on maggot-infested cell walls.
In 1981, republican hero and convicted bomber Bobby Sands went on hunger strike at the Maze in protest against conditions in the prison. He died 66 days later after being elected an MP for Fermanagh-South Tyrone. Nine other men later died during the hunger strikes and although the protest was to collapse, the prisoners' demands were eventually met.
There have been several high-profile escapes from the prison; in 1983, 38 IRA men escaped in a van, killing a warder as they fled. A 1998 report commissioned by the British government sought to examine how to prevent security breaches and other failings in the prison regime. The report concluded: "Not infrequently, the Maze is caricatured as a holiday camp. It is nothing of the sort. It is a prison which while tolerating relatively high levels of prisoner freedom on the wings had until December 1997, an enviable safety record . . . it is not a normal prison". During 1997, there had been a murder and two escapes within a six-month period.
Camp Maze, according to those who bought into the holiday theory, was a place where prisoners swanned about the blocks in designer clothes, chatting into mobile phones, using computers and sunning themselves in the exercise yard. Their once excrement-covered walls now bore colourful murals and the main disagreements with prison officers were about the size of the sausages they had for dinner. Newspaper reports suggested that prisoners were allowed to have sex during visits or that they were often drunk coming back from parole. Other stories had it that prisoners regular claimed compensation for damaged goods and often received it with no questions asked.
Another assessment of the Maze left it with the tag of University of Terror, although republicans have referred to it as the University of Freedom. Those critical of the regime saw paramilitaries schooling themselves behind the prison walls, some securing Open University degrees and doctorates, others fine-tuning their bomb-making skills, only to graduate top of class in the political arena. (The Maze was the alma mater of Sinn Fein's Mr Gerry Adams and Mr Gerry Kelly and PUP Assembly Members Mr David Ervine and Mr Billy Hutchinson.)
Inmates taught each other Irish and smuggled out letters written in minuscule writing on toilet paper. The prison library, now held in Belfast's Linen Hall Library, shows the diversity of books, many left-wing or Marxist in theme, that were studied by republican prisoners. These included Behind Iranian Lines by John Simpson, Dialectical Materialism by Maurice Cornforth and Bolsheviks in the Tsarist Duma.
Whatever happens to the Maze, it will be forever associated with the 10 men who died for the republican cause during the hunger strikes. LVF leader Billy Wright, who was murdered in the prison in March 1997, acknowledged the significance of the protests in an interview shortly before he died.
"He was physically wrecked and repulsive to look at. But there was an atmosphere of pure history," he remembered of one blanket protester. Loyalists were called off the blanket by their leaders as it was thought to be embarrassing for them to be seen to be supporting republicans.
"I knew the significance of what I was witnessing. Here was a movement that would inflict on itself so much violence for its own ideology that what would it not do to other human beings?" said Wright.
In what was to become an anthem for the hunger strikers and protesters, "The H-block Song", written by Francie Brolly in 1976, has a chorus which tells how the inmates would "wear no prison uniform, nor meekly serve my time". The last verse will be particularly poignant for republicans when later this year the doors of the Maze slam shut for the final time:
Does Britain need a thousand years
Of protest, riot, death and tears
Or will this past decade of fears
Of eighty decades spell
An end to Ireland's agony,
New hope for human dignity
And will the last obscenity
Be this grim H-block cell?