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Her Majesty’s Prison Maze. A high security prison outside Belfast. Said to be the most secure prison in Europe, possibly even the world. The prisoners are all either Republican or Loyalist paramilitaries, and serving long sentences for crimes including murder, kidnap, arson, planting bombs, weapons possession and conspiracy to kill.

It’s September, 1983, a Sunday, early afternoon. Quiet. A Republican IRA prisoner approaches the officer in charge of the block where he’s serving his sentence. He has a personal problem, says the prisoner. Might he have a quiet word? Of course, says the officer. The officer brings the prisoner into his private office. As soon as the door closes behind them, the prisoner produces a gun. An IRA operation is underway, he explains. The officer is under arrest. As the officer surrenders, other prisoners produce guns out in the rest of the block. It’s the start of an audacious escape – the biggest from a prison in Britain and Ireland ever and the biggest in Europe since the Second World War. It will see 38 armed Republicans break out. And it shouldn’t happen. This prison has been built to be escape-proof and until this moment it is escape proof. What has gone wrong? How can this have happened?

I’m Carlo Gébler and once upon a time I worked in HMP Maze as a teacher. Not at the time of the escape, but 12 years later. The escape is still remembered, though, when I’m there. I hear it discussed, a lot, lauded by prisoners, disparaged by staff. I’m fascinated and the conversations make an impression. Now, decades later, I’ve gone back into the history of the prison where I worked and I’ve delved into the story I heard about – the story of the escape – in order to make Escape from the Maze.

How the unthinkable happened

It’s true the Maze escape has been done before from the prisoners’ perspective, but in this series, I tell the story from both sides and I set the event in its historical and political context. Thus, I hear both from those who escaped as they give a unique blow-by-blow, second-by-second account of just what happens and how they do it, as well as their opposite numbers – those on the staff whose job it is to stop escapes and who explain, with admirable candour and frankness, just why and how the unthinkable is able to happen and so many dangerous prisoners are able to break out. This series probes areas that haven’t been probed before regarding the culpability of the British state, the corruption of prison officers, and the cunning of the IRA.

As an event, the escape, which is a huge news story at the time, is a trauma – it’s a trauma for the officers and staff caught up in it, obviously, and it’s a trauma for the British government and their policy of using the criminal justice system and imprisonment in HMP Maze as the solution to the problem of IRA violence.

For the Republican movement, on the other hand, the escape’s a coup which, to this this day, deliberately echoing the 1963 film The Great Escape about allied POWs escaping from a German camp in the Second World War, they like to term their own ‘Great Escape’ and continue to celebrate as one of their finest achievements, although the list of staff killed and injured during the escape suggests otherwise. These contradictory meanings of the escape for the various parties are carefully and meticulously unpicked in the series. It’s fascinating to see how a single event can mean such different things to different parties.

The escape is one of the pivotal moments in Northern Ireland’s tortured history. It destroys the prison’s reputation and arguably paves the way for the Maze prison’s eventual closure. It had an impact that went way beyond itself and the destructive impact of the escape on the government’s confidence cannot be underestimated.

Traditionally, the escape is spun as a story of Republican guile and cunning, but that is only half the story. Government policy is also a big part of the story and that needs to be better known. State dereliction, sadly, plays a huge part in this story.

Despite Stormont and power-sharing and all the rest, we still can’t agree amongst ourselves on the Troubles, with the Maze escape remaining one of our biggest bones of contention. It is still contested and sometimes our disagreement finds its way into court. As recently as January 2024 a libel case comes before a judge in Belfast, where the plaintiff is one of the leading escapees and the defendant a well-known Belfast journalist. This case, long and acrimonious, has important implications for the freedom of journalists to report on events, even 40-year-old ones, like the Maze Escape.

The Maze Prison closes in 2000 and is mostly knocked down a few years later. Today the site stands mostly empty. During the making of the series I go to visit. I’m not allowed in; I can only look through the fence at the place where I once worked. With everything gone, my memories have no buildings to attach themselves to; so, on a personal level, I don’t feel myself feeling very much. But as a citizen of Northern Ireland, I find myself filled with powerful feelings of despair as I look at the huge empty site. What a waste, I think. But I know all too well why it stands empty. I do live here, after all. Such are the associations connected to the site where a vanished and notorious prison once stood, no Northern Irish politician can face doing anything with it because of the opprobrium they fear they would face if they did.

On Sunday afternoon in September 1983, 38 Republicans physically broke out of their H-Block. Psychological escape, however, is quite a different matter. The place that is the Maze might be gone but its history and reputation still hold an entire population prisoner.