THE beginning of this month marked the 40th anniversary of one of the most defining moments in modern Irish history. 

IRA volunteer Bobby Sands was the first to refuse food as the hunger strike that was to end with his election as a Westminster MP and the death of 10 men, including himself after 66 days, began.

The date was chosen as the fifth anniversary of the phasing out of special category status, with the republicans insisting that they were political prisoners that had been jailed by a foreign occupying force — the British state.

It also marked the anniversary of the introduction of internment — imprisonment without trial — introduced by the British state and used as a tool of oppression against the Catholic and nationalist community in the occupied north of Ireland.

The hunger strikers had five demands, all of which were eventually won as the strike ended in October 1981:
 
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 organise their own educational and recreational facilities
5. The right to one visit, one letter and one parcel per week.

The army council of the IRA was initially cautious about the hunger strike and in the days leading up to its launch sought reassurances that those who had volunteered were sure that they were prepared for the consequences of their action. They replied that they were. 

Messages were sent far and wide in a bid to attract support. 

Letters were written to trade unions, politicians and even to the US hostages in Tehran to see if they could reach supporters in the Iranian regime.

But even as the hunger strike was announced way back in 1981, few could have imagined its outcome and its longer term legacy. 

Hunger strikes have a long tradition in Ireland and can be traced as far back as medieval times when they were included in the country’s civil code. 

A person could starve themselves on the doorstep of someone that had done them an injustice or owed a debt. If they were to die the home dweller was responsible for the death and was made to compensate the family of the deceased.

Hunger strikes are also part of the Christian faith, with St Patrick, the patron saint of Ireland, going without food and water for 45 days against God who refused his demands. God gave in and the numerous other tales of hunger strikes made the form of protest appear a saintly struggle of self-sacrifice.

It was later that hunger strikes were used by political prisoners, perhaps most famously in 1920 by Sinn Fein lord mayor of Cork Thomas MacSwiney who was to die in London’s Brixton Prison 74 days after refusing food.

He had been arrested by the occupying British forces while he was sitting at his desk in Cork town hall and was sentenced to two years for sedition on charges he attended an IRA meeting.

Like Sands, MacSwiney’s struggle gained international support. Some 2,000 longshoremen went on strike in New York while in Argentina a plot by Circulo Irlandez (Irish Circle) to blow up the British consulate in Buenos Aires was foiled.

The political situation in 1981 was far different to that of today, when a sometimes fragile peace process and the 1998 Good Friday Agreement are sometimes traced back to the courageous men who took actions like this.

Sands was born in Rathcoole in North Belfast and as a young boy he and his family were driven out of their home twice as sectarian violence worsened and Catholics paid the price.

At the age of 15 he joined a local coach building company and became a member of the trade union. But he was forced to leave after being threatened by his Protestant co-workers and was held at gunpoint outside his workplace and told that it was “no place for Fenians.”

It was after his parents’ home was again targeted by loyalists that he joined the IRA. He was first jailed in April 1973, serving three years of a five-year sentence for possession of firearms after four pistols were found in a house he was staying in.

He was jailed again the following year, receiving a 14-year sentence along with four other men after a gun was found in the back of the car he was travelling in as a getaway from the Balmoral Furniture Company bombing.

Sands made an impression in prison, devouring radical literature including works by Marx, Frantz Fanon, James Connolly and Liam Mellows. He learned Gaelic almost fluently, teaching other prisoners and memorised the whole of Irish writer Leon Uris’s novel Trinity. 

Despite being behind bars he managed to smuggle out articles written for the Republican News, using the pen name Marcella after his sister. He was a poet and his books of verse have been posthumously published in Prison Poems and Skylark Sing Your Lonely Song.

He rose to become the Officer Commanding (OC) of the political prisoners of his wing in Long Kesh and following a failed hunger strike of 1980, he made plans for a second, with a crucial difference. This time the hunger strike would be staggered, with one prisoner joining at a time, two weeks apart.

As OC he was the first to volunteer and on March 1, 1981 he refused food and the hunger strike began. 

Sands’s first diary entry is worth quoting in full as it perfectly encapsulates not only his unwavering commitment and sacrifice, but also the political nature of the hunger strike and his own humanity.

He wrote: “I am standing on the threshold of another trembling world. May God have mercy on my soul. 

“My heart is very sore because I know that I have broken my poor mother’s heart, and my home is struck with unbearable anxiety. But I have considered all the arguments and tried every means to avoid what has become the unavoidable: it has been forced upon me and my comrades by four-and-a-half years of stark inhumanity. 

“I am a political prisoner. I am a political prisoner because I am a casualty of a perennial war that is being fought between the oppressed Irish people and an alien, oppressive, unwanted regime that refuses to withdraw from our land.

