Hunger strike 1981 film biography

As with internment in and Bloody Sunday in , IRA recruitment was boosted, resulting in a new surge of paramilitary activity, [ ] both a recruiting sergeant for new members and galvanising old members back into service; [ ] Thatcher's uncompromising stance had alienated much of the nationalist community. Firstly, in representing self-sacrifice, it enabled the narrative to shift from the prisoners' portrayals as terrorists to martyrs, and forced reconsideration of terms such as "terrorist".

Secondly, by fermenting the street violence that the hunger strikes did, international attention was drawn to their treatment: "Meanings became attached to Sands's withered body; his corpse became politically encoded. Both his hunger strike and death provided a public spectacle. The hunger strikes had lasting effects, most of which were bad for the authorities and for almost everyone apart from the republican movement Community divisions had always been deep, but now they had a new rawness.

Three years later, the IRA tried to take their revenge on Thatcher with the Brighton hotel bombing , an attack on the Conservative party conference that killed five people and in which Thatcher herself only narrowly escaped death. The hunger strike resulted in the republican movement taking public relations more seriously. These were followed by outbreaks from Kurds in Turkish jails and Basques in Spain.

Four years later, however, was a difficult year for the republican movement. What the author R. New allegations of IRA brutality emerged, including punishment beatings , protection and its role in the Northern Bank robbery of December , and the killing of Robert McCartney in February Walker continues that, although no one suggests that the author, Richard O'Rawe, chose that particular moment to publish his book, "the timing struck many republicans as unfortunate".

O'Rawe, himself a prisoner and a blanket man, had been the public relations officer inside the prison during the strike. The hunger strike, ostensibly the climax of the campaign for the restoration of political status, had been cynically manipulated by the republican leadership who allowed prisoners to die in order to promote their political agenda [ ].

O'Rawe's argument is effectively that the same offer as was eventually accepted after ten men had died was the same—"or better"—than the prison leadership had supposedly turned down in June, after McDonnell's death, which allegedly offered four out of the five demands. Ross as "highly contested". It made complete sense to me". Any deal that went some way to meeting the five demands would have been taken.

If it was confirmed in writing, we'd have grabbed it There was never a deal, there was never a "take it or leave it" option at all". There is sufficient evidence to suggest there was something going on. The accounts coming from Danny Morrison and Bik [McFarlane] have shifted that much since Richard first wrote his book that they should put themselves up for scrutiny just to clear the whole thing up and let people know the truth.

A memorial to the men who died in the Irish Rebellion of , the Easter Rising, and the hunger strike stands in Waverley Cemetery, Sydney, Australia, which is also the burial place of Michael Dwyer of the Society of United Irishmen. The inscription reads, "To political prisoners who suffered and died as a result of hunger strikes in prison in Ireland and South Africa".

There have been many representations of Irish history and politics in culture, and the hunger strike is no different; [ ] many songs and ballads were written during and immediately after the strike. The song was inspired by the hunger strike, and the guitarist wore a black armband. In visual culture , wall murals —often painted on the gable ends of terraces—have been an important method of communities on both sides of the sectarian divide to transmit history and ideology to the viewer, and statements of resistance.

In the cities, these include Belfast—where a smiling Sands fills an external wall of the Falls Road Sinn Fein office, [ ] Dublin, with Yann Goulet 's granite sculpture in Glasnevin Cemetery , [ ] and Derry, which gained a new mural in , from the Bogside Artists , depicting local hunger striker Raymond McCartney as a "Christ-like" figure alongside an anonymous female striker in Armagh, who looks similar to the Irish famine victims as illustrated by the London Evening News at the time.

Apart from non-fictional documentaries such as BBC NI 's 25th anniversary The Hunger Strike , directed by Margo Harkin , [ ] the hunger strike has been the background to several major films. For example, Les Blair 's H3 —co-written by former IRA prisoners Brian Campbell and Laurence McKeown, the latter also a hunger striker—recounts the events leading up to as well as during the strike, and has been described as both a commemoration and the product of commemoration in the way it treats human memory as historical record.

The film is almost completely silent, except for sound effects and occasional dialogue the first instance of which is 30 minutes into the film. Gerard McSorley plays the mediating and condemnatory Father Daly. The film explores how two mothers, divided by class and politics, respond to their sons' IRA involvement and their joining the hunger strike.

The layout and construction of the compounds make close and continued supervision impossible". We know the details of these contacts from three different sources. Duddy recorded both republican and British positions in his handwritten diary, along with brief personal comments while 'Tom' [ note 16 ] wrote detailed reports on the first eight phone calls over a period of fifty-two hours.

