A five-year protest during the Troubles by Irish republican prisoners in Northern Ireland culminated in a hunger strike in 1981. The protest began as the blanket protest in 1976 when the British government withdrew Special Category Status (prisoner of war rather than criminal status) for convicted paramilitary prisoners.
In 1978, the dispute escalated into the dirty protest, where prisoners refused to leave their cells to wash and covered the walls of their cells with excrement. In 1980, seven prisoners participated in the first hunger strike, which ended after 53 days.
The second hunger strike took place in 1981 and was a showdown between the prisoners and the prime minister, Margaret Thatcher. One of the hunger strikers, Bobby Sands, was elected as a member of the British parliament; Kieran Doherty and Paddy Agnew were elected in the 1981 Irish general election to Dáil Éireann during the strike, prompting media interest from around the world. The strike was called off after ten prisoners had starved themselves to death, including Sands, whose funeral was attended by 100,000 people. The strike was the driving force that enabled Sinn Féin to become a mainstream political party.
Background
Tradition of hunger striking
He has chosen death:Refusing to eat or drink, that he may bringDisgrace upon me; for there is a custom,An old and foolish custom, that if a manBe wronged, or think that he is wronged, and starveUpon another’s threshold till he die,The common people, for all time to come,Will raise a heavy cry against that threshold,Even though it be the King’s.
The use of a hunger strike as a means of protest in Ireland is a tradition dating to pre-Christian times. This was not ascetic, but rather a way of publicly reprimanding those who deserved it. By fasting—possibly to death—on the doorstep of his master, the hunger striker enforced a claim against the other until either the latter gave in or the faster died. This tradition carried on even into the Christian era, and there are documented cases of early Irish saints fasting against God. The tradition of Troscad—fasting against an opponent—and Cealachan—gaining justice through fasting—became codified in the 8th century Senchas Már.
In the 20th century, there had been hunger strikes by Irish republican prisoners since 1917. Twelve men died on hunger strike prior to the 1981 strikes: Thomas Ashe (1917), Terence MacSwiney (1920), Michael Fitzgerald (1920), Joe Murphy (1920), Joseph Whitty (1923), Andy O'Sullivan (1923), Denny Barry (1923) (see 1923 Irish hunger strikes), Tony D'Arcy (1940), Jack McNeela (1940), Seán McCaughey (1946), Michael Gaughan (1974), and Frank Stagg (1976).
Internment
Although The Troubles had been ongoing since 1969, internment—which had been used several times in Ireland during the 20th century by both the British and Irish Free State—was not introduced until 1971. Internees were originally held in a disused RAF base in County Down, called Long Kesh. Later renamed HM Prison Maze, it was run along the lines of a prisoner of war camp, complete, says the author Thomas Hennessey, "with imagery reminiscent of Second World War POW camps surrounded by barbed wire, watchtowers and Nissen huts". Internees lived in dormitories and disciplined themselves with military-style command structures, drilled with dummy guns made from wood, and held lectures on guerrilla warfare and politics.
Convicted prisoners were refused the same rights as internees until July 1972, when Special Category Status was introduced following a hunger strike by 40 Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) prisoners led by the veteran republican Billy McKee. Special Category, or political status, meant prisoners were treated similarly to prisoners of war; for example, not having to wear prison uniforms or do prison work.
On 1 March 1976, Merlyn Rees, the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland in the Wilson ministry, announced that paramilitary prisoners would no longer be entitled to Special Category Status. This was part of Britain's long-term strategy of criminalisation in the north, the intention being to alter perceptions of the conflict from a colonial war to that of a campaign against, effectively, criminal gangs. The policy was not imposed retroactively and only affected those convicted of offences after 1 March 1976. Long Kesh prisoners remained in the huts, but new intakes arrived at eight newly built cellular "H-Blocks", so called due to their layout.
After the introduction of the strategy of internment in 1971, both IRA violence and recruitment escalated.
Blanket and dirty protests
IRA volunteer Kieran Nugent had been interned in Long Kesh in 1974, but when he was arrested and convicted in 1976, he faced a very different prison regime. On 14 September, he was the first republican to be convicted since the withdrawal of status. As such he was required to wear a prison uniform as every other, non-political, prisoner did. Nugent refused, telling the warder, "If you want me to wear a uniform, you'll have to nail it to my back", and wore a blanket in its place. This began the blanket protest, in which IRA and Irish National Liberation Army (INLA) prisoners refused to wear prison uniforms and either went naked or fashioned garments from prison blankets. In 1978, after a number of clashes between prison officers and prisoners leaving their cells to wash and "slop out" (empty their chamber pots), this escalated into the dirty protest, where prisoners refused to wash and smeared their excrement on the walls of their cells. The scholar Begoña Aretxaga has suggested that, unlike the hunger strike which followed, "the Dirty Protest had no precedent in the political culture". The protest soon spread to the women's prison at Armagh, where not just faeces and urine but menstrual blood coated cell walls. These protests aimed to re-establish the political status expected by prisoners of war and were encapsulated in what became known as the "Five Demands":
- The right not to wear a prison uniform;
- The right not to do prison work;
- The right of free association with other prisoners, and to organise educational and recreational pursuits;
- The right to one visit, one letter and one parcel per week;
- Full restoration of remission lost through the protest.
