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An ancient protest in bitter modern times
As the film Hunger is released, historian Peter Berresford Ellis gives his perspective on the Long Kesh hunger strikers and their cause
WHEN the death of their fellow democratically elected Member of Parliament, Bobby Sands, was announced in the House of Commons on May 5 1981, after 66 days on hunger strike, the House disgraced itself by leaving the world in no doubt that they approved of his death.
Warders at Long Kesh, the former internment camp then renamed The Maze Prison, whistled “Oh, What a Beautiful Morning”.
What had led this 27- year-old Irish prisoner to make this ultimate protest? The hunger strike as a means of political protest is a very old Irish concept. If the person being fasted against did not come to arbitration and actually allowed the protester to die, then the moral judgment went against them and they endured shame and contempt.
Until the mid-1970s, the status of Irish prisoners engaged in the insurgency in Northern Ireland had been regarded as a political one. That status was then changed by the British government to a criminal one. For years Irish prisoners had protested, such as the notorious blanket protest when they refused to wear prison uniforms. In 1980 the Irish prisoners decided that the only way to assert their former political status was by means of the hunger strike.
Brendan Hughes led the first seven hunger strikers in the protest on October 27 1980, to restore rights and stop the ill-treatment, beatings and strip-searches they were daily subjected to by prison warders.
The British authorities persuaded the hunger strikers to end their protest by pretending to agree to all their requests. Once the hunger strike ended, the British authorities refused to keep their word and the regime was worse than before.
The second hunger strike became inevitable. It fell to Bobby Sands to lead it. He had been an active republican, an intelligent young man with a literary talent.
Sands started to refuse food two weeks before his comrades in the hope that if the British proved intransigent, his death alone might secure for the others the demands that would return them to political status.
It did not. They had not counted on Margaret Thatcher’s obstinacy. The deaths of nine other young men followed that of Sands.
With the prospect of many other deaths to come, pressure was put on the families of the prisoners by the religious authorities. When a hunger striker slipped into unconsciousness, the next of kin was persuaded to give permission for the authorities to feed and revive the protester. Under such conditions the hunger strike was eventually called off.
Throughout the world, streets and squares have been named after the young Irishmen who sacrificed their lives. Wave after wave of moral revulsion against Thatcher’s merciless rigidity has ensured her tarnished place in the history of human rights.
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