The Stupidity of Thatcher and the British Government in Refusing Political
Status for Republican Prisoners led to the growth of Sinn Fein North and South
Bobby Sands wasn’t the first
Irish hunger striker nor was he the last to die. Terence MacSwiney,
the elected Sinn Fein Mayor of Cork, died in Brixton prison in October 1920
after 74 days on hunger strike. He had been arrested by the British government
on a charge of sedition, a clearly political ‘crime’. 10 hunger strikers
died in 1981.
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| Roy Mason, Labour's Northern Ireland Secretary, behaved like a typical British Colonial Secretary |
Their demands were for
the return of political status which had
been removed on March 1 1976 by Merlyn Rees, Labour’s Northern
Ireland Minister. He was succeeded by the hated Roy Mason who was worse than
any Tory imperialist ruler.
At first the reaction to the
removal of political status was the blanket and dirty protest where faeces were
spread on the walls. Eventually that led
to the hunger strikes. The behaviour of Roy Mason in provoking what became the
hunger strikes led to the defeat of the Labour government when Frank MacGuire,
the Independent Republican MP for Fermanagh and South Tyrone abstained in
person.
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| The refusal to wear clothes preceded the hunger strike |
Of course there are racists
and imperialist dupes who chime up that the IRA were ‘men of violence’ and
‘terrorists’. The same people have no problem in supporting the ‘men of
violence’ when it comes to the invasion of Iraq, the bombing of Libya, Israel’s
war against the Palestinian people and any other imperial adventures. But when people
fight back against colonialism and imperialism it is terrorism. The same is true in Palestine. The only ‘terrorists’ are the Palestinians,
never the Israeli state.
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| The 10 Hunger Strikers Who Died |
During the 16th
and 17th centuries Ireland and in particular Ulster was subject to
the Plantation, the colonisation of Ireland by thousands of settlers from
Britain, Scotland in particular. This was enabled through the confiscation,
i.e. theft of land from the indigenous population. This Protestant population
was then used as a foil by the British state in order to undermine and subvert
Irish unity.
The same happened in Palestine
with the settlement of Jews from Europe and it is what the Indian government today
is intending to do in Kashmir.
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| Bobby Sands funeral cortege accompanied by 6 IRA men |
I was a member of the Troops
Out Movement and I arrived on a fact finding/solidarity tour on 8th
August 1981 as the 9th hunger striker, Thomas McElwee
died. I’ll never forget the scene on the
Falls Road, the main road through the Catholic ghetto of West Belfast, with
hundreds of women banging dustbin lids on the road to announce the death.
Here was a working class
community basically in insurrection. I had never seen anything like this and
wasn’t to see anything like it until I stayed during the miners’ strike in the
South Yorkshire village of Armthorpe in December 1984. Armthorpe had been subject to a siege by the
corrupt and murderous South Yorkshire Police.
Although he died, it was Bobby Sands who won out against Thatcher
The British strategy in
Northern Ireland was criminalisation. According to this fiction the IRA and
INLA were merely common criminals like any bank robber. This has always been
the reaction of the British to colonial uprisings. Whether it was the Indian Mutiny
or the Mau Mau Uprising
in Kenya the only reason that people rebelled against British rule was for base
criminal reasons. There was nothing political about it. This was the self-deception
that the British comforted themselves with. It was an illusion and a lie.
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| The 5 Demands |
The fact is that the
Catholic population of Northern Ireland had never accepted the constitutional set up. In 1918 Sinn Fein won the all-Ireland
general election winning 73 out of 105 seats. The Liberal government under
Asquith refused to implement the Home Rule Act of 1914 as a consequence of the Curragh Mutiny
by army officers in 1914.
There was a civil war in the Free
State in Southern Ireland between 1918 and 1920. The British had threatened war
and destruction unless the Irish accepted Partition. Partition, the favourite
solution of imperialism to its divide and rule tactics in settler colonies, was
imposed on the Irish people. The nationalist population of the north of Ireland
had never accepted Partition and the IRA was the consequence.
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| Some of the thousands of mourners at Bobby Sands funeral |
Partition has had disastrous
consequences wherever it has been imposed in the world, be it Cyprus or India
or indeed Palestine.
would mean a
carnival of reaction both North and South, would set back the wheels of
progress, would destroy the oncoming unity of the Irish Labour movement and
paralyse all advanced movements whilst it endured.
