British Army Operation ongoing in South Armagh
South Armagh Sinn Féin Councillor Packie McDonald has demanded that the British Army and PSNI end an operation in Meigh which began with the village being sealed of at around noon today.
NUJ backs Daily Ireland workers in job crisis
The National Union of Journalists announced yesterday that it will raise concerns about the Irish and British governments’ treatment of Daily Ireland ‘as a matter of urgency’.
Irish Secretary, Seamus Dooley, expressed alarm at reports from both the management and staff of Daily Ireland that the newspaper has been subjected to political vetting and systematic discrimination.
Describing the reports as “deeply disturbing”, Mr Dooley said: “The NUJ supports the concept of editorial diversity and any discrimination against a newspaper on the grounds of politics would be totally
unacceptable.
“The NUJ will be raising this issue with the Irish and British governments as a matter of urgency,” he said.
Mr Dooley’s comments follow the agreement of a resolution by the staff of Daily Ireland.
The resolution was agreed after an announcement by Daily Ireland management last week that jobs could be lost.
Management at the publication have lodged a landmark complaint with the North’s Equality Commission regarding the British government’s ban on advertising with Daily Ireland.
Prior to the publication of Daily Ireland on February 1, Irish Minister of Justice Michael McDowell made serious allegations about the newspaper which are now the subject of
litigation.
The following is the text of a motion passed by the Daily Ireland chapel:
“The Daily Ireland NUJ Chapel comprising news journalists, designers, sports journalists, sub-editors, features department and senior editorial staff have hereby resolved to:
(a) Publicly assert that the creation and development of Daily Ireland represents a highly significant contribution to the development of an inclusive media and progressive participative democracy on the island of Ireland.
(b) Publicly repudiate the sustained and cynical campaign of political vetting and systematic discrimination practiced against this newspaper by the Irish government and the British government (notably the Northern Ireland Office), particularly in the context of the commercial and political obstacles placed by both governments in the path of creating and maintaining sustainable employment within this newspaper.
(c) Publicly request the effective and immediate intervention to both governments of the National Union of Journalists, all other trade unionists, all other sections of the media, all political parties, the community and voluntary sector, human rights NGOs, the business community, and all other people of goodwill who wish to see the values of inclusive media and progressive participative democracy sustained on the island of
Ireland.”
NUJ national organiser Des Fagan has also expressed concern about the threat to jobs at Daily Ireland.
He called on the company to do everything possible to secure employment at the newspaper. Mr Fagan said the NUJ is committed to protecting employment at the newspaper.
“Our priority is to save jobs. In the event of job losses we will be seeking the best possible deal for our members but our earnest hope is that job losses can be averted,” Mr Fagan said.
A poignant anniversary
The 24th anniversary of the death of Bobby Sands MP will ensure that today’s elections will be a poignant occasion for republicans across the North of Ireland.
Bobby Sands died on May 5, 1981 after 66 days on hunger strike. His successful election as an anti-H-Block MP for the Fermanagh and South Tyrone constituency just three weeks earlier changed the political landscape forever. The 1980/1981 hunger strikes were the culmination of the campaign of resistance against the British Government’s attempt to criminalise republican prisoners.
The event resulted in the deaths of ten men but generated mass mobilisation of the North’s nationalist population on a scale not witnessed since the aftermath of Bloody Sunday in 1972.
Bobby Sands was nominated as an anti-H-Block candidate and won the election after the death of Frank Maguire MP.
Jake Jackson, a former Blanketman and cellmate of Bobby Sands in Long Kesh, spoke of the legacy of Sands’ death yesterday at the rededication of a mural on the Falls Road in Belfast to Bobby Sands and the hunger strikers.
He said: “I’m glad to be here today, 24 years after Bobby Sands died on hunger-strike, to defend the Irish freedom struggle and to defend republicanism. Bobby and his nine comrades died on hunger strike and it was a catalytic event which changed the course of Irish history. I think tomorrow again, in Bobby’s own words, everyone has their own particular part to play and no part is too great or too small.
Speaking on today’s elections, Mr Jackson added: “Right across the Six Counties there will be young people and old people and people just about my age who will be out on the stumps from half-six in the morning to half-ten or half-eleven at night and what they’re going to deliver is a resounding mandate for Sinn Féin which is going to change the course of politics on this island yet again. “It’s kind of fitting that on Bobby Sands’ anniversary we’re going to the polls and as Bobby himself said, our revenge is going to be the laughter of our children.”
