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On the 25th anniversary of Bobby Sands’ death his close friend, Séanna Walsh, shares some of the memories of the time he spent with the man who has gone down in history as one of the central icons of Irish republicanism

By Damian McCarney

Twenty-five years after his death on hunger strike, Bobby Sands is regarded as an icon of Irish republicanism, often spoken about in the same breath as figures like Ché Guevara. However, for Séanna Walsh, he was simply his friend and comrade.

Photo: Séanna Walsh

In many ways Séanna’s life mirrored Bobby Sands’, having been brought up in a working-class area during the height of the conflict, being a committed republican and sacrificing years of his life in prison.
Both will also be remembered for their roles in landmark events in the North’s history with Bobby’s death on hunger strike, and Séanna’s reading of the announcement of the formal conclusion of the IRA’s armed campaign last July.
The two friends first met when Séanna entered Long Kesh as a 16-year-old Fian in January 1973, facing armed robbery charges.
Bobby had been in prison since the previous October, awaiting trial for possession of weapons, and was two years Séanna’s senior. On first impressions, Séanna could be forgiven for not recognising that Bobby would have such a lasting impact on him, and indeed the history of Ireland.
“I remember the way that he came dandering up to me, a sort of swagger – the classic cocky Belfast walk. He stuck his hand out and introduced himself, and said, ‘What are you in for?’ He was your cocky, ordinary Belfast teenager, with a spikey Rod Stewart-style haircut, and into soccer,” smiled Séanna, who originally hails from the Short Strand.
After a few weeks the teenagers were transferred along with other remand prisoners to Crumlin Road Jail and when their cases were heard in mid-1973 both men received five-year sentences and they ended up back in Long Kesh.
During this period, IRA prisoners enjoyed political status which was begrudgingly conceded by William Whitelaw after the 1972 hunger strike led by, among others, Billy McKee.
Consequently they were not required to wear prison garb, nor carry out prison work, leaving them free to learn the Irish language, and to immerse themselves in political theory.
“Your day was your own. In Cage 17 there was an extensive library and everyone was encouraged to read all the books. We were very keen readers of different political philosophers,” said Séanna.
Before their release in 1976, the two young pals were among the prisoners who watched the H-Blocks being built from a vantage point on the rooftops in the prison camp, and joked about who would be the first one back inside. Although there were lighter moments, the pair remained focused on furthering the republican cause, and prepared to take the conflict to the British on their release.
“We trained our minds and bodies, looking forward to getting back on the streets and to continue where we left off. We were very eager,” said Séanna.
Séanna was released in May 1976, only a matter of weeks after Bobby. During his imprisonment Séanna’s family had moved from their Short Strand home to the new development of Twinbrook, where Bobby’s family had fled having been intimidated from their Rathcoole home by loyalists. Bobby was in charge of the Twinbrook IRA, and he convinced Séanna to transfer to his unit to help transform the Twinbrook unit into an effective machine – on all fronts.
Struggle
“During one yarn we had, he said he didn’t see the struggle as just a military conflict. He organised community political groups in the area, he ensured that there were republicans in the local tenants’ associations, he organised a Sinn Féin cumann, organised the Fianna and an auxiliary defence force. He organised the publishing of a local newsletter for Twinbrook and social events to give a focus for republicans in the area. All the strategising and all the theory that he had read about and studied in prison were quickly being put into practice,” said Séanna.
Bobby believed that by creating such an extensive infrastructure, it would become impossible for the British to remove the republican ideal from the area.
Caught in possession of a rifle, Séanna was arrested in the summer of 1976 and held on remand in Crumlin Road jail. Bobby joined him in October the same year, receiving a 14-year sentence for possession of a revolver.
Protest
The pair eventually ended up in the newly-built H-Blocks, which was by that stage straining under the repressive policy of criminalisation. The blanket protest had been born a matter of months earlier with Kieran Nugent’s brave stance against the removal of political status, and his refusal to accept a prison uniform unless it was nailed to his back.
Those who joined the protest were subjected to the most inhuman physical and psychological torture, and there seemed no end in sight as the British remained intransigent, dismissing their demands.
In a bid to highlight their plight to the public, the first hunger strikes commenced in 1980, and during this period Bobby became OC with Séanna acting as his deputy. Bad faith on the part of the British government led to a brokered deal falling through soon after the prisoners came off the strike.
In calling the second hunger strike in 1981, Bobby went over the heads of the IRA leadership outside the prison who vehemently opposed the idea. When he made it clear that he was going ahead, and that he would lead by example, the leadership then instructed that Séanna should become the OC. However, Bobby again overruled their decision.
“He asked Brendan McFarlane [to become OC] as our relationship was too close. He was concerned that I would allow it to damage my judgement. He was probably right, I would have let that emotional bond influence me at that stage of Bobby’s life,” admitted Séanna.
“After 14 or 15 days he wrote a wee note to me saying that he had prepared his family to have faith and confidence, that it [his hunger strike] would break the British. But he also wrote ‘at the end of the day, I don’t think that the British will move until they get their pound of flesh’,” said Séanna.
When the Member of Parliament for Fermanagh and South Tyrone, Frank Maguire, died in March 1981 the door was open for an audacious bid to have Bobby Sands elected as MP to put further pressure on the British. With the SDLP, Bernadette Devlin and Frank Maguire’s brother standing aside, it became a straight fight against the Ulster Unionist candidate, Harry West.
By the time of the election, prisoners had smuggled a small radio into the H-Blocks, enabling them to hear news on the outside and also find out the election results.
Being held in cells separately or in twos, the breaking news was passed to each prisoner by whispering through holes where pipes came into the cells.
“We had wired people off not to give any indication that they knew as it would mean that we had access to a radio to find out the news. So we had said not to make any big deal of it.
“The knock [to let neighbouring cells know there was a message to be passed that Bobby had been elected] went all the way down through the cells and the next thing, someone went up to the door and let out a big yell.
“After that the whole wing exploded with cheers, and people began banging the doors with their piss pots,” smiling at the memory of the momentous event.
“At that time there was an orderly out mopping the floors and the warders came in and hit him a slap saying, ‘You, were speaking to the prisoners!’
“He was innocent and they beat the crap out of him,” continued Séanna.
The sense of elation shared by the prisoners after the electoral success was short-lived for Séanna, however.
“It was a very, very heavy time. Once he was elected we were all on a high, and thought maybe, just maybe, it would bring an end to this.
“Surely the British can’t allow an MP to die. It would be crazy in terms of propaganda.
“Over the following days, though, I came back to what Bobby had said in his note.
Torturous
“He believed he would be the pound of flesh paid before the British gave anything. They would allow him to die, and maybe others.”
After 66 agonising days on hunger strike, Bobby Sands died on May 5 1981.
“Even before his death there was a blanket of sadness and an atmosphere of despair had settled on the wings.
“There was no slagging, joking or any craic. We all retreated into our own thoughts and our concerns, not only for Bobby but for the other three lads who were on hunger strike.
“Whenever I got the news that he had died I didn’t cry. I didn’t allow myself to cry. It wasn’t until 1984, when I went to visit Bobby’s grave, that I allowed myself to cry there.
“My thoughts were for his family and his son who would never get to grow up with him.”
Twenty-five years after his death Bobby Sands has become an iconic figure. Countries across the world have streets named in his honour and using the modern barometer of fame, a Google search of ‘Bobby Sands’ brings up a vast ocean of hits. Séanna believes that his friend would have found this attention overwhelming.
“He was a self-effacing guy who would take reddeners very easily. The idea that he would be a republican icon would be mind-blowing to him. That he is recognised as an icon along the lines of Ché Guevara would have tickled him no end, I’m sure.”
For Séanna the memory of the events of 1981 are still very painful, but he believes that the selfless acts of the hunger strikers have not been in vain. In addition to giving republicans confidence to pursue electoral politics, Séanna believes that Bobby Sands and the hunger strikers’ legacy lies in their success in defeating the policy of criminalisation.
“Their strategy was based on a lie that the freedom fighters were simply common criminals and deserved no other status. In prisons they treated us as criminals as if we were part of some criminal conspiracy in Ireland, but they ended up criminalising themselves in the eyes of people throughout the world.”

