1981 Irish hunger strike

The IRA/INLA Hunger Strike was the seminal event of Modern Northern Irish history. While a failure in its own terms, it radicalised Nationalist politics, was the midwife to Sinn Féin as a serious political movement, began the slow decline of the centre ground in Northern Ireland, and to all intents and purposes forged the current Unionist party system.

The process which led up Hunger Strikes began in 1976. As part of the policy of Ulsterisation, the British government ended its previous policy of giving Special Category Status to paramilitary linked prisoners in Northern Ireland prisons. Special Category, or political, status meant prisoners were treated very like prisoners of war, e.g. they did not have to wear prison uniforms or do prison work. The end to Special Category Status was a serious threat to the authority which the paramilitary leaderships inside prison had been able to exercise over their own men. The policy was not introduced for existing prisoners, but rather phased in for those newly convicted.

The IRA, soon joined by the INLA and even some Loyalists, began the blanket protest in which prisoners would refused to wear prison uniform and either went naked or fashioned garments from prison blankets. In 1978, this escalated into the dirty protest, where prisoners not granted political status refused to wash and smeared the walls of their cells with excrement. These protests aimed to re-establish their privileges by securing what were known as the Five Demands, viz.:

• 1. The Right not to wear a prison uniform;
• 2. The Right not to do prison work;
• 3. The Right of free association with other prisoners;
• 4. The Right to organize their own educational and recreational facilities;
• 5. The Right to one visit, one letter and one parcel per week.

In October 1980, Republican prisoners in The Maze and Crumlin Road Prison began a hunger strike. In a war of nerve between the IRA leadership and the British government, the IRA blinked first and the strike was called off in December before any prisoners died.

However, the IRA had failed to secure any of their objectives, so on March 1, 1981, under the new IRA Officer Commanding in The Maze, Bobby Sands, a second hunger strike began, with Sands himself the first to refuse food. The political atmosphere outside the prisons became electric, both in Northern Ireland and the the Republic, with widespread rioting in Nationalist areas.

Shortly after the beginning of the strike, the independent Irish republican MP for Fermanagh & South Tyrone died and precipitated a by-election. Sands was nominated as an anti-H-Block candidate, and won the seat on April 9, 1981 with 30,492 votes to 29,046 for the Unionist candidate Harry West.

Three weeks later, Sands died from starvation in the prison hospital. The announcement of his death prompted several days of riots in nationalist areas of Northern Ireland. Over 75,000 people lined the route of his funeral.

Over the summer, nine more hunger strikers also died. Their names, paramiltary affiliation, hometown, dates of death, and length of hunger strike were as follows:

• Bobby Sands, IRA, Belfast (Twinbrook), 5 May, 66 days
• Francis Hughes, IRA, Bellaghy, 12 May, 59 days
• Patsy O’Hara, INLA, Derry, 21 May, 61 days
• Raymond McCreesh, IRA, Camlough, 21 May, 61 days
• Joe McDonnell, IRA, Belfast (Lenadoon), 8 July, 61 days
• Martin Hurson, IRA, Cappagh, 13 July, 46 days
• Kevin Lynch, INLA, Dungiven, 1 Aug, 71 days
• Kieran Doherty, IRA, Belfast (Andersonstown), 2 Aug, 73 days
• Thomas McElwee, IRA, Bellaghy, 8 Aug, 62 days
• Michael Devine, INLA, Derry, 20 Aug, 60 days

In late Summer, the Hunger Strike began to break, thanks in large part due to the actions of the radical Catholic Priest, Fr. Dennis Faul, who intervened with hunger strikers' families after they had lost consciousness to urge them to give consent to the prison authorities for their relatives to be fed by drift. On 3 October, 1981, the IRA called off the Hunger Strike.

The Hunger Strike heralded an upsurge of violence after the comparatively quiet years of the late 1970s, with widespread civil disorder in Northern Ireland and, for the first time, serious unrest in the Republic, including the burning of the British Embassy in Dublin. It resulted in a new surge of IRA activity, with the group obtaining many more members. It paradoxically prompted the Republican movement to move towards electoral politics - Sands' success combined with that of pro-Hunger Strike candidates in Northern Ireland's local elections and Dáil elections in the Republic gave birth to the armalite and ballot box strategy. As a direct consequence, Sinn Féin emerged as a serious political force in the 1982 Northern Ireland Assembly Elections. Thereby, it indirectly paved the way for the Good Friday Agreement many years later.

Reference

• Hunger Strikes (General)
• Hunger Strikes BBC History