At its final conference, in October 1982, the National H-Block/Armagh Committee openly acknowledged that it had ‘failed to mount and lead an effective, broad and far-reaching campaign’ on its newfound brief. Financial difficulties limited communication with the various H-Block action groups and no new campaign literature was produced. By September 1982, the committee's head office in Dublin's Mountjoy Square had closed. After agreeing to conclude their campaign, all that would remain was a small caretaker executive ‘to wind up the affairs of the NationalH-Block/Armagh Committee’. But had the Committee successfully fulfilled its original brief? What did the anti-criminalization campaign accomplish?

As academic Richard English noted, ‘a persistent theme in modern Anglo-Irisha affairs’ has been ‘the capacity for popular mobilizations … on behalf of those punished for republican activities’. This, according to Laurence McKeown, is because ‘[i]mprisonment and the plight of Irish political prisoners has always been an emotive issue in the psyche of nationalist/republican Ireland’. Yet such public demonstrations of sympathy or support are not a given nor do they materialize overnight. Indeed, former IRA Chief of Staff Seán MacStiofáin (the main contact for the Mid/South Meath anti H-Block committee) complained that his 1972 hunger strike did not get ‘the usual degree of support given to hunger strikes in the Republican movement’.