Though the hunger strike had ended, there was little change within the prisons. By the start of the New Year, local H-Block committees were openly expressing their concerns regarding the apparent lack of movement by prison authorities. The Derry ‘Smash H-Block’ Committee warned of a second hunger strike ‘unless the Government ceases at once in playing toady to the prejudices and bigotry of a few petty-minded bureaucrats at the Northern Ireland Office’. Fr Denis Faul would go so far as to argue that this lack of movement was a ‘deliberate British policy aimed at a split among the prisoners themselves and, in turn, dissension among their relatives, friends and supporters’. And so the prison crisis was far from being solved.

On 2 January, the blanket men in Long Kesh issued a statement calling on ‘those in authority in church and state … to immediately and publicly bring pressure to bear upon the British to ensure the speedy resolution of the blanket/‘no wash’ protest and the defusion [sic] of the H-Block/Armagh crisis’.