The Northern Ireland police
statelet was created in 1921 and until 1969 there was what was called a
Protestant state for a Protestant people with gerrymandering widespread. For
example in Derry, there was a perpetual Unionist council even though Catholics
formed the majority of the population by the simple device of making Catholic wards
larger.
There grew up a civil
rights movement in northern Ireland. In 1967 the Northern Ireland Civil
Rights Association was formed. It was a completely peaceful movement but it was
met with state and unionist violence.
On 4 January 1969 a People's Democracy march from Belfast
to Derry was violently attacked at Burntollet
Bridge. This was the
beginning of the Troubles in Northern Ireland.
The march
had been called in defiance of an appeal by Northern Ireland Prime Minister Terence
O'Neill for an end to protest. The Northern Ireland Civil Rights
Association and some Derry nationalists
had advised against it. Supporters of Ian
Paisley, led by Major Ronald
Bunting , denounced the march and mounted counter-demonstrations along the
route.
At
Burntollet an Ulster loyalist crowd numbering in the region of
300, including 100 off-duty members of the Ulster Special Constabulary (USC),
attacked the civil rights marchers with stones as well as iron bars and sticks
spiked with nails. Nearby members of the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) did nothing
to prevent the violence.
In the Battle of the
Bogside, from 12-14 August the B-Specials, an all-Protestant paramilitary
force and Unionists tried to invade what became Free Derry. It was repelled by
a civil insurrection and barricades were thrown up. It was a colonial rebellion
by the Catholics of the north. It was euphemistically called ‘The Troubles’.
At that time there was no
IRA. The IRA was reformed and split into
the Officials ‘stickies’ and Provisionals.
The former claimed to be Marxist but ended up as the right-wing Workers
Party in Southern Ireland. In 1969 the IRA stood for ‘I Ran Away’.
In 1981 the Hunger Strike
began on March 1st with Bobby Sands, the officer commanding the IRA
in Long Kesh refusing his breakfast. On March 5th the sitting
nationalist MP Frank MacGuire died.
Bobby Sands was nominated in the by-election
that followed and he defeated the sole Unionist candidate, Harry West by some
1,400 votes. Sands never took his seat.
He died 26 days later.
This was the context in
which the hunger
strikes took place and the sacrifice of Bobby Sands and the other 9 men. Eventually the relatives of the hunger
strikers insisted that the strike was called off but the demands were
effectively won by then. In any event the British government had lost
politically and northern Ireland would never be the same again.
The hunger strike led to the
rise of Sinn Fein and in 1983 Gerry Adams was elected as the MP for West
Belfast defeating the sitting MP, Gerry ‘the Brit’ Fitt. The continual accusation
by supporters of Britain’s occupation was that the IRA didn’t have the support
of the Catholic population. The election of Bobby Sands by the voters of
Fermanagh and South Tyrone and then the victory of Gerry Adams proved once and
for all that the IRA had the passive, if not active, support of the working
class Catholic population of Northern Ireland.
In the succeeding years the right-wing
Social Democratic and Labour Party, the ‘moderate’ nationalist party, was
eclipsed and Sinn Fein became the majority party of the Catholic population.
British colonialism has
always been led by stupid and arrogant imperialists and none was more stupid
than Thatcher who believed that her attempts to criminalise the Republican
struggle would somehow stop the march of history.
With the Good Friday
Agreement under Blair in 1998 the violence in Northern Ireland stopped, at
least for the time being but as long as Ireland is partitioned, there will
never be peace.
Below is an excellent
article from Canary.
Tony Greenstein
Peter Bolton
5th May 2020
5th May 2020
Today marks
the 39th anniversary
of the death of Bobby Sands inside the H-blocks of Long Kesh internment camp.
On 5 May 1981, Sands laid
down his life for his and his comrades’ right for recognition as political
prisoners. On this day, we should remember the sacrifice he made for the cause
of Irish freedom. But his struggle does not just provide an example that all
anti-imperialists should follow. It also serves as an important reminder of the
ruthless brutality of the British government in Ireland under the leadership of
then-prime minister Margaret Thatcher. And that is equally something that we should
never forget.
