I was 13 years old when the 10 Irish Republican hunger strikers began their protest against their conditions in prison, and the refusal of the British government, and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher to grant them a category of political prisoners. I watched with interest as Bobby Sands lasted for 66 days until his hunger strike killed him. It takes a lot of courage, and fortitute, to make it through a hunger strike until you die.
Bobby Sands died on May 5, 1981. The news of his death rang out across America, despite the fact that the British government and PM Thatcher wanted to keep it all quiet and hush hush.
Sands death was actually a turning point in “the strugles” between catholics and protestants in Ireland.
The violence began in 1968 when a peaceful protest by Catholics in the Northern Ireland City of Londonderry got ungly when police attacked the group–
This was a Civil Rights march for equal rights and fair housing for the Catholics living in Northern Ireland. No violence and no IRA yet. Protestant Police from the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) beat the marchers, and used water cannons to disperse the peaceful marchers.
In 1972 in the Northern Ireland city of Derry, British troops shot and killed unarmed catholic civil rights protestors in an event now memoralized as Sunday Bloody Sunday.
In 1970 the Provisional Irish Republican Army was formed and commenced a guerrilla war with the British Army and protestant military groups.
In 1976 Irish republicans in prison had their rights as political prisoners taken away, When they refused to wear prison uniforms, that is when the prison protests began. Wrapping themselves in blankets instead of the prison garb, and refusing to wave or shave, the 450 IRA prisoners in the Maze prison took their lead from Bobby Sands, who after PM Thatcher refused to compromise at all, (her famous quote “A crime is a crime” applied to Catholic members of the IRA but not to the protestant police or military groups who commited terror on the catholics in N. Ire.) began his hunger strike and was dead at the age of 26.
Sands joined the IRA after his family was forced out of their home in a Protestant neigborhood in N. Ire. One month before his death, in April 1981, Sands was elected to British Parliament from his prison cell, defeating the Protestant candidate. His election gave those in the IRA who supported terror a pause, to consider a political remedy to the struggles.
Pope John Paul II tried to intervene with Thatcher who had none of it. Sands recevied a crucifix from the Pope, and became deaf and blind before his death
70,000 people in Belfast attended Sands funeral, and nine more republican prisoners followed Sands into a hunger strike and dealth.
In 1998, US President Bill Clinton helped negotiate the Good Friday agreement between Britian and the IRA, and in 2005, the IRA officially renounced violence. The political wing of the IRA, Sinn Fein has an equal number of MP’s as the unionists-protestants.
I wish that I could say that I never fogot about Bobby Sands, but I did. It took a good friend of mine, Mr. J, to remind me. Perhaps we should all move on from the love or hate of Trump to recall this part of our history, which touched millions of Irish-Americans.
