Provisional Irish Republican Army 1982, reflecting the sequence in which the old leadership of the republican movement were being sidelined. IRA prisoners convicted after March 1976 did not have Special Category Status applied in prison. In response, more than 500 prisoners refused to wear prison clothes. This activity culminated in the 1981 Irish hunger strike, when seven IRA and three Irish National Liberation Army members starved themselves to death in pursuit of political status. The hunger strike leader Bobby Sands and Anti H-Block activist Owen Carron were elected to the British Parliament, and two other protesting prisoners were elected to the Dáil. In addition,
Mountjoy Prison helicopter escape thousand members of the Irish Defence Forces and Garda Síochána ensued. Mallon was recaptured at a Gaelic Athletic Association dance in a hotel near Portlaoise on 10 December 1973, and imprisoned in Portlaoise Prison. He escaped from there in a mass break-out on 18 August 1974, when nineteen prisoners escaped after overpowering guards and using gelignite to blast through the gates. He was recaptured in Foxrock in January 1975 and returned to Portlaoise Prison. O'Hagan was recaptured in Dublin in early 1975, and also imprisoned in Portlaoise Prison. After the end of his original twelve-month sentence, he was immediately arrested