Journalist:: Damien McCarney

Newshound

(Susan McKay, Irish News)

Their silence is deafening. Can you imagine the pitch of self-righteous frenzy that unionist politicians would by now have reached had it been revealed that the main source of the IRA’s weapons in the early days of the Troubles had been the Irish army?

That innocent Protestant civilians had been gunned down in the streets by terrorists using those weapons? That elements of the Garda were close to the IRA and were giving information to Gerry Adams? That the Irish government knew, and suppressed the information?

Yes, you can imagine it. The silence which has greeted the revelations carried in The Irish News this week about collusion between the security forces and loyalist paramilitaries is perhaps the most shameful aspect of the whole sordid story.

As I write, unionist politicians have responded minimally and only to try to deny that the information is true and accurate.

Lord Denning infamously said that the prospect that the Birmingham Six might be innocent presented such an “appalling vista” that it must be rejected. This is another appalling vista – and it must be faced.

The sources of the documents published in this paper this week, and painstakingly analysed by Steven McCaffery, simply cannot be plausibly rubbished. This is evidence from the heart of the British establishment.

It was uncovered by researchers at the Pat Finucane Centre and Justice for the Forgotten.

The Irish News has published documents which show that in 1973 British military intelligence knew that up to 15% of UDR soldiers were also involved with loyalist paramilitary groups. That the UDR was the “best single source of weapons” for those groups. That the weapons were being used in sectarian murder attacks on catholic civilians. That in 1975 Labour secretary of state Merlyn Reese briefed Tory leader Margaret Thatcher that there were elements in the RUC who were “very close” to the UVF, and were prepared “to hand over information, for example, to Mr Paisley”.

This reference to the DUP leader is particularly interesting in the light of the false allegations he has made in the House of Commons regarding those he claims were responsible for the Kingsmills Massacre.

Paisley claimed his information came from security sources but the RUC denied and repudiated it.

Much of the so-called information passed to loyalists over the years was based on rumour, fuelled by passionate sectarianism. Many innocent people have died as a result.

The UDR was formed out of the notorious B Specials and brazenly carried on the tradition of that unionist militia. Remember that dual membership of the UDR and the UDA was for a considerable time perfectly legal. The ‘Subversion in the UDR’ document reveals that the main anxiety on the part of the British was that the loyalty of a large element of the UDR was to Ulster and not to Britain, and the implications of that.

Although loyalist paramilitaries boasted that they were the “gloves off” branch of the security forces, allegations about collusion have always been met with denial from ‘respectable’ unionists. Far from accepting that it was institutionalised in the local security forces, unionists have even rejected the idea that there were “bad apples”.

The UUP’s former security spokesman, Ken, now Lord, Maginnis, claimed that in his time in the UDR (during the 1970s) he had only come across a small number of “bruised” apples.

This is hardly in keeping with the comment in the 1973 British intelligence report that if you removed the undesirables you would be left with a “very small regiment indeed”.

John Stalker tried to investigate collusion and was thwarted.

John Stevens was obstructed over 14 years but found that it existed during the 1980s, including “the extreme of agents being involved in murder”.

Mr Justice Henry Barron’s investigation into the Dublin and Monaghan bombs revealed a chilling network of loyalists, policemen and UDR soldiers who murdered with apparent impunity while the British and Irish authorities were preoccupied with the “real” enemy, the IRA.

