HM Prison Maghaberry
prison in Lisburn, Northern Ireland
HM Prison Maghaberry is a high security prison near Lisburn in the south-west of County Antrim in Northern Ireland which opened in 1986. It was built on the site of RAF Maghaberry, a World War II airfield used as a flying station by the Royal Air Force and a transit airfield for the United States Army Air Forces. At the end of the war, the airfield was run down and was bought back from the Air Ministry in 1957 by Edward Thomas Boyes who then farmed it with his sons until the Northern Ireland Office (NIO) began work on the prison in 1976.
Mourne House, which held female prisoners, young offenders, and remands, was the first part to be opened, in March 1986. This followed the closure of the women's prison at HMP Armagh. The male part of the prison became fully operational on 2 November 1987. Following the closure of HMP Belfast on 31 March 1996, Maghaberry became the adult committal prison in Northern Ireland. Two new accommodation blocks were opened in 1999.
In 2003, the Steele report recommended options to make Maghaberry safe, including "a degree of separation" for Irish republican and Ulster loyalist inmates.
Maghaberry is currently a high-security prison housing both adult male long-term sentenced and remand prisoners in both separated and integrated conditions.
The public source identifies “HM Prison Maghaberry” as prison in Lisburn, Northern Ireland. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Prison, Maghaberry and prison.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 30, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5635231. VIAF identifies the subject as 125843707. The Library of Congress control number is no2004114849. Authority coordinates are 54.514, -6.186. 1 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1986, 1957, 1976 and 1987.
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This entry incorporates text from “HM Prison Maghaberry” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.