Irish Hunger Strikes Chapter 1

From Death Springs Life
A Retrospective on the 20th Anniversary of the
1981 Hunger Strike

Twenty years are a long time. Not, however, for the dead.

Those that live in the hearts of good people because of their deaths are more alive than those who live but epitomize death. Hundreds of years from now Bobby Sands will be known by men and women struggling against oppression and aspiring to become human beings.

Margaret Thatcher, for example, will be long forgotten or remembered as a historical footnote: one of the long list of unsuccessful, bitter tyrants.

The political and moral effects of the 1981 Irish Hunger Strike are very alive. Current republican strategy and analysis to a large degree is a result of the dynamics that sprang from the events of the H-Block protests and hunger strikes. Without doubt, it was more of an organic development of opportunities and reactions to oppressive British tactics than a planned, predetermined blueprint. But the goal was always, and is, the same.

Brit Strategy Backfires

Irish Republican strategy is, as often as not, a matter of endurance and exploiting the cards dealt by a superior, imperious, and morally bankrupt force. Yet, British military and political strategy often backfires when dealing with its "Irish Problem". That's because of its basic lack of understanding of the Irish people and its penchant for acting in its narrow, short-term best interests with maximum barbarity.

From the Great Hunger, to the Executions after the Rising of 1916, to Bloody Sunday -- they always get us wrong.

The course of the current stage of Irish history has also been profoundly affected by the sacrifice of the ten men who freely gave their young lives that the promise of a just and independent Irish Republic would prevail over the monstrous tyranny that had perverted their country's history for 800 years.

And, it is more than that.

It is also the story of the largely unknown others in the H-Blocks of Long Kesh and Armagh Jail who unselfishly suffered horrifying indignity and torture and who, alone and naked, took on the cruelty of Britain's psychotic resolve to annihilate all those that challenge its imperious hold.

It is the story of tens of thousands of supporters in Ireland, England, Europe, Australia, North America, and throughout the world, who came out on the streets to protest and march to smash the H-Blocks and to save men dying unspeakably bravely, one by one, and then to mourn together as if suffering the loss of brothers.

In the long view of history, it is the story of the uncommitted, content, and essentially ignorant millions of Irish -- second and third and fourth generation Irish -- whose families were originally scattered throughout the world by genocidal famine, poverty, and British misrule who began to see for the first time through realistic Irish eyes.

Around 1981, it became awfully hard to look away from the hell-hole of Long Kesh and pretend to be Irish at all.

Frightened and Alone

Mostly, it is the story of frightened and alone young Irish men and women in the pitiless maw of a British legal and prison system designed to break them and their movement, men and women in their teens and early twenties who didn't really know what they were doing at any one moment or what to do next.

They knew one thing. They knew they were not criminals.

And they learned another thing. They learned they could prevail and could win under ANY circumstances - miserable and scared to death, beaten and hammered, stripped to the bone in bare cells with their own excrement on the walls, and worse. The monsters were faced down by seemingly ordinary men and women.

Britain will never recover what it lost in Long Kesh and Armagh Jail and it will never recover from what it inadvertently made. It rejuvenated a movement and gave it a revolutionary vision.

The British regime crushed them, raw rabble like black coal pressed between the walls of its prisons, and turned them into diamonds.

Hard focused and perfect. Eternal.

New Hope for Human Dignity

The Republican prisoner protests from 1976 through 1981 made the whole world question British motives and hegemony in Ireland. But agonizingly slowly. The death on Hunger Strike of ten young Irish men made the essentially uninterested world finally understand. Criminals and terrorists do not willingly die slow deaths to bring "an end to Ireland's agony; New Hope for human dignity" as the Francie Brolly song goes.

Saints do things like that. Sometimes lovers. Criminals? Never.

It also opened up avenues of revolutionary struggle that would lead to Irish Republican "criminals" elected to the London Parliament and the Dublin Dial, an indestructible IRA, the electoral phenomenon of Sinn Fein in the north and growing strength in the south, the abolition of visa denial and censorship, the Republican movement assuming the moral highground in a peace process that is seeing the unionist/loyalist establishment self-destructing, and the British government's political maneuverings more and more transparent to the world.

Naked Into the Bowels of The H-Blocks

It all started in March of 1976 when a young, Nationalist man named Ciaran Nugent, the first Republican prisoner sentenced under a new British "counter-insurgency" strategy to make common criminals of IRA soldiers, said "No" and refused to wear the prison outfit presented to him. He was alone and hardly sought out what was happening to him.

He was stripped naked, given a blanket only, and swept away into the bowls of the newly constructed H-Blocks. Only the prison authorities knew where he was taken, what was happening to him, or what was to become of those who were to follow.

Next: From The Conveyor Belt to The Blanket