Barron was refused access to British intelligence documents he needed.

Judge Peter Cory protested vehemently when the British rushed through legislation making it impossible for the sort of inquiry he had called for to be carried out into the murder of Pat Finucane. The Saville Inquiry was obstructed and evidence willfully destroyed.

A Tyrone coroner was refused access to documents he needed to carry out inquests into controversial murders in the 1990s.

We now know a bit more about what they have got to hide.

May 5, 2006
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This article appeared first in the May 4, 2006 edition of the Irish News.

Newshound

(Steven McCaffery, Irish News)

Thirty years ago a gun and bomb attack on a south Armagh pub killed three people. Now a bereaved relative is establishing the truth of what happened. What he has learned may force a rethink of the history of the Troubles

Trevor Brecknell got to see his new daughter before he died. It is one of the few things his killers could not take from him.

After visiting his wife and two-day-old baby in hospital, he drove to Donnelly’s bar in Silverbridge.

It was the evening of December 19 1975. Nearly Christmas. Trevor, 32 and now a father-of-three, was surrounded by friends and relatives, and a sing-song was under way.

Within minutes he was among three dead. Six people were injured, including Trevor’s brother-in-law who was shot five times, and his sister-in-law, who survived being shot in the head.

The loyalist gang killed 24-year-old Patsy Donnelly first – shooting him as he pulled up to the petrol pumps.

One survivor recalls what happened next.

“I heard a banging outside then the door was kicked in. Shots were fired into the bar.

“Trevor and I were sitting opposite the door. It had a heavy spring on it and it slammed back in the gunman’s face. He broke the glass panel with his gun and began firing through the broken glass.

“Trevor just slumped forward beside me without saying a word. I got shot twice and fell to the floor. Everyone else was huddled in the corner, with the man still shooting.”

Michael Donnelly (14), the bar owner’s son, died when the gang threw in the bomb shouting: “Happy Christmas you fenian bastards.”

Another witness later said he recalled “hearing a blurred figure laughing” as he fell to the ground.

In recent years Trevor Brecknell’s eldest son, Alan, has pieced together what happened that night and has learned that security force members were among the gang.

“There was always an allegation of security force involvement,” he says.

“I grew up believing it was as little as making sure that the roads were kept clear. In more recent years it has been confirmed to us by the police that there was a member of the UDR, a reserve RUC officer and loyalists from Portadown involved in the attack. The UDR member was subsequently killed by the IRA in 1976 and it’s been alleged he was involved in a number of other incidents including the Dublin and Monaghan bombings. His name was Robert McConnell.”

It was not until the more positive atmosphere that followed the ceasefires of the mid-1990s that the families bereaved at Donnelly’s bar felt it was safe to begin to dig deeper into the events.

During a business trip to Derry, Alan knocked on the door of the Pat Finucane centre – the human rights group named after the solicitor killed in a conspiracy between the state and loyalist paramilitaries, the full truth of which is still emerging.

They helped gather statements from those connected to the tragedy at Donnellys and issued an appeal for the RUC officer who led the original investigation to come forward. He agreed to meet them.

“His opening comments to us were, ‘I have no doubt that there was collusion between members of the UDR, RUC and loyalist paramilitaries on the attack on Donnelly’s bar’.

“While we maybe knew it in the back of our own heads, it was still shocking to hear from an official source,” Alan says.

The relatives did not have the names of those believed to have been responsible but they lobbied the authorities and took court action to force more information into the open.

Alan eventually became a researcher for the Pat Finucane Centre, forging close ties with Justice for the Forgotten, representing those bereaved in the 1974 Dublin and Monaghan bombings in which 33 died.

The two groups sent a team to scour the mass of paperwork in the public records office in London each time new government files were released under the 30-year rule.

UDR members have been linked to the Dublin-Monaghan bombings and the Donnelly’s bar attack, so when one of the team discovered a document entitled ‘Subversion in the UDR’, they all took notice.

“This is the most significant thing we have found at any stage.

“It was quite alarming to find that the British government at the highest level knew, as they put it themselves, that there was ’subversion within the UDR’,” Alan says.

“They knew that it went as far as getting guns for loyalists and involvement in murder.”

Alan now knows that more than two years before his father’s death British authorities were aware that large numbers of UDR members were connected to loyalist paramilitary groups, and were the “only source of modern weapons” for loyalists. The government, nevertheless, expanded the regiment’s role.

He is shocked, but says it is also a positive step on his journey.

“It is official; it settles that part of the story now. No-one can say it’s the rantings of Alan Brecknell or whoever. It’s official.”

The files he helped discover have now been passed to the police Historic Enquiries Team to help shed light on other cases.

Trevor Brecknell was from Birmingham but none of his English relatives attended his funeral.

His parents were told Trevor was killed by the IRA and it would not be safe for them to cross the Irish Sea. The RUC is blamed for the false information.

“That to me is unforgivable,” said Alan suddenly struggling to hold back tears. “Granny Brecknell died not knowing what really happened to her son.”

May 3, 2006
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This article appeared first in the May 2, 2006 edition of the Irish News.

An Phoblacht

“He’s My Son”

25 years ago this week Bobby Sands died after 66 days on Hunger Strike. Laurence McKeown also took part in the 1981 Hunger Strike, going for 70 days without food. Here, he talks to An Phoblacht’s ELLA O’DWYER about his own background, jail experience, his impressions of Bobby Sands and the affects of a prolonged encounter with death at such an early age.

“I was born in the village of Randalstown, County Antrim, a rural place where, typical of the times, there was no water or electricity. Ours was a relatively non-political household. My parents were quiet, unassuming people who lived in a mixed community of Protestants and Catholics, all knowing each other on first name terms”.

