SUNDAY coming marks the 50th anniversary of a turning point in Britain’s approach to the Troubles.

From March 1 1976, Special Category Status was abolished, so that anyone convicted of a scheduled offence would be treated as a criminal and sent to the newly-opened H-Blocks in the state-of-the-art Maze prison.

It had taken a couple of years to work out the new policy.

After the joint efforts of unionist parties and loyalist terrorists had brought down the Sunningdale experiment in 1974, Harold Wilson’s government accepted that the Troubles, as the insurrection became known, weren’t going away.

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Until then the response to the violence had been ad hoc, often copying the responses to previous colonial uprisings that many of the senior civil servants and military officers had dealt with elsewhere.

After all, Britain had been kicked out of Aden only in November 1967. The SAS was still engaged in aid of the Sultan of Oman until 1976.

As the north was part of the UK, an EEC member, things were a bit trickier.

The British government appointed Lord Gardiner to produce a report to enable them to act “consistently within the terms of the ECHR (European Convention on Human Rights) for........

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