Guardian
Blasts hit British consulate in New York
Mark Tran
Thursday May 5, 2005
photo: CNN
Two small explosions went off outside the British consulate in New York today, police said.
The New York police department said the blasts, which happened at 3.35am local time (0835 BST), had shattered windows in the building, but nobody was injured and the consulate, in midtown Manhattan, had suffered no structural damage.
Pictures from CNN showed the area cordoned off, with bomb squad staff and fire engines in attendance.
“There was an explosion in front of the location,” a New York police spokesman said. “It was detonated in one of the cement flower boxes used as a barrier outside the building. There was some damage to the front window, but there are no reports of any injuries at this stage.”
The police said they were piecing together shrapnel at the scene, and it appeared that two homemade grenades had been used. One was the size and shape of a pineapple, the other the size and shape of a lemon. The two went off within a minute of each other.
One of the devices had some gunpowder inside linked to a fuse. The police added: “It was one of those things you light and then run.”
Raymond Kelly, the New York city police chief, said there had been no threats and no phone calls after the explosions.
“There is no known motive for this action at this time,” said Mr Kelly at a news conference at the scene of the explosions as a helicopter flew overhead.
Mr Kelly said video film from security cameras was being studied for clues as to who might have set off the explosions.
Michael Bloomberg, the mayor of New York city, cautioned against jumping to conclusions. “There is no knowledge of what the motive was,” he said.
The road was closed for two blocks on either side of the consulate, a big office building at the corner of East 50th street and Third Avenue.
The consulate helps distressed Britons, issuing emergency British passports for one-way journeys to the UK and handling visa applications. The consulate’s press and public affairs department organises exchange programmes, seminars and conferences.
A trade and investment section gives free advice and assistance to US firms interested in starting or expanding a business in the UK.
The blast occurred as British voters went to the polls in the general election, but experts said it was too early to speculate on whether there was any connection between the two events.
Professor Paul Wilkinson, chairman of the Centre for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence at St Andrew’s University, said: “We have no idea yet who the perpetrators were, but obviously the authorities will be keeping a close eye on the investigation.”
In November 2003 a suicide bomb attack devastated the British consulate general in Istanbul, in Turkey. Among those who died in the incident was the consul general, Roger Short, the UK’s top envoy in the city.
May 5th, 1981 - Bobby Sands Dies
“We refuse to lie here in dishonour! We are not criminals, but Irishmen! This is the crime of which we stand accused…” - Bobby Sands
**This is a nice article on Bobby because you can click on many links within it to learn more about
everything.
Mala Poist
Defending the honour of our Mickey Marley
A dhuine uasail,
In Monday’s Andersonstown News (and an earlier edition of Daily Ireland), in an article on the passing of Belfast legend Mickey Marley, Barnbrack’s Alex Quinn claimed that part of the song Mickey Marley’s Roundabout was deliberately written to poke fun at Mr Marley.
Alex Quinn claimed that the lyrics “If you haven’t got a penny and your ma’s gone out, you can still get on his roundabout” were untrue, and that Mickey would have chased any child who couldn’t pay.
As the writer/composer of the song in question, I refute the claims of Mr Quinn.
I wrote the song as a deserved tribute to a real Belfast character and no part of it poked fun at Mickey.
And I personally know (and knew) those whom Mickey let on the roundabout free when they didn’t have the money.
I hope this puts the record straight for Mr. Quinn.
Finally, long may the song Mickey Marley’s Roundabout keep evergreen and happy our memories of Mickey – the last of the real Belfast characters.
Mise le meas,
Seamus Robinson
(aka Seamus Mac Róibín)
Election 2005 - 6,000 extra voters on register–
But many are this morning left without crucial electoral ID cards
An increase of 6,000 in the numbers registered to vote in West Belfast today should have been a cause for celebration this week.
After five years of ever-dwindling numbers on the West Belfast electoral register, the figure rose to a more healthy 53,831 for 2005.
However, the positive figures have been tainted with the news that the Falls Community Council were inundated with calls this week from frustrated constituents who said their electoral ID had not yet arrived.
Hundreds of votes could be wasted if those affected do not receive their photographic ID by post this morning.
Stephen Corr of the Falls Community Council says it’s a huge blow for the organisation, which worked tirelessly in February to increase the number of first-time voters on the electoral register.