Photo: Laurence McKeown talking to An Phoblacht’s Ella O’Dwyer

In 1969 Laurence was 12 years old: ” Bernadette Devlin, John Hume etc. were on TV regularly and, like many people of his generation, my father was fired up by the Civil Rights campaign. It touched a nerve. It was a time of heavy discrimination, most obviously in terms of housing. My father and a Protestant neighbour he worked with had submitted identical building plans to the local council. My father’s was knocked back and the Protestant’s accepted.”

Around this time, young Protestants with whom Laurence grew up were joining the Ulster Defence Regiment. “At about 15 or 16, myself and my mates would be stopped by these same recruits who in, the reality of rural Antrim, were neighbours.

“In the beginning they were embarrassed at asking us what our names were and where we were going . They knew our names; they had grown up beside us. They knew exactly who we were. A pattern emerged where these former acquaintances were ordering us out of cars and lining us up against walls. It wasn’t about religion. It was about one side being armed while the other wasn’t”. This was a turning point for Laurence and, at the age of 16, he became actively involved in republicanism.

“I was arrested on 2 August 1976 and taken to Castelreigh holding centre. This was at a time when Ulsterisation, criminalistaion and normalisation was the policy under a Labour government; a time when powers of arrest and detention were extended and the non-jury Diplock courts were introduced.

“When it came to interrogation, the police had a free hand and people could be sentenced to life on the basis of statements, oral or signed. I was ill-prepared for what faced me in Castlereigh.”

The physical and psychological torture endured by those who passed through Castlereagh is well documented. ” The uncertainty, the unknown, the waiting” and the inevitable brutality. Whether through physical or psychological pressure, the interrogating team aimed to get results. After three days In Castlereagh McKeown was charged with attempted murder of an RUC man and causing explosions. He was then taken to Crumlin Road Jail in Belfast and subsequently to the H-Blocks at Long Kesh. He was sentenced in a non-jury Diplock court to life imprisonment. At this time other republicans were on the same path, many of whom would subsequently end up on hunger strike, people such Bobby Sands, Tom McElwee, Joe Mc Donnell and Kieran Doherty.

I asked him how he felt. Recalling the atmosphere of the non-jury court, he said: “The worst of it was that my mother was there. The judge asked if anyone present had something to say in favour of the defendant. I heard this woman’s voice, my mother’s saying: “He’s my son”. It was 1978 before he saw her again.

McKeown’s arrival at the H-Blocks at the age of 19 was as confusing and torturous as the interrogation period, again the encounter with “uncertainty, the unknown” and an inevitable period of waiting. Following in the steps of Kieran Nugent, he became a blanket man. “Kieran was probably a good man to start the protest. He was, that sort of …not a hard man, not macho, but solid”.

Instead of being delivered to the protesting block at H5, McKeown was taken to another block simply because, as he later discovered, the protesting block H5 was full up- full of blanket men. More and more people were joining the protest. This was a “lonely time” as the lone protesting prisoner in H2.

He was taken down to the circle and ordered to take off his clothes. He stripped to his underpants when a screw shouted, “I told you to fucking take off the heap”.

“The first days were the loneliest, I was naked and confused as to why I wasn’t with the other protesting prisoners in H5″- again the uncertainty, the unknown and the waiting. “Waiting on a beating was worse. There’s a kind of relief when it’s over”.

Bibles are a compulsorily feature of all British prisons. On arriving in his H Block cell Laurence spotted the inevitable Bible the bedside locker. “I opened the book in a haphazard way and found myself reading from something called the Book of Sirach. The line I was looking at simply stated that ‘gold must be tested at the heat of the furnace’. I took some inspiration from the quote”.

As it happened this interview took place in the small garden at the front of Laurence McKeown’s home. In a strange twist of events just as we spoke, a team of Bible enthusiast neighbours called by to talk about the good book. As their offer was declined, Laurence McKeown had a flash back to a scene in the Blocks. The phantom of the ‘prison visitor’ had come to mind. Prison visitors, quite like the Bible loving neighbours, work in teams of usually well intentioned, ungrounded people with little grasp on reality and too much time on their hands. He described how prison visitors had visited a blanketman’s cell one day: A woman came into the cell which was “riddled with shit, rotten food and maggots”. This messenger of God didn’t ask him how he was coping, how his family fared or how he could possibly survive in such horrific circumstances. ‘Where is your Bible’ she demanded, to which the young man replied: ‘I fucked it out the window’.

In later years, the Church was to feature in the Hunger Strike, forming a pressure group aimed directly at the families of the hunger strikers.

It was clear that Laurence McKeown’s prolonged engagement with death during the Hunger Strike was part of a journey through self awareness that began well before the Hunger Strike, through the conveyor belt of Castlereagh, the Crum and the Blocks. The blanket protest was a levelling and grounding period amongst protesting prisoners. By March 1978 there were a couple of hundred on the protest. Strip searches, abuse and beatings were the order of the day. “We were getting bad beatings, they thought to beat us off the protest. People were being allowed only two showers a week and were being stopped going out to the toilet”. The prisoners decided to withdraw co-operation even further. The system retaliated with brutality and in a very short time things had spiralled into the ‘no wash’ protest. “Shit on the walls, rotting food and maggots occupied the corners of the cells”. Yet, typical of the political prisoner, even in these dark circumstances they were actively challenging the system. By 1979 there were many protesting blocks.

The first time McKeown saw Bobby Sands was in H6. I asked him what he was like. ” It was the first time I seen him. I might have seen him once or twice before. We’d been through a rough period. But that was a brilliant period in H6, Jackie (Mc Mullan) was there, Bobby Sands etc. People expect leadership people of such calibre to be somehow spectacular and exceptionally charismatic. I remember thinking he was charismatic, creative and all, but Bobby was also one of the Boys, one of us.

“Bobby understood the historical importance of the period. There were political lectures reflecting on various IRA campaigns, splits, the Civil rights movement etc. It was a major period of politicisation. We learned to think, question and reflect through discussion.”

