Hunger Strikes

Hunger striking was not purely a phenomenon of the early 1980s in Northern Ireland. After a visit to fasting republican prisoners in 1978, the primate of all-Ireland, Cardinal Ó Fiaich, commented that "they prefer to face death rather than submit to be classed as criminals. . . . Anyone with the least knowledge of Irish history knows how deeply rooted this attitude is in our country's past." The cardinal recognized the two essential elements of hunger strikes: historical resonance and contemporaneous grievances. A sense of continuity and symbolism was important to republicans. Already, twelve republicans had starved to death for their beliefs in the twentieth century, most recently Michael Gaughan (1974) and Frank Stagg (1976). Gaughan's coffin was draped with the same tricolor flag that had been placed on the coffin of the legendary hunger striker Terence MacSwiney in 1920. Hunger striking, a practice that flourished in pre-Christian times in Ireland, derives from the ancient Brehon (Gaelic Irish) laws that recognized and strove to regulate the rite of "fasting against a person of exalted state in order to enforce a claim against him." The debtor had three options: to concede the claim, to mount a counterfast, or to let the hunger striker starve himself to death. None of these are congenial, as events in 1980 and 1981 were to demonstrate.

THE STRIKERS' CAMPAIGN

The contemporaneous grievance centered on prison status. Republicans believed that their struggle was political, not criminal. In an effort to bring them into the political process the British authorities granted them special-category status in 1972. This enabled them to run their own regime and strengthen their organization inside the prison to such an extent that there were fears that the prisons were being used as extensions of the militant republican campaign. Concerned that political violence was not being contained and that political concessions had not weaned republicanism away from violence, the British secretary of state, Merlyn Rees, reverted to a policy of "criminalization" in March 1976. Essentially it meant that there was no distinction between those imprisoned for "normal" crime and those fighting for a nonexistent republic. When they lost their special-category status, the prisoners embarked on a blanket and no-wash protest in which they refused to wear prison clothing or to clean out their cells. Only when these tactics failed did they resort to the ultimate protest—the hunger strike.

Criminalization was a serious political error for three reasons. In the first place, it denied republicans the respectability they felt they had earned in a legitimate and heroic struggle for Irish freedom. They had been practicing a form of social republicanism inside the ghettos whereby they had appropriated the role of the guardians of the law. In those circumstances, they asked rhetorically, how could they be criminals?

Secondly, the prisoners distinguished the sacrificial ideology of their campaign from the revolutionary ideology of the military campaign, linking themselves to the 1916 rebels who had risen not to win but to die. And their campaign was steeped in martyrology and religious symbolism, demonstrated in the grafitto in west Belfast of a dying hunger striker comforted by the Virgin Mary that bore the caption "Blessed are those who hunger for justice." The hunger strikers were portrayed in crucified postures, with the barbed wire of the prisons transformed into Jesus's crown of thorns, and the H-Block blanket (their only piece of "clothing") into a burial shroud. These religious motifs tied them into the heart of the Catholic psyche and broadened the dimensions of the campaign.

Thirdly, the campaign both diluted and strengthened the republican leadership. The decision to hunger strike had been made by the prisoners alone, against the advice of the outside leadership, who felt that it was distracting attention from the "war." But it brought on-board another layer of support. Some of the prisoners' relatives had formed a Relatives' Action Committee (RAC). Over the next few years the RACs, distributed across Northern Ireland and often independent of Sinn Féin, developed a mass movement that offered an alternative to a seemingly pointless military campaign. The strength of that movement is illustrated by comparing the numbers who protested when the first hunger striker, Bobby Sands, began his fast (about 4,000) and those who attended his funeral march (approximately 70,000). It could be seen too in the results of Northern Ireland's local government elections of May 1981 (following Sands's death). If all candidates identifying with the hunger strikes had joined together in one group, they could have become the fifth-largest party. There was a constituency to be nurtured, a fact acknowledged in an editorial in the newspaper Republican News in September 1982: "While not everyone can plant a bomb, everyone can plant a vote."

The first hunger strikes began on 27 October 1980 in protest against prison conditions and status. The second group began on 1 March 1981. In both instances seven volunteers were selected initially. The timing and the numbers were significant: The first strike was to culminate at Christmas (though it was called off on 18 December because the prisoners believed, wrongly, that they had extracted the necessary concessions), and the second at Easter. The seven strikers corresponded to the number of signatories to the 1916 proclamation. They believed themselves to be the revolutionary vanguard and sacred keepers of the nation's history. Bobby Sands, the Irish Republican Army (IRA) leader imprisoned in the Maze, was the first to die on 5 May 1981. By 20 August another nine republican prisoners were dead, and the rest ended their protest on 3 October. The whole business polarized the community as never before. It threatened to make constitutional nationalism redundant inside Northern Ireland; it deprived Fianna Fáil of victory in the Republic's 1981 general election when two hunger strikers were elected to the Dáil; it caused tremendous tension between the British and Irish governments; and it aroused an inordinate amount of international attention, much of it embarrassing to the British government.

INTERNATIONAL REACTION

The hunger strikes above all gave republicans what they wanted by making politics a straightforward confrontation between them and the British government in which every other party was rendered irrelevant or powerless. There is no doubt that the strikes discommoded the political and religious establishment. A survey of sixty-four newspapers in twenty-five countries conducted by the Sunday Times (31 May 1981) concluded that world opinion had begun to shift away from the British government and in favor of the IRA. In the United States, the home of so many descendents of the Great Famine Irish, the Irish Northern Aid Committee (NORAID), a U.S. support organization for the republican cause, raised $250,000 in the first half of 1981 (compared with an average of $110,000 every half-year for the previous seven years). In short, the hunger strikes contributed to a fundamental reevaluation of the conflict: Republicans moved into political mode while retaining the armed struggle, and the British and Irish governments, with the active support of the Reagan administration, embarked on much closer political and security cooperation that culminated in the Anglo-Irish Agreement in November 1985.

Bibliography

Arthur, Paul. "'Reading' Violence: Ireland." In The Legitimization of Violence, edited by David E. Apter. 1997.

Clarke, Liam. Broadening the Battlefield: The H-Blocks and the Rise of Sinn Fein. 1987.

O'Malley, Padraig. Biting at the Grave: The Irish Hunger Strikes and the Politics of Despair. 1990.

Paul Arthur

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