“After recent elections, it was clear that voting numbers were well down,” he explained. “ So the British MP John Spellar agreed that the names registered over the last two years would be married together to increase the figures.”
One major shortcoming with the new legislation was that it did not address the issue of first-time voters.
So at the end of February, the Falls Community Council, in conjunction with the Electoral Commission, instigated a week-long drive to encourage first-time voters to register.
“We visited local schools and set up stalls in local shopping centres, and it was a big success – we managed to get over 1,200 to register.”
But on Monday, the first concerned callers contacted the Falls Community Council to say that they had not received their identification.
“I couldn’t believe it,” said Stephen. “After all our efforts, after bending over backwards to get these people registered, it’s turned out that a substantial number of them won’t be able to vote tomorrow [Thursday]. We thought our job was done by getting people on the register, but it isn’t. Our phones haven’t stopped all week, and I just think it’s an outrage that these people who have gone to the effort of registering, can’t do so now because of government bureaucracy and inefficiency.”
The community organisation plans to take the matter to the Equality Commission if a substantial number of constituents are denied their right to vote.
“I would call on anyone who is registered but didn’t receive their ID to contact myself at the Falls Community Council, because we intend to take action through the local MP’s office after the election,” said Stephen.
“The British Government goes on about democracy and everyone’s duty to vote, but then they make it so difficult and bureaucratic here. They went to extremes to get people voting in England and Wales, but the same effort wasn’t made in the North of Ireland, and the danger is, if you put a young person off voting, they might not vote again.”
Last night Sinn Féin Lower Falls Councillor Marie Moore praised those who have lead the registration drive in West Belfast, but said one in five in West Belfast still didn’t have the vote.
“That is a direct result of the legislation introduced by the British government which was supported by unionists and the SDLP. Sinn Féin has won the argument that the current electoral registration process is fundamentally flawed. We expect the incoming British government to change that law to enable all voters to exercise their rights,” she added.
Random Ramblings from a Republican
My Brother Bobby
by Bernadette Sands
An Phoblacht/Republican News
May 9th, 1981
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photo source: Ireland’s OWN
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**I am including this link because there are two videos on site–one of the news and one of Bobby’s mother Rosaleen Sands
5 May 1981: Bobby Sands dies in prison
Hunger striker Bobby Sands has died in prison 66 days after first refusing to eat.
The 27-year-old republican spent the last days of his life on a water bed to protect his fragile bones.
He had been in a coma for 48 hours before being pronounced dead by medical staff at the Maze prison in Northern Ireland.
Sands’ parents, brother and sister were at his bedside when he died.
This was the second time Sands had been on hunger strike, the first was in 1980 when a number of prisoners in the Maze prison were demanding political status for sectarian prisoners.
Three other republican prisoners at the Maze prison remain on hunger strike. There is grave concern for 25-year-old convicted murderer Francis Hughes, who began his strike 15 days after Sands.
Bobby Sands, who had served five years of a fourteen year sentence for possessing a gun began his hunger strike on 1 March.
He had softened his stance since the first strike and this time was making five main demands: that sectarian prisoners be allowed to wear their own clothes, that they be given free association time, visits and mail, that they should not to have to carry out penal work and should be given back lost remission.
The Provisional IRA is now expected to launch a campaign of violence and destruction in response to Sands’ death.
**From 2002
Mo Chara Bobby Sands
——————————————————————————–
Last Friday, 3 May, former republican POW SEANNA WALSH delivered the annual BOBBY SANDS MEMORIAL LECTURE in the fitting surrounds of the Felon’s Club in West Belfast. Seanna was a close personal friend of Bobby Sands, the first of ten Irish republican prisoners who died on hunger strike in 1981, and he shared some memories of the man he knew so well.
——————————————————————————–
I was surprised but very honoured to come here tonight and speak at this the 20th Bobby Sands lecture. Go raibh maith agaibh don choiste chuimhneacháin as an cuireadh labhairt.
We are at a crucial juncture in the current phase of the Irish struggle for a United Ireland, on the cusp of substantial electoral gains in the Southern elections, but I’ve decided not to talk about all this.
I’m here to talk about Bobby Sands the man, Bobby Sands the son, the husband, the father - the poet warrior, the self taught Irish language speaker and teacher, the indomitable spirit of the republican prisoner.
I first met Bobby on remand in Cage 8 of Long Kesh before being moved to Crumlin Road Gaol in January ‘73. What struck me about him was the cocky self-assuredness of his Belfast dander and his spiky Rod Stewart hair cut.