The Blanketmen and then the Hunger Strikers demanded the dignity and treatment due to political prisoners. This, as encompassed in the Five Demands, was crucial to the revolutionary process in Ireland. To criminalise the prisoners was to criminalise the conflict, to acknowledge political status was to admit that it was a war.

By the 1980’s republican prisoners believed that a hunger strike was inevitable. “The idea of a hunger strike was always there in the background. In 1979, with the visit of Pope John Paul, the idea of hunger striking was under consideration”. The reckoning was that the Church would have to deal with the hypocrisy of allowing such a scene of brutality and injustice to go on. Brendan ‘the Dark’ Hughes and Bobby had discussed the idea and raised it with the Movement outside. At that time the proposition was declined for the logical reason that there was not yet enough mobilisation outside. It needed more time. Soon the National H-Block Committee was set up and the time arrived in the early 1980s.”

In the aftermath of the end of the 1980 Hunger Strike, when the British failed to deliver the Five Demands, people like Bobby Sands understood that the next time around, people would die.

Asked how he felt at the end of the first hunger strike and the start of the next, McKeown spoke again of a sense of relief. They were again doing something. The prisoners had become accustomed to biding their time, forever waiting for something to happen. Sitting with the “uncertainty, the unknown and the waiting. We had been in the eye of the storm, yet there was a kind of calm during that time”. There had been a measure of hope when Bobby was elected MP for Fermanagh/South Tyrone. That was swiftly deflated as Thatcher legislated against the possibility of any other political prisoners standing for election.”

On 1 March 1981 Bobby Sands began a hunger strike to death, a commitment that he and others like McKeown had already made during the 1980 strike. Bobby Sands was dead almost 24 hours before word got to McKeown’s landing. “Fr Toner came into the Dark’s cell that morning. The Dark came to the door and shouted ‘Bobby is dead’. It wasn’t an angry time. It was more a question of who would take over after Bobby. Many of the screws were tamed down, I think even they realised they were living through the middle of something. The wing was quiet, the atmosphere sombre, even amongst the screws.”

While Joe McDonnell lasted 61 days, others survived for a lesser time. “Mickey Devine went on strike a week before me”. Devine was the last of the ‘ten men’ to die. It seemed like Laurence McKeown’s time was up.

In the prison hospital he recalls the differing natures of the prison hospital staff. “While one might steal your hospital allowance of fags, other medical staff, though very clinical, were not brutal. Some of these went on to meet gruesome ends, committing suicide or being killed in driving accidents through excessive drinking. After 70 days, that same brave woman who stood in the Diplock court at her son’s sentence, took him off the Hunger Strike. He remembers as he drifted into a coma her saying: “You did what you had to do and I have to do what I have to do”. The family had come under that ‘pressure group’- the church, some neighbourly and well intentioned and most ill-advised. Happily Laurence McKeown and his mother had two years of prison visits before his mother died. The same shy woman who had the courage to shout “he’s my son”

An Phoblacht

Bobby Sands dies

On 5 May 1981 IRA Volunteer, Hunger Striker and Fermanagh South/Tyrone MP Bobby Sands died in the H-Block prison hospital at Long Kesh. He had endured 65 days without food, and had spent his last two days in a coma. Sands’ emaciated body, lying in state at his home in Belfast’s Twinbrook estate, told the story of the torment and suffering which he had endured. (Click photo to view)

Sands’ condition had deteriorated steadily until he finally fell into a coma the previous Sunday morning from which he never regained consciousness. Lying in another cell in the prison hospital, South Derry Hunger Striker, Francis Hughes was reported to be periodically slipping into unconsciousness also. And there was increasing fear that he too was close to death.

In the weeks and days before Bobby Sands died there were two major attempts to unconditionally end the Hunger Strike. The first was an intervention by the European Commission on Human Rights. This was supported by the Dublin Government and the SDLP as a way to alleviate nationalist pressure on them to take Britain to task by supporting the prisoners demands. The second was the visit to Sands from the Pope’s Private Secretary Fr John Magee. Both interventions ended in failure following re-affirmations to their relatives by Bobby Sands, Francis Hughes, Raymond McCressh and Patsy O’Hara that they would not settle for less than the Five Demands.

For over a week before his death Bobby Sands had been in a critical condition with death a possibility at any moment. Several times he had reported that he had felt himself slipping into unconsciousness but managed to pull himslef back.

His skin had become so thin that he was placed on a water bed to prevent his bones breaking through and a week before he died, he was so weak that his conversation with the Pope’s envoy, left him totally exhausted.

By Thursday he had lost all feeling in his mouth and gums and was having great difficulty talking. He was also suffering great pain and medical staff indicated that he was on the point of death.

Of all the interventions in the Hunger Strike, possibly the most despicable came from British Labour Party opposition spokesperson on the North Don Concannon who, on Friday, 1 May arrived in Ireland and went to the H-Block prison hospital where he told a dying Bobby Sands that he and his party did not support the huinger strikers’ demands.

Concannon’s ghoulish visit- to tell a dying man that he did not support him- caused consternation among elements of the British Labour party, 28 of whose MPs had signed a parliamentary motion calling on the British Government to negotiate with the prisoners.

By Saturday, Sands had lost his eyesight completely and had no feeling in one side of his face, and then in the early hours of Sunday morning even his powerful determination could no longer keep him conscious and he slipped into a coma.

From this point on Sands’ death could have come at any moment and his family remained constantly at his bedside. His breathing became more laboured as his body struggled to stay alive but finally at 1.17am on Tuesday, 5 May, Bobby Sands died.

However prepared people may have thought they were for Sands’s death, the news came as a profound shock to the Irish nation, outraging people North and South. It also caused a huge international reaction.