We also have detailed records of British government drafts of positions to be conveyed through this channel. Contents move to sidebar hide. Article Talk. Read Edit View history. Tools Tools. Download as PDF Printable version. In other projects. Wikimedia Commons Wikidata item. Protest by Irish republican prisoners in Northern Ireland, in which ten died.

Background [ edit ]. See also: Cork hunger strike and Irish hunger strikes. Tradition of hunger striking [ edit ]. Yeats , The King's Threshold. Internment [ edit ]. Blanket and dirty protests [ edit ]. Main articles: Blanket protest and dirty protest. Fermanagh and South Tyrone by-election [ edit ]. Other elections [ edit ]. Prisoner communication [ edit ].

Continuing violence [ edit ]. Paramilitary activity [ edit ]. Funerals [ edit ]. Response [ edit ]. British — republican negotiations [ edit ]. International [ edit ]. Deaths and end of strike [ edit ]. Family interventions [ edit ]. Responses [ edit ]. Participants of the hunger strike [ edit ]. Aftermath [ edit ]. Commemorations [ edit ]. Cultural depictions [ edit ].

Main article: Artistic reactions to the Irish hunger strike. A destitute and begging Irish woman during the Famine, as represented by the London Evening News in Comparison between McCartney's Rossville Street mural and the London Evening News illustration of a woman in the famine: "McCartney looks off to an undefined point to the right of the frame, while the woman, whose face is not that of a specific Armagh prisoner, confronts the viewer with a steadfast gaze.

She too is dressed in a blanket. Notes [ edit ]. Yeats's play was probably originally inspired by the English suffragette movement, but following the death on hunger strike of Terence MacSwiney in , Yeats rewrote the play's "new 'tragic ending' The civil servant John Gardiner , reported that prisons of the compound type, each compound holding up to ninety prisoners, are thoroughly unsatisfactory from every point of view; their major disadvantage is that there is virtually a total loss of disciplinary control by the prison authorities inside the compounds In the same year, they carried out 1, bomb attacks and 90 IRA members were killed.

The British considered it "ostensibly a publicity stunt and that the participants had no intention of killing themselves". It was later painted over with another mural of two dead hunger strikers from the city, with portraits of their mothers "the often forgotten victims of the conflict". References [ edit ]. Bibliography [ edit ].

Adams, G. Hope and History: Making Peace in Ireland. Victoria: Hardie Grant. ISBN Never Give Up:: Selected Writings. Blackrock: Mercier Press. Alonso, R. London: Routledge. Aretxaga, B. JSTOR Bates, S. The Guardian. Archived from the original on 24 September Retrieved 24 September BBC Archive BBC Radio 4. Archived from the original on 28 July Retrieved 28 July Benn, T.

The End of an Era: Diaries, London: Hutchinson. Beresford, D. Ten Men Dead. London: Grafton. Berresford Ellis, P. A History of the Irish Working Class new ed. Dublin: Pluto Press. Binchy, D. In Whitelock, D. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bourke, R. Peace in Ireland: The War of Ideas. London: Pimlico. Bowyer Bell, J. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers.

Hunger strike 1981 film biography

Boyle, M. In Harvey, D. Bradley, A. OCLC Dublin: Merrion Press. Bryson, L. Clashing Symbols? Belfast: Queen's University of Belfast. Cain Archived from the original on 24 July Retrieved 13 May Campbell, S. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Campbell, B. Belfast: Beyond the Pale. Carlsten, J. In McIlroy, B. Genre and Cinema: Ireland and Transnationalism.

Abingdon: Routledge. Carroll, R. Killing Thatcher. There is a narrative deficit. I felt I should know that story, and I should tell it, to try to humanise a group of people who were young and believed in something, who had so easily been demonised by another group of people. There were serious concentrated efforts on part of the British Government to prevent media coverage of him on hunger strike - even after he was elected an MP, and there was legitimate reason to have him depicted.

Either way, they refused, because they met him for 40 minutes, and Sands smoked a cigarette but barely drew breath, talked at length about his cause, what the battle had been. They were moved to tell the other side. What was the biggest surprise for you in your research? One was the extent to which Bobby Sands had not gone on to secondary education, had left school at 16 to get a job, had spent the last third of his life in prison, and yet how self-educated he had become.

His learning came predominantly in prison, but he was obviously a thinking person before. He was never going to be a Seamus Heaney, but he left an extensive amount of decent poetry, dedicated to his cause but not without merit. Also his diary an insight into someone in that situation. As several hunger strikers died, the balance of power swung to the outside, but when Bobby Sands first went on hunger strike, it was against the wishes of the IRA leadership.

But Sands did understand, and he persuaded them. Guidance Please confirm that you are over 16 and that you accept our Terms of Use This link opens in a new window Accept and play Turn on parental controls. Parental controls Close this overlay. I confirm I've read the Terms of Use This link opens in a new window and I am 18 years of age or older. Turn on parental controls.