I was a 16-year-old, ‘thought he knew it all’ child of Short Strand, East Belfast; he was from Twinbrook and before that Rathcoole and was a couple of years older.
We came through remand together but I didn’t get to know him well until I doubled up with him in Cage 17 and later then in Cage 11 as we served out our sentences together.
There was a clatter of Short Strand men in Cage 17 and then after the burning of the camp, in Cage 11. We took a bit of stick about being a ‘clique’ but Bobby and several others would have been part of that group too.
The man behind the icon
And what was he like then, this the foremost icon of the last 30 years of republican struggle, the man behind the face that’s recognised and venerated by freedom loving people from New York to San Francisco, from Johannesburg to Hebron, right across Europe?
Well he was very much one of ‘us’, an ordinary guy who loved a bit of craic, kicked a football, had a sleg and a laugh, and lapped up the sing songs and concerts we’d organise as the guitars and mandolins were pulled out to accompany the poitín voices - we’d sing and play away into the early hours.
Bobby read and absorbed books hungrily - political and historical books about British involvement in our country and the resulting resistance to that involvement, as well as novels. He also showed an interest in the plight of ‘the ordinary man’ throughout the world and the struggle for social justice, fair play and freedom. This was reflected in his writings and poetry while on the blanket. In the early years he was almost like a sponge, soaking in all these different ideas, histories and theories.
As he prepared for release in early ‘76, he worked hard to prepare himself physically and mentally for his return to the outside and re-involvement in the republican struggle. There was no room for doubt - he was coming out to reorganise the republican base in his area, Twinbrook, and he had a picture in his head, a plan he was determined to make true.
He reorganised the army, the auxies, na Fianna and Sinn Féin, but then he took things a step further. He organised republican involvement in the tenants’ associations - until then a fiefdom of the Sticks and SDLP. He pushed republicans to become involved in the everyday battles with the British Direct Rule administration and unionists on Lisburn Council. As far as he was concerned, there was so much to do and not enough time to do it.
He still found time though for his singing and playing the guitar. There was one memorable night when, in the middle of one of Bobby’s cabaret sessions, an IRA foot patrol came into the local drinking club and after checking a number of peoples IDs, they approached Bobby on the stage with the intention of asking him to read out a statement from the local unit - he had written it an hour previously! Somehow the Volunteer managed to misplace the statement and had only a bru card in the pocket, Bobby took this from the Volunteer and ad libbed his way through a 15-minute speech.
After six short months, however, he was back inside and I was already there too, waiting on him coming back. The rules were different this time though, with the denial of political status after March 1976.
The writer
Bobby was at the forefront of resistance to Britain’s criminalisation policies on remand in Crumlin Road Gaol and then once sentenced, in the H-Blocks. He had been involved in writing a local weekly newssheet before recapture and he decided to continue writing for it in gaol. After a while he started writing for Republican News, soon to become An Phoblacht/Republican News. He was now like a man possessed; it was his job to tell the story of every brutal assault, every sadistic attack on the naked prisoners in the H-Blocks. He also opened up communication with our women comrades in Armagh Women’s Gaol and those who retained political status in the Cages of Long Kesh.
The horrendous conditions in which we suffered meant nothing if the world outside of our immediate families knew nothing about them. Bobby was central to getting the word out, first of all to republicans and then to the wider community.
One effect of all this letter and article writing he was engaged in was that he developed a grá for poetry. He began to scribble bits of verse, which he would recite to the wing, interspersing it amongst his song repertoire. Nothing too heavy.
On one particular occasion, while we were in H6 in 1979, we received a collection of poems by the nationalist poet Ethna Carberry. Bobby was really taken with the maternal heartbreak of “An Páistín Fionn” and the blood-curdling tale of “Brian Boy Magee” that he set down and penned a letter. He got to the door that night after screws had left the wing and called to Brendan Hughes - ‘Dorcha, get up to your door, wait till you hear this letter, it’s a cracker, it’s to your woman Ethna Carberry. I had to write to her after reading those poems’. The Dark replied, ‘You may get your Ouija board out Bobby, she died 70 years ago!’ You can imagine the slegging he got there.
Preparing for Hunger Strike
As the crisis in the H-Blocks dragged on from ‘79 into ‘80 and we went through different avenues to move the British on the Political Status issue, it became clear that we would be left with one last option - The Hunger Strike.