On the streets of the Six Counties crowds gathered and prayed while others built barricades or fought fierce running battles with the British army and RUC.

Thousands of people in the 26 counties reacted immediately to the news with widespread marches and vigils. Dublin’s O’Connell Street was brought to a standstill as hundreds gathered in silent vigil throughout the morning.

The body of Bobby Sands was brought to his Twinbrook home in Belfast on Tuesday evening where a steady stream of thousands of mourners filed past his open coffin which was alternatively flanked by guards of honour from Óglaigh na hÉireann, Na Fianna Éireann and Cumann na mBan.

On Wednesday Sands’ remains, flanked by an IRA Guard of Honour, made the short journey to St Luke’s chapel.

At around 2pm the following day, Thursday, the funeral set out for the four-mile journey to the cemetery. Men, women and youths wept as the cortege passed by. A piper played the tune of the H-Block song the words of which are:

“I’ll wear no convict’s uniform,

‘Nor meekly serve my time,

That Britain might call Ireland’s fight

Eight hundred years of crime.”

The funeral stopped close to the Busy Bee shopping centre and Sands’ coffin was removed from the hearse and placed on tressels.

Then, from among the crowd of people emerged three IRA Volunteers who fired three volleys from rifles over the coffin.

Sinn Féin’s Gerry Adams officiated at the graveside ceremony which began with the playing of the Last Post. The Tricolour was removed from the coffin, and along with a beret and gloves was presented to Sands’ mother.

The coffin was finally carried to the grave by the IRA Guard of Honour.

In poignant scenes Bobby Sands’ seven-year-old son Gerald helped to spade the soil that buried his father.

The funeral oration was delivered by Fermanagh republican Owen carron, who had been Bobby Sands’ election agent. During the course of the oration he said: “They tried to compromise Bobby Sands, they tried to compromise his supporters, but they failed. Around the world Bobby Sands has humiliated the British Government. In Bobby Sands’ death they have sown the seeds of their own destruction.”

It was later estimated that over 100,000 people attended what was the biggest IRA funeral since that of hunger-striker Terence McSwiney in 1920.

• An Phoblacht/Republican News 9-May-1981

Comment is free

It is 25 years to the day since Bobby Sands died in prison after 66 days on hunger strike.

Danny Morrison
May 5, 2006 11:09 AM

In the early hours of this morning, 25 years ago, we received word that Bobby Sands had died. It was the 66th day of his hunger strike. He was 27 years of age and had spent a third of his life in prison, twice convicted for IRA activities.

Bobby Sands came from a community that had suffered 50 years of sectarian discrimination under one-party government. When that community made demands for change through the Civil Rights Association it was repeatedly attacked, the most grievous series of attacks being the house burnings and killings of August 14/15 1969, led by the Ulster Unionist government’s police force and paramilitary reserves, the RUC and the B-Specials. A slogan on a wall in west Belfast sums up what happened next: “Out of the Ashes of Bombay Street arose the Provisional IRA.”

The conflict was not of Sands’ making, but his choice to join the IRA - which was never an easy one - was. The first time he was in jail he had political status in the cages of Long Kesh. Political status had been won as a result of a hunger strike in 1972 that ended without loss of life. By granting political status, the British government settled the prisons for a while. However, the powerful imagery of Long Kesh as a PoW camp irked British politicians and contradicted government propaganda. Ministers depicted the IRA’s campaign as “terrorism”, which had no justification, no mandate and no support.

But to outside observers, Britain was imprisoning captured enemy combatants with a status that suggested some legitimacy (and also occasionally engaged in secret contacts and explorative talks with the IRA and/or its perceived political wing). The observers also noted that British casuistry was no different from that used by British administrations dealing with national liberation organisations and insurgencies in colonial confrontations throughout the former empire. When it became expedient, the renowned “terrorist” leaders would, no doubt, become welcome in No 10 Downing Street as statesmen.

And so the British government arbitrarily withdrew political status for anyone convicted for subversion after March 1 1976. There was, of course, a major contradiction in the British position in that Section 31 of the Emergency Provisions Act (and, later, the Prevention of Terrorism Act) defined scheduled offences and “terrorism” as “the use of violence for political ends”.

After having been arrested under special laws, been questioned in special interrogation centres, been tried in special courts with special rules of evidence, the prisoners were told when they arrived at the specially-built H-Blocks that there was nothing “special” about them. Indeed, in denying the political nature of the prisoners, the British were engaged in a huge lie.

Having been unable to defeat the IRA on the streets, Britain thought it could defeat it through criminalising and defeating its prisoners.

For refusing to wear the grey prison uniform and take orders, the prisoners were punished and often beaten. There was just one blanket in the bare cell and they draped that around themselves. Republicans went on to serve years, often in solitary confinement, without access to books or newspapers or writing material. They lived in cells floating with urine and covered in their own excrement. As a punishment they were given a Number One bread and water diet (which was illegal).

“One would hardly allow an animal to remain in such conditions, let alone a human being,” said Archbishop (later Cardinal) O Fiach, when he visited there in 1978.

It was out of desperation that the prisoners decided to hunger strike.

Mrs Thatcher said they were common criminals who had no public support, but their leader, Sands, became an MP. From his cell he wrote poetry and prose. His prison writings became a bestseller and remain in print 25 years after his death. When the people of Fermanagh and South Tyrone elected him as their MP and gave him a mandate, Thatcher still refused to negotiate. In fact, she changed the electoral law so that no other prisoner could stand in election and embarrass her. As a result of her intransigence, 10 men died on hunger strike over a seven-month period.

Although Britain was to fail in its objective of forcing the prisoners to accept criminal status, it was not before a heavy price was paid by the prisoners, their families, protesters and civilians (including children and a mother killed by plastic bullets, and a milkman and his son by nationalist rioters), prison officers and their families. All of them were caught up in a clash of wills that one governor was later to describe as “a battle for the false aim of criminalisation that was always going to fail”.