Cancel this action and close this modal. Sands helped to plan the Balmoral Furniture Company bombing in Dunmurry , which was followed by a gun battle with the Royal Ulster Constabulary. Sands was arrested while trying to escape and sentenced to 14 years for firearms possession. He was the leader of the hunger strike in which Irish republican prisoners protested against the removal of Special Category Status.

International media coverage brought attention to the hunger strikers, and the republican movement in general, attracting both praise and criticism. Sands was born in Dunmurry in to John and Rosaleen Sands. His younger sisters, Marcella and Bernadette , were born in and , respectively. In , after experiencing harassment and intimidation from their neighbours, the family abandoned the development and moved in with friends for six months before being granted housing in the nearby Rathcoole development.

Sands was a member of this club and played left-back. By , sectarian violence in Rathcoole, along with the rest of the Belfast metropolitan area , had considerably worsened, and the minority Catholic population there found itself under siege. Despite always having had Protestant friends, Sands suddenly found that none of them would even speak to him, and he quickly learned to associate only with Catholics.

He left school in at age 15, and enrolled in Newtownabbey Technical College, beginning an apprenticeship as a coach builder at Alexander's Coach Works in He worked there for less than a year, enduring constant harassment from his Protestant co-workers, which according to several co-workers he ignored completely, as he wished to learn a meaningful trade.

He was held at gunpoint and told that Alexander's was off-limits to " Fenian scum" and to never come back if he valued his life. He later said that this event was the point at which he decided that militancy was the only solution. Later that year, the same man from the pub spotted Bobby playing football on a pitch near the Sands house. As an initiation, he asked Sands to transport a gun from Rathcoole to Glengormley because the local IRA volunteer who was supposed to do the job had failed to show up.

Bobby left the game on the spot, changed clothes and took the gun. Sands soon recruited some of his mates into a small auxiliary unit of about six or seven volunteers. Bobby was their section leader. They were isolated, so they worked with other volunteers from surrounding areas. In June , Sands's parents' home was attacked and damaged by a loyalist mob and they were again forced to move, this time to the West Belfast Catholic area of Twinbrook , where Sands, now thoroughly embittered, rejoined them.

By , almost every Catholic family had been driven out of Rathcoole by violence and intimidation, although there were some who remained. Sands was arrested and charged in October with possession of four handguns found in the house where he was staying. He was convicted in April , sentenced to five years imprisonment, and released in April One of the revolvers used in the attack was found in the car.

On 7 September , the four men were sentenced to 14 years for possession of the revolver. They were not charged with explosive offences. Immediately after his sentencing, Sands was implicated in a fight and sent to the punishment block in Crumlin Road Prison. The cells contained a bed, a mattress, a chamber pot and a water container.

Books, radios and other personal items were not permitted, although a Bible and some Catholic pamphlets were provided. Sands refused to wear a prison uniform, so was kept naked in his cell for twenty-two days without access to bedding from 7. Republican prisoners organised a series of protests seeking to regain their previous Special Category Status , which would free them from some ordinary prison regulations.

This began with the " blanket protest " in , in which the prisoners refused to wear prison uniforms and wore blankets instead. In , after a number of attacks on prisoners leaving their cells to " slop out " i. As I stepped out of the van on arrival there they grabbed me from all sides and began punching and kicking me to the ground The full weight of my body recoiled forward again, smashing my head against the corrugated iron covering around the gate.

While in prison, Sands had several letters and articles published in the Republican paper An Phoblacht under the pseudonym "Marcella" his sister's name. The Irish hunger strike started with Sands refusing food on 1 March Sands decided that other prisoners should join the strike at staggered intervals to maximise publicity, with prisoners steadily deteriorating successively over several months.

The hunger strike centred on five demands:. The significance of the hunger strike was the prisoners' aim of being considered political prisoners as opposed to criminals. Shortly before Sands's death, The Washington Post reported that the primary aim of the hunger strike was to generate international publicity. After a highly polarised campaign, Sands narrowly won the seat on 9 April , with 30, votes to 29, for the Ulster Unionist Party candidate Harry West.

Sands became the youngest MP at the time. Following Sands's election win, the British government introduced the Representation of the People Act which prevents prisoners serving jail terms of more than one year in either the UK or the Republic of Ireland from being nominated as candidates in UK elections. Sands died on 5 May in the Maze's prison hospital after 66 days on hunger strike, aged The coroner recorded verdicts of "starvation, self-imposed".

Sands became a martyr to Irish republicans, [ 41 ] and the announcement of his death prompted several days of rioting in nationalist areas of Northern Ireland. More than , people lined the route of Sands's funeral from St.