We had talked about the final recourse to Hunger Strike since the collapse of the Cardinal Ó Fiaich negotiations with Thatcher. It seemed to us that it didn’t matter what the people of Ireland thought or said, the British had but one aim and that was to smash the republican resistance both inside and out of the gaols.
People began to prepare for Hunger Strike in the summer of 1980. We had been involved in a letter-writing campaign since the formation of the National H-Block/Armagh committee in the winter of ‘79. This was intensified in the run-in to the Hunger Strike in October 1980. We wrote to anyone and everyone of influence in Ireland, in Britain, throughout the world. Bobby was in his element. We were not allowed to receive replies, only personal letters - one per month - were allowed, so to be honest none of us knew what impact, if any, these letters had. We do know that hundreds and hundreds poured out of each block week after week, month after month. I later found out that these tiny letters had a massive impact throughout the world, carrying our message of the horrors of the H-Blocks.
Spinning yarns
Yet somehow or another, at the end of a frenzied day of writing, visits debates and arguments with governors and warders and whoever else, Bobby used to be able to get up to his door after lights out and relate a yarn. Usually, this would be from some obscure novel he had read but the tale he spun would be like nothing less than a movie blockbuster as prisoners sat in the darkness; mattresses propped on the cell pipes, listening to some magical tale of good overcoming evil, the righteous oppressed throwing off the shackles of the oppressor.
The hunger strike of 1980, as we all know, ended with the doublespeak and bad faith that helped the British to conquer and rule half the world. Instead of letting people’s heads go down, Bobby and the rest of us on the gaol leadership bent over backwards to come to some sort of comprise with the prison governors and their allies in the NIO. They were not interested. They believed, foolishly, that republicans were beaten, that they had us on the run and it was simply a case of them holding their nerve and watching the gaol protest collapsing. How stupid were they?
1981
It became apparent to a number of us that a second hunger strike was inevitable. With Bobby leading the charge in the face of justified concerns and worries from the army leadership outside, we pressed our case. We were successful. Bobby organised for himself to be the first man on the strike, the first then to die, the two-week gap before Francie Hughes joined him giving the British space to move, to make concessions once Thatcher had her pound of flesh.
At the end of his second week on the strike, he wrote to me telling me that he had put on a fine hopeful face to those around him on the wing, to his clann on the visits. But he told me he had no intention of trying to pretend anything with me. He was determined to do what had to be done and he knew that the British would show no mercy. Yet he was confident that by his actions his comrades coming behind, and a whole generation of young still unborn, would be so inspired as to ensure that his goal, his dream, his Aisling would become a reality. The rest is history. The story of the actual Stailc Ocrais was told and retold so often last year I’m not even going to try to revisit it here.
Tá mé chun chríochnú anseo beidh sibh sásta cluinsint ach
A chairde, we have come a long way since those sad dark days of 1981. We’ve still got a long way to go but we’re steadily making progress. During those leanest of days in the prisons we got by “one day at a time”. Out here it is a battle a day too. So:
Ar Aghaidh go bua
Ar Aghaidh don Phoblacht.
Go raibh míle maith agaibh as éisteacht liom anocht. Slán abhaile.
‘Bobby’s Dead’
by Jack McKinney
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[Our old friend [retired Philadelphia Daily News columnist] Jack McKinney has begun to release all his archival stuff on the 1981 H Block Hunger Strike…. This article from five years back really sets the tone. It has, if I may say so, a certain lyricism that is absent from his powerful reportage in 1981.Well, watching friends and comrades starve to death doesn’t exactly evoke lyricism, rather rage and sorrow…..–Roger Collins]
I wrote [this] spontaneously one night in May, ‘96, after reflecting on the fact that a lot of younger people who didn’t actually experience that protracted nightmare would find it difficult, in reading the inadequate existing literature, to get a sense of what it was like emotionally. As you’ll see, I was also pissed –as I still am in retrospect– at the cowardice shown by Yank news photogs generally, and the Phila Daily News cur particularly, when they got the ‘action’ they’d been clamoring for.
–Black Jack
A Cairde: There’s few memories I’d like to share before calling it a night.
The evening of May 4, 1981, my mate Seamus and I were heading back up the road to Andytown when we saw a white-line vigil a short stretch beyond the Kennedy Way roundabout. White-line vigils were a common sight in West Belfast that Spring, just as a common sound was the plaintive tenor voice of Francie Brolly and his H-Block Song, wafting through open windows from record players in at least one house on every street in the district. No one was hoping anymore. Only wondering. When?