Initially, the dirty protest did not attract a great deal of attention, and even the IRA regarded it as a side issue in the context of the armed struggle. It began to attract attention when Tomás Ó Fiaich, the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Armagh, visited the prison and condemned the conditions there. O'Fiaich subsequently told the press, "I was shocked at the inhuman conditions prevailing in H-Blocks ... The stench and filth in some of the cells, with the remains of rotten food and human excreta scattered around the walls was almost unbearable. In two of them I was unable to speak for fear of vomiting." In 1979, former MP Bernadette McAliskey stood in the election for the European Parliament on a platform of support for the protesting prisoners and won just under 34,000 votes, even though Sinn Féin had called for a boycott of the election, and on one occasion, Martin McGuinness heckled her with a megaphone during a public meeting. Other republicans believed that her standing would be a diversion from the military campaign, and the Maze prisoners released a statement emphasising that, in their collective opinion, only physical force could remove the British.
Although McAliskey had stood solely on a prisoner's rights ticket, there was no intention of turning the popular support the campaign had exposed into an organised movement at that time. However, the dirty protests had now lasted nearly three years, and morale inside was felt to be dangerously low. One ex-blanketman recalled that "the more experienced men spoke for the rest of us when they said they were nearly at the end of their tether". Shortly after this, a "Smashing H-Block" conference took place in West Belfast in October 1979. Over 600 people, from many republican or left-wing organisations attended. This led to the formation of the broad-based National H-Block/Armagh Committee on a platform of support for the "Five Demands", and included seasoned activists such as McAliskey, Eamonn McCann and Miriam Daly.
The period leading up to the hunger strike saw assassinations by both republicans and loyalists. The IRA shot and killed a number of prison officers, while loyalist paramilitaries shot and killed a number of activists in the National H-Block/Armagh Committee. These included a UFF gun attack which badly injured McAliskey and her husband, the assassination of Miriam Daly by the UDA while her house was under military observation, and, of the Irish Independence Party, John Turnley's death at the hands of the UVF.
1980 hunger strike
With the three-year anniversary of the dirty protest approaching in 1979, the prisoners presented a proposal for a hunger strike to the external leadership. Although this was rejected—former prisoner Laurence McKeown has said this proposal was "unknown to most prisoners"—the external leadership "conceded, reluctantly" that they had no alternative proposal. In June 1980, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) rejected a claim by the prisoners that their treatment during imprisonment was against the Convention on Human Rights on the grounds that the dirty protest was self-inflicted. On 27 October 1980, republican prisoners in the Maze began a hunger strike. The strike garnered 148 volunteers, but a total of seven were selected to match the number of men who signed the Easter 1916 Proclamation of the Republic. The group consisted of IRA members Brendan Hughes, Tommy McKearney, Raymond McCartney, Tom McFeely, Sean McKenna, Leo Green, and INLA member John Nixon.
On 1 December, three prisoners in Armagh Women's Prison joined the strike. These were Mairéad Farrell (age 23), Mary Doyle (24) and Mairéad Nugent (21); Farrell stated that the intention was to "create an additional source of pressure on the authorities". In four days, their average weight loss was 9 pounds (4.1 kg). They were moved to a single clean cell two days after beginning and were in a stable condition. In the Maze, the seven men were in the prison hospital where they were weak but generally stable, except for McKenna and McKearney, who deteriorated faster than their comrades. They remained defiant, however, and refused to accept less than the settlement of the Five Demands. The British government, while offering extensive prison reform, refused to acknowledge political status. The women's strike lasted nineteen days, finishing on 19 December. Twenty-six women remained on the dirty protest at Armagh. Token three-day fasts broke out sporadically in Belfast Prison. In a war of nerves between the IRA leadership and the government, with McKenna lapsing in and out of a coma and on the brink of death, the government appeared to concede the essence of the prisoners' five demands. The republicans were unsure whether the British position of refusing to negotiate could itself be a negotiating position, although this was emphatically denied by the Northern Ireland Office. The situation escalated on 15 December when twenty-three more prisoners joined the Maze strike. McKenna was by now gravely ill, and McKearney close behind; the eyesight of both had deteriorated.
Following "intense" and "highly secret" negotiations involving the Irish Government, the British clarified their position in a thirty-page document detailing a proposed settlement, which touched on many of the demands, although without conceding any. With the document in transit to Belfast, Hughes—having already been informed that rights to free association and to their own clothing had been granted, which he deemed 'close' to what they wanted—took the decision to save McKenna's life and end the strike after fifty-three days on 18 December. Later, however, Hughes stated that the reason he called it off was purely to save McKenna's life and explicitly not because he expected British concessions or a prisoners' victory. Sands believed that the strikers "were beat [sic] by a few lousy hours". The final British offer made no promises but gave assurances that the government "will, subject to the overriding requirements of security, keep prison conditions—and that includes clothing, work, association, education, training and remission—under continuing review".
1981 hunger strike
By January 1981, it became clear that the prisoners' demands had not been conceded. The republican movement—"unconvincingly", argues Kelly—blamed Britain, insisting that Thatcher had reneged on her promises. Instead, for example, of the right to their own clothes, which the prisoners believed had been conceded them, it became clear that they would have to wear prison-issued clothes until they could demonstrate full compliance with the regime. Sands saw this as "a demand for capitulation rather than a step-by-step approach", argues O'Dochartaigh, and began pressuring the external leadership to authorise another hunger strike. The investigative author R. K. Walker has reported one member of British Intelligence as believing that