‘Criminalisation’ leads to ‘blanket protest’
On 1 March,
1976, the British government announced
an end to ‘Special Category’ status for members of paramilitary organisations
imprisoned for offences related to the conflict in Ireland. This formed part of
a multi-pronged propaganda strategy to falsely
portray the republican insurrection against British rule as some kind of
aggravated crime wave.
In response,
republican prisoners began
a series of protests to regain the lost privileges, as well as the symbolic
importance of prisoner of war status. This included the right to
wear one’s own clothes, free association and exemption from prison work. IRA
volunteer Kieran Nugent began
the ‘blanket protest’ when he refused to wear a prison uniform. Thrown into his
cell naked, he draped
himself in the only thing available – a grey, prison-issue blanket.
The ‘dirty protest’ and the 1980 hunger strike
After suffering
beatings from prison officers on their way to the shower areas, republican
prisoners began
the ‘no wash protest’, in which they refused to bathe, cut their hair or shave.
When prison officers refused
to empty their chamber pots, republican prisoners were forced to smear their
own excrement on the walls, which marked the beginning
of the ‘dirty protest’.
In 1979,
their prospects became even bleaker with the election
of the right-wing
government of Margaret Thatcher in Britain. When it became clear
that Thatcher wouldn’t grant even the most modest of concessions, republican
prisoners began
a hunger strike in 1980. It ended
without any deaths when her government appeared to concede some of the strikers’
demands. But the document containing the terms of the agreement turned
out to be vague and open to interpretation, and the prison regime was quickly
returned to a situation little better than how it was before.
A second hunger strike, and this
time to the death
Determined
not to be double-crossed again, the new Officer Commanding (OC) of the
republican prisoners, 27-year-old Bobby Sands, launched
a second hunger strike with a crucial difference from the last. The strikers
would stagger
their joining of the fast one-by-one and two
weeks apart so that each would near death one at a time. As OC, Sands volunteered
to go first, making him the most likely to die. On 1 March, 1981, Sands refused
his prison food, beginning the second hunger strike in Long Kesh just over two
months after
the end of the first.
On 5 March,
less than a week into Sands’ fast, Frank Maguire, the independent
nationalist member of parliament for Fermanagh and South Tyrone, died
suddenly and unexpectedly, leaving his seat in Westminster vacant. The
republican leadership on the outside hatched a plan. They were forever getting dismissed by
political opponents for not having a mandate, but if they stood Sands as a
candidate in the resultant by-election
and won, they could demonstrate
to the British government and the wider world that the hunger strikers’ demands
had popular support in the community.
A bittersweet victory
On 9 April
1981, Bobby Sands won
the election with over
30,000 votes – almost 10,000 more than Thatcher
had won in her home constituency of Finchley in the 1979
UK general election. The victory provided the republican
movement with a powerful morale boost and demolished the British government’s
argument that they had no support.
But in spite
of Sands’ victory, along with international
pressure from the Irish diaspora abroad and others around the world,
Thatcher refused
to budge. On May 5, 1981, Bobby Sands died
of starvation 66 days into his fast at 27 years of age. Over 100,000 mourners lined his cortege in one
of the largest
political funerals in Irish history.
International outcry
Sands’ death
led to international outcry
at the treatment of the prisoners and Thatcher’s intransigence in meeting their
demands. Critics pointed
out that as members of a guerrilla army operating in contested
territory, republican prisoners were entitled
under the Geneva Convention to be recognised as prisoners of war. One letter,
sent from one Bernard
Sanders (then-mayor of Burlington, Vermont in the US), stated:
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.
In October
1981, the British government eventually conceded
most of the prisoners’ demands; but not before nine more republican hunger
strikers had followed
Sands to the grave.
This episode
perhaps shows more than any other the utter depravity, brutality, ruthlessness
and lack of humanity that lurked within the twisted soul of Margaret Thatcher.
All but one of the men were under 30 years old
and left
behind grieving mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters and, in some cases, children
– all for the ‘crime’ of fighting back against foreign oppression and
discrimination in their own country.
Sands’ brave
sacrifice stands as an example that all anti-imperialists and advocates of
justice can aspire to. But it also serves as a reminder of Thatcher’s sordid
legacy of death and destruction in Ireland.
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