An APC overtook us and pulled alongside the single column of young people in the vigil. The Brit up front swung open the door and slung the greasy remains of a fish’n'chips take-out among them, shouting: “‘ere! Run this up to yer boy Bobby!” You never got to read about the countless nightly provocations like this.
Sure, at least some of you are probably fantasizing right now about what you would have done. Maybe about how you would have scooped up the garbage and flung it right back in the face of the taunter.
If one of the vigil-keepers had surrendered to such an impulse, a 7.62 round would have thumped into its target, leaving globs of pink-stained grey matter mixed in with the remains of the fish’n'chips.
The lance corporal would have said the Yellow Card gave him the right to fire when confronted with lethal force and his fellow squaddies would have sworn they saw the others in the vigil passing off a weapon, hand by hand, till it disappeared in the angry crowd that seemed to gather from nowhere.
That you would have read about.
* * * * *
Downtown Radio had signed off with its usual, seductive “Chariots of Fire” tape and it was going on 2 a.m. when I heard Seamus’s wife rapping softly on my bedroom door, whispering so as not to wake the kids.
“Jack. Bobby’s dead.”
No matter how long you’d been expecting to hear that, it still felt like a cannon ball tearing through the gut when the news actually came.
* * * * *
Already the bin lids were dinning through the estate. Protesting. Denouncing. Lamenting. Summoning. People were gathering on Andytown Road. Cursing. Crying. There was the harsh sound of glass shattering and the squeal of metal drums being dragged up from the Busy-B for barricades.
A crew of American press photographers had been staying at the little hotel that used to be right down from the Felon’s Club. One of them liked to swagger around wearing a cowboy hat, demanding to know when the action was going to start. The others didn’t have cowboy hats, but every last one of them had a safari jacket adorned with press tags in several different languages and scripts, which they thought gave them a license to swagger and make the same complaints about the lack of action.
I now banged on one’s door and told him to roust his chums because the action they’d been so desperate for was already underway down at the foot of Clonard. He stuttered as he tried to paraphrase the bulletins he’d heard on the radio warning everyone to stay off the streets. Having taken this as sound advice, he and his colleagues had decided to “stay put until the British army has the situation under control.”
* * * * *
Down at Sinn Fein Headquarters (the old one, before Connolly House) some staffers were trying to discourage the wee lads from making Kamikaze petrol-bomb-runs at a Brit roadblock on the bottom of the Springfield Rd. The message didn’t sink in till one wee lad got hit with a sniper’s bullet high on the inside of his thigh, near the groin.
This couldn’t have really happened, of course, because none of the American photographers was there to snap a picture of the boy being carried off the road with his blood pumping out in gulping spurts. But a French TV crew wheeled in from Leeson St. and was starting to set up till Seamus and I persuaded them to put the victim in their maroon van and rush him over to Royal instead, because the high velocity bullet had destroyed the major artery in his thigh and even with his belt cinched above it, he’d be dead in a few more minutes.
The Frenchies didn’t get a picture, either, but they had something ticking inside that doesn’t seem to come with safari jackets and cowboy hats.
* * * * *
About an hour later, a call came in to SFHQ. Bobby Sands had finally been brought home and Jimmy Drumm had to speak to his parents about the Republican funeral arrangements.
But the Brits had Twinbrook sealed off from below. Could Seamus and I find another way to get Jimmy in? We could and did, taking back roads and a couple of fields to loop up and around Lisburn and come back down to Twinbrook from there.
Bobby didn’t look anything like the broadfaced, beaming young man the world knew only from that picture taken years earlier in Long Kesh. His hair was neatly trimmed and parted on the left side, and he looked more like the young accountant he might have become. His cheekbones, always prominent, were now the most dominant feature of a face that remained handsome even in its shrunken state.
* * * * *
There was one moment so almost overwhelmingly poignant that I can still close my eyes and summon it in vivid detail. A ringlet of hair lay across Bobby’s upper right forehead. His younger brother Sean, who idolized him stepped unobtrusively behind the casket and, reaching in, tenderly brushed back the stray locks.
John Sands, prematurely whitehaired at 57, tightened his arm around wife Rosaleen and sighed.
“We should have a photo of how he looks now. If only we had a photographer.” Seamus and I exchanged glances. We had both been thinking the same thing.