After the hunger strike ended, the British conceded all of the prisoners’ demands. Later, when I was sentenced to eight years’ imprisonment, I had political status in the H-Blocks. The final admission of the political status of the prisoners came in 1998 when, under the Belfast agreement, the H-Block prisoners were given early release and the prison was closed down.

Until 1981, republicans were highly suspicious of electoral politics, with good reason, given the history of splits on the issue, particularly on the subject of abstentionism. Electoral politics, they felt, were synonymous with constitutional politics. Were it not for the elections of Sands to Westminster and hunger striker Kieran Doherty (and blanketman Paddy Agnew) to the Dail it is doubtful if Sinn Féin could have made its transition to electoral politics so smoothly. Today it is the major party representing the nationalist community in the north and the fastest-growing party in the south of Ireland.

Had the prisoners been born into a democracy or normality they would have established careers, travelled, married, built homes and raised families. In all probability they would have had long and fulfilling lives.

This morning a number of us - former blanket men and women prisoners, friends and comrades of Bobby Sands - will be going to the cell in the hospital wing of the H-Blocks where he died. There we shall hold a minute’s silence, recall his life and sacrifice and read from some of his poetry.

Mrs Thatcher.

Mrs Thatcher failed to kill the spirit of freedom. Her only success in life was in waging war and impoverishing her subjects. Bobby Sands, on the other hand, remains an inspiration not just to Irish republicans but to oppressed people around the world. There is a memorial to him and his comrades on Robben Island, streets named after him in Iran, in France, in North America.

IRA volunteer Bobby Sands MP. A hero and a great patriot.

BBC ON THIS DAY

**There are two videos on site–one of the news and one of Bobby’s mother Rosaleen Sands

5 May 1981

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.

In Context

Bobby Sands was the first of 10 republican prisoners to die after hunger strikes.

More than 60 civilians, police and soldiers also died in violence directly attributable to the hunger strikes.

Three days after the hunger strikes came to an end on 3 October, the Ulster Secretary James Prior negotiated a package of concessions for the Maze prisoners - much to the fury of the loyalist community.

He met two of the prisoners’ demands - the right to wear their own clothes and the restoration of 50% of lost remission for those who obeyed prison rules for three months.

Independent.co.uk

5 May 2006 00:54

Bobby Sands, IRA hunger striker and Westminster MP, died at the Maze Prison 25 years ago today. David McKittrick analyses how his death transformed The Troubles, and talks to the key players

Published: 05 May 2006

The 1981 republican hunger strike was a time of violence, of sacrifice, of death and of horror, a time of huge polarisation and division which created new depths of bitterness and revitalised a flagging IRA.

Ten republicans starved themselves to death in the Maze prison near Belfast in what was a long drawn-out agony for them, and for Northern Ireland. The crisis plunged the province into one of the worst convulsions it has experienced, putting the population through communal trauma and laying the basis for a deadly cycle of increased violence.

Many deaths on the streets followed. The IRA attempt to kill Margaret Thatcher, in a revenge bomb attack on the Tory party conference in Brighton three years later, was one example.

And yet the paradox is that this struggle was to set the IRA and Sinn Fein on an unexpected new path which eventually led to the peace process. No one realised this at the time; most were aghast at the turmoil which spread from the IRA cells of the Maze to poison community relations and caused many to despair that there might never be peace. Most thought it a crushing defeat for the republicans, a view shared then by many within the IRA and Sinn Fein. Yet today Sinn Fein is the biggest nationalist party in Northern Ireland, and growing strongly in the south.

In other words, it now possesses the political status that Bobby Sands and the other strikers died for; the status Mrs Thatcher refused to grant. Before the hunger strike, Sands and other prisoners had staged years of protests in the Maze but Mrs Thatcher was adamant the IRA should be treated as common criminals.

When Sands died 25 years ago today, his 66th day of hungerstrike, he ascended into republican Valhalla, regarded as the IRA’s most prominent martyr and an emblem of self-sacrifice. His portrait, repainted annually, remains one of the most prominent of the republican murals on Belfast’s Falls Road.

Huge tensions grew during the campaign, which was marked by one stunning development, when Sands won a Westminster by-election from his cell. His narrow win was a propaganda victory of enormous proportions. The world’s image of Sands was largely based on a photograph taken in the prison which showed him in a smiling group of prisoners, his fair hair at rock-star length. But with hindsight, it was a photograph steeped in irony. In December last year we learnt that Denis Donaldson, the IRA prisoner pictured draping an arm around Sands’ shoulders, had later turned Special Branch spy.

Sands’ election spurred frantic attempts to mediate or find a resolution. An envoy from the Pope spent an hour with Sands in his cell, and media from all over the world flocked to Belfast. His death provoked waves of political tumult and riot. Hostile reaction to Britain came from around the world, with several cities, including Paris and Tehran, naming streets after Sands. At least 100,000 people attended his funeral. But after 10 deaths, the protest petered out as relatives of comatose hunger-strikers, encouraged by a priest, Father Denis Faul, allowed doctors to administer food.

The Troubles took many twists, but the key development was that republicans experimented with a mixture of politics and violence. The politics prevailed. Although ostensibly a defeat, the hunger strike provided republicans with a political launching pad, the foundation of Sinn Fein’s electoral success. Some observers regard it as the genesis of the peace process. What was first designed as an instrument of subversion and sabotage led to the displacement of the IRA by today’s Sinn Fein.

Not everyone in republicanism has travelled with Sinn Fein on its long political march. Prominent among dissenters has been Bobby Sands’ sister, Bernadette. She is married to Mickey McKevitt, who has been jailed for heading the Real IRA, the breakaway group responsible for the 1998 Omagh bombing. As head of the 32-County Sovereignty Movement, Mrs Sands-McKevitt claims Sinn Fein’s backing of the peace process is a betrayal of what her brother fought and died for. But few in the republican mainstream agree with her.