“I believe and stand by the God-given right of the Irish nation to sovereign independence, and the right of any Irishman or woman to assert this right in armed revolution. That is why I am incarcerated, naked and tortured. 

“Foremost in my tortured mind is the thought that there can never be peace in Ireland until the foreign, oppressive British presence is removed, leaving all the Irish people as a unit to control their own affairs and determine their own destinies as a sovereign people, free in mind and body, separate and distinct physically, culturally and economically. 

“I believe I am but another of those wretched Irishmen born of a risen generation with a deeply rooted and unquenchable desire for freedom. I am dying not just to attempt to end the barbarity of H-Block, or to gain the rightful recognition of a political prisoner, but primarily because what is lost in here is lost for the Republic and those wretched oppressed whom I am deeply proud to know as the ‘risen people.’”

His death 66 days later was met with mass protests and condemnation of the callousness of the British state, embodied by then prime minister Margaret Thatcher who in a calculated move allowed Sands and his comrades to die as she thought it would break the Republican movement.

She was wrong. Sands’s election as the Member of Parliament for Fermanagh and South Tyrone in April 1981, receiving a thumping 30,000 votes, put to bed her claims that republicanism had no support outside the H-Blocks. 

It also dwarfed her own vote in her London constituency of Finchley with Sands picking up 10,000 more votes than Thatcher and a majority twice as large. While opposition from the Tories was to be expected, the response from the Labour Party was particularly notable for its callousness.

On Friday May 1 as Sands lay dying the party’s spokesman for the north of Ireland Don Concannon went to the H-Block prison hospital in what has been described as “a ghoulish visit”, to say that he and his party did not support the hunger strikers’ demands. Four days later Sands died.

His funeral was attended by more than 100,000 mourners, the biggest since MacSwiney was laid to rest 60 years earlier. It was a boost to the republican cause with Sinn Fein standing candidates both sides of the border.

It led to international reaction and protest. Dockers in the US refused to handle British goods for 24 hours in an act of solidarity while a letter from a certain Bernie Sanders, then mayor of Burlington, urged the Thatcher government to reconsider its inhumane stance.

“We are deeply disturbed by your government’s unwillingness to stop the abuse, humiliation and degrading treatment of the Irish prisoners now on strike in Northern Ireland…

“We ask you to end your intransigent policy towards the prisoners before the reputation of the English people for fair play and simple decency is further damaged in the eyes of the people of Vermont and the United States,” the later Vermont senator wrote.

Iranian authorities changed the name of the road that housed the British embassy from Winston Churchill Street to Bobby Sands Street, and he continues to inspire oppressed people across the world.

I remember receiving a handwritten note from Kurdish political prisoners in Turkey paying tribute to someone they see as a brother, making the ultimate sacrifice for the freedom of his people as they are doing at time of writing,

Last year saw both Ibrahim Gockek from Grup Yorum and lawyer Ebru Timtik die, murdered by the Turkish state according to their supporters, as they went on hunger strike for the right to play music and the right to a fair trial respectively. 

And now Kurdish political prisoners are engaged in another round of protests, with rolling hunger strikes in more than 100 Turkish prisons over the treatment of jailed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) leader Abdullah Ocalan and the demand for a peaceful resolution to the country’s so-called Kurdish question.

Previous action, led by former Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) MP Leyla Guven led to concessions with Ocalan able to access his lawyers for the first time in nine years.  But that was also around election time with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan courting Kurdish votes in the rerun Istanbul mayoral vote. Since then normal service has been resumed with requests for legal visits rebuffed.

Sinn Fein’s Martina Anderson, herself a former political prisoner, visited Leyla Guven in her home in 2019 and the pair have forged a friendship. In December Guven was jailed for 23 years and three months and the similarities between the Irish and Kurdish struggles are clear.

At the time of writing Dimitris Koufontinas, a political prisoner from the November 17 urban guerilla group is believed to be close to death in a Greek jail as the right wing New Democracy-led government adopts a similar stance to that of Thatcher in 1981. 

They would rather let Koufontinas die than granting him his rights as a prisoner. His supporters believe there are partly personal motivations behind his treatment – the Prime Minister is related to someone that was killed by N17. But as others join his hunger strike in solidarity, police have brutally attacked demonstrations on the streets of Athens in support of Koufontinas.

Ten men in their twenties were to die during the 1981 hunger strike: Bobby Sands, Francis Hughes, Raymond McCreesh, Joe McDonnell, Martin Hurson, Kieran Doherty and Thomas McElwee from the IRA and Patsy O’Hara, Kevin Lynch and Michael Devine of the INLA.

Tributes are being paid on the 40th anniversary of their struggle that changed the course of history  as they gave their lives for the freedom of the Irish people in a struggle against the brutality of the British state.

That struggle for freedom continues, but in the words of Bobby Sands in his last diary entry: “Tiocfaidh ar la — our day will come.”