————-
Bobby Sands was defiantly elected to the British Parliment by the people of Fermanagh-South Tyrone while on hunger strike. The Speaker’s announcement of his death in that body pointedly excluded the traditional condolences to the family on the death of a Member.
According to journalist David Beresford in his book Ten Men Dead: The story of the 1981 Irish Hunger Strike, “a news agency photographer [later] offered the Sands family 75,000 for a picture of Bobby in his coffin. During his time in internment a group photograph had been taken of him and fellow prisoners, with a smuggled camera, and the blurred picture had become one of the most famous in the world. His family turned down the offer of a new one.”
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Irish Hunger Strikes Chapter 25
Tuesday, 1:17 A.M., 1981
Bobby Sands Joins Connolly, Pearse and Tone
At 1:17 on the morning of Tuesday, 5 May 1981 Bobby Sands died for Ireland. At 1:52 A.M., the Northern Ireland Office released this terse statement: “He took his own life by refusing food and medical intervention for sixty-six days.”
Bin lids, riots, and plastic bullets
By 2 A.M., women were on the streets in Nationalist areas banging bin lids on the concrete, like primitive drums to announce and keen Bobby’s death to the gods above and the natives alike, and in defiance of the gathering, ever present enemy army and foreign regime.
By morning, riots spread throughout the north, barricades went up, lorries hijacked and torched. This was quickly met with crown force actions against neighborhoods with armored vehicles and plastic bullet attacks on the people. Armed men and women were silently in place to protect against large scale loyalist murder squad invasions — the oft spoken of total “civil war” scenario. Bread was hoarded in Catholic homes.
The Speaker of the House of Commons rose to make the following announcement to parliament: “I regret to have to inform the House of the death of Robert Sands Esquire, the Member for Fermanagh and South Tyrone.” And that was that. I am sure he did regret to have to inform the House. He pointedly deleted the customary extending of sympathy to the family.
World wide reaction
The reaction elsewhere in the world was more impassioned. The US Congress and state and local governments passed resolutions honoring Bobby’s sacrifice and sent letters of condolence. The NJ state legislature noted his “courage and convictions.”
NY Cardinal Cook offered a mass in St. Patrick’s Cathedral. The New York Times, the country’s premier newspaper, editorialized: “Despite proximity and a common language, the British have persistently misjudged the depth of Irish Nationalist.”
In Rome, the President of the Italian Senate did what the Brit Speaker couldn’t bring himself to do by expressing the Italian government’s sympathies to the Sands’ family. Five thousand protesters burned the Union Jack in Milan. Thousands more marched in Paris behind a large portrait of Bobby chanting “The IRA will conquer.” In Le Mans they named a street after him. The British embassy there call it an “insult to Britain.”
Even Hong Kong, a British direct colony, was outraged by Bobby’s death. The Hong Kong Standard said it was “sad that successive British governments have failed to end the lst of Europe’s religious wars.” The Hindustan Times remarked that Margaret Thatcher’s allowing a fellow Member of Parliament to die of starvation was an act which never had occurred before in a “civilized country.” Iran announced it would be sending its representative to Bobby’s funeral in West Belfast.
Protesters in Oslo, Norway, hurled a balloon filled with tomato sauce at the English Queen Elizabeth, there on a state visit. In India, the opposition party in the Upper House stood for a minute of silent in tribute [Indira Gandhi’s ruling party refused to stand.] The members of the opposition party also stood in the Portuguese legislature. It seemed that parties in power feared Brit anger. But in Spain, the Ya newspaper said Bobby’s death was “an act of heroism.” Pravda called his death “another tragic page in the grim chronicle of oppression, discrimination, terror and violence” in Ireland. Poland’s Lech Walesa paid tribute, “Bobby Sands was a great man who sacrificed his life for his struggle.”
Bombs on European Midland
Bombs were heard exploding in Toulouse at the British owned Dunlop tire warehouse; in Milan a bomb blew a hole in the Brit Chamber of Commerce; and in Lisbon a bomb exploded outside the Royal British Club. A parcel bomb was detected before it could be delivered to the Prince of Wales.
Cardinal Basil Hume: “It’s suicide”
The West German paper, Die Welt, however, said that the Brits were correct in allowing Bobby die and not giving in to “political blackmail.” The Spanish conservative paper ABC said he was “a political kamikaze” who got his strategy wrong. But the most bitter reaction must be accorded to the English Catholic Cardinal, Basil Hume, who called Bobby’s death “suicide.”