Today on the 25th anniversary of her brother’s death, thousands of them will gather to reaffirm his status as one of republicanism’s most revered heroes.

Gerry Adams

THEN: Link between the hunger-strikers and the IRA Army Council

NOW: President of Sinn Fein, MP for West Belfast

“When Bobby Sands began to say they needed to go on a hunger strike we argued, and I actually wrote to him, saying we were morally and strategically and tactically and physically opposed to it. I was driving when the news came through on the radio that Bobby had been elected. I remember nearly bouncing the car off the hedges and pounding the steering wheel. It was a huge thing to know that against all the odds we’d pulled it off and the prisoners had been vindicated.

“The way Bobby Sands… controlled the mechanisms within the prison show clearly he believed he would have to die. My generation of Irish republicans will never forget those terrible months, but in marking the 25th anniversary we have an opportunity to celebrate their lives, remember their sacrifice and rededicate ourselves to advancing the struggle.”

Laurence McKeown

THEN: IRA hunger-striker, serving life sentence

NOW: Active on ex-prisoners’ issues and outreach initiatives to Protestants and others

McKeown, who spent 70 days on hunger strike, took a degree in prison and now has a doctorate. After volunteering for the strike, the IRA army council warned him: “Comrade, do you know what this means? You will be dead within two months. Rethink your decision.”

When news that Sands had been elected to Westminster came through, “the place just erupted. Everybody shouted, roared, probably unintelligible sorts of screams.”

McKeown became weak but turned down pleas from his family to come off the protest. “On the evening of the 69th day I was talking to people who weren’t there, and calling people by the wrong names. On the morning of the 70th day the doctors were looking for reflexes and I wasn’t responding. About noon, my mother authorised medical intervention. I can’t say I was happy to be alive, but I couldn’t say I was sad to be alive.”

Brendan McFarlane

THEN: Officer commanding IRA prisoners during the hunger strike

NOW: Senior republican figure

“Bik” McFarlane is a near-legendary IRA figure who has long been to the fore in the republican movement. He was the “officer commanding” IRA prisoners at the time of the hunger strike. He is now a strong supporter of the peace process.

In 1981 he was serving life for the murder of five Protestants, two of them women, in an IRA attack on a loyalist bar on Belfast’s Shankill Road. Two years after the hunger strike, in 1983, he helped plan and participated in the IRA’s mass breakout from the jail. He also played a key role in the talks that led to the IRA ceasefire of August 1994. He said of the hunger-strikers: “They were brave men whose courage and sacrifice should be celebrated in a positive way. Their bravery should be seen as something inspirational, especially in this new phase of struggle when we need to build on our continuing political progress.”

Richard O’Rawe

THEN: IRA press officer in the Maze

NOW: Works with recovering alcoholics and drug addicts

O’Rawe caused a stir last year with his book Blanketmen, which claimed that, after several deaths, the army council overruled the prisoners, who wanted to settle the dispute by means of a message from the British government.

He thought some of the 10 deaths were unnecessary, adding: “This hasn’t been said for 24 years because it would be a massive embarrassment if they accepted the army council of the IRA refused to acquiesce to the prisoners’ acceptance of the deal. The consequence of that would be that responsibility for the deaths would shift from Brits to the IRA.”

O’Rawe’s version of events has been partly supported by Denis Bradley, a former priest involved in mediation. But his claims have been attacked by some Republicans, including Bik McFarlane who said no offer had been made in writing and authenticated.

:::u:::

About half of Northern Ireland’s population have incomes less than £300 a week, according to a new Government study just published.

THURSDAY 04/05/2006 14:21:32
By:Press Association

It also showed there was a high concentration of people living on less than the UK average income.

The report `Households Below Average Income` produced by the Department of Social Development again flagged up the east-west economic divide, with those in the west trailing those in the east in the income stakes.

It showed that people living in the Co Tyrone towns of Cookstown and Magherafelt were most at risk of being in a low income of all local government districts.

Conversely those living in Carrickfergus or Lisburn, Co Antrim were least at risk.

Around one in five individuals living in low income families did not have a bank account, seven in 10 had no savings.

In 2004/05 approximately half of all children in Northern Ireland were in families with income in the bottom two bands of income distribution.

Children living in Coleraine and Derry were most at risk of low incomes, before housing costs.

At the other end of the age spectrum, single pensioners, particularly single males, were wore likely to be at the bottom end of income distribution.

Pensioners living in Housing Executive homes were at risk of low income, compared to those in Housing Association properties.

Pensioners without an occupational or personal pension were more likely to be in low income status than those in the UK.

SDLP social development spokesman Patsy McGlone expressed his worry about the level of poverty in Northern Ireland.

He said for the levels to be higher than in the rest of the UK was an issue of “grave concern”.

Things were particularly bad west of the Bann, he said. “Many families, many pensioners and many single people are struggling to live on low incomes.”

Mr McGlone said the situation was not helped by the misrule of direct rule ministers.

“Firstly the Government slapped on a substantial increase in rates, then they continue to threaten to impose water changes.

“Now Lord Rooker has closed down the countryside to building dwellings, which brings into question any commitment the Government has to affordable housing.”

He added: “The cost of living is also rocketing while there is a dangerous shortage of well-paid job opportunities west of the Bann. This situation is very worrying indeed.”

The MLA said the Government must act following the report.

“They cannot sit idly by while some people in Northern Ireland live in serious levels of poverty.”

Bad decisions had been made by direct rule ministers and that was why it was vital to get the Assembly up and running again as soon as possible with full powers to reverse some of the decisions, he said.