British army Lt. Colonel Dr. Thomas: “No. Bobby was like a soldier.”
Hume’s callous stupidity was answered best by Dr. Michael Thomas in the August edition of the British Medical Association’s News Review. Thomas was the chairman of the Association’s Ethics Committee and a serving lieutenant-colonel in the British army. His remarks were made all the more poignant considering his stature and his professional background. He said Bobby was “like the piper walking in front of a highland battalion, the bloke who was prepared to be shot down first.”
Specifically to Hume, Dr. Thomas wrote: “Is it suicide for a soldier to charge a machine-gun nest, knowing that he was almost certain to get killed? Isn’t it what we describe as laying down one’s life for a brother? That’s what Bobby Sands was doing…”
Screws: “Oh, What A Beautiful Morning”
Meanwhile inside the Kesh, the screws didn’t know how to act. Several made their delight evident; one serenaded the Blanketmen in his wing with his rendition of “Oh, What A Beautiful Morning”. But the general reaction of the screws was to let it pass, no doubt under orders not to cause a problem or for fear of getting the contents of slop out pots in their faces.
“Old Bobby” — The Protestant Hospital Orderly
Not everyone on the so called “other side of the religious divide” in the prison was a monster, although most certainly qualified. Good people are everywhere and even those that disagreed with Republicans or their methods could appreciate the bond of a common humanity.
Such a man was “Old Bobby”, a Protestant man in prison for tax irregularities. He was a hospital orderly during the hunger strike years of 1980 and 1981. Raymond McCartney recalls how he meet Bobby H., ” a very warm and genuine man”, the year after the hunger strike deaths when he was in the prison hospital himself. Old Bobby, who they also called the Old Man or “Sean Fhear” in Irish, gave Raymond a heart wrenching tour of the rooms where the ten men died and told stories of those terrible times. But there was good humor too and unexpected human kindness under horrific circumstances.
The Sean Fhear was probably the human being closest to the men as they died in at least a physical sense, and he a Protestant “ordinary criminal”. He was approached by the British and Irish press for interviews after his release. He told Raymond that he told those media people, “What I shared with the hunger strikers was not for selling newspapers.” He affirmed that he witnessed “unparalleled courage.” He would sneak in books, papers, tobacco, or anything that he could to make the last days of the hunger strikers easier. He told of how Bobby Sands’ was using package after package of “fag papers” and yet the tobacco that was smuggled in to him was hardly touched. Old Bobby H. was concerned that Bobby Sands was eating them or was engaged in some other dangerous pursuit. Imagine how the two laughed when Bobby explained to Old Bobby that he was using the paper to write comms on. Old Bobby also got the screws angry on occasion, such as when he commented to one that he had to clean up Bobby’s hospital room really well today, “After all, we have an MP in the wing now.” Old Bobby’s good nature didn’t spare him the glares of the prison personnel who heard that remark.
“May God forgive them”
On the day before Bobby Sands died, and he was coming in an out of coma, Old Bobby, the Sean Fhear, was in the TV room while the Sands family were by Bobby’s side. Bobby asked for Old Bobby and once he recognized him, said, “Bobby, I’m going to die but I want to thank you for all you have done for me and the other lads, We will never forget you; you are a real gentleman.” Old Bobby held young Bobby’s hand and cried.
Old Bobby, the sean fhear, told Raymond McCartney: “Despite all his own suffering, the prospect of imminent death, this man whom I met hardly a month before this remembered me and thanked me. For what? A bit of tobacco and some papers. For a man so noble and brave that he gave his life for his friends and in a strange was, even for me, they let this man die. May God forgive them.”
The Dublin government’s reaction?
In March 1982, the year after Bobby Sands’ passed into Irish history, he was selected Grand Marshal of the St. Patrick’s Day Parade in New York City. A prominent Irish born businessman praised Bobby’s selection and saluted his sacrifice for Ireland in a paid advertisement in the Irish Echo. The man did a lot of business with the Irish government. He soon received a call implying that he had insulted Dublin by honoring Bobby and was losing his Irish business connections.
A friend of the Irish American businessman intervened on his behalf with Sean Donlon, then Irish Ambassador to the US, to get things straightened out. Donlon told the friend what the businessman, who dared to honor one of the greatest Irish heroes of all time, could do to get back into the good graces of the Irish government: “He can crawl.”
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