Ten Men Dead: the story of the 1981 Irish hunger strike
David
Beresford
Atlantic Monthly Press 1987
This book chronicles the period and events in Northern Ireland leading
up to when nine members of the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA)
and one member of the Irish National Liberation Army (INLA) starved to
death while on hunger strike inside Northern Ireland’s notorious Long
Kesh prison. While reading this book one may be tempted to draw
parallels between the actions of imprisoned Irish nationalists and the
actions carried out by prisoners in California who protested the use of
solitary confinement and indeterminate sentences in the state’s infamous
Security Housing Units (SHU) in 2011 and 2013. However, there were
qualitative differences between these two movements. Whereas one was
revolutionary nationalist in nature and sought to ultimately eject
British imperialism by linking the struggle behind prison walls to that
of every oppressed Irish national on the streets, the other was of a
reformist character and has lent itself to the preservation of the
status quo; AmeriKKKa vs the oppressed nations. [Today, the
hunger
strikes by Palestinians in I$raeli prisons are similar in nature to
the Irish strike. - editor]
While the British first invaded and began to colonize Ireland in the
year 1171, the focus of this book is on more contemporary times so we’ll
start there. Having failed to wipe out Irish nationalism thru sheer
military might the British government sought to switch strategy, and in
1972 initiated a new method of oppression called “normalization”.
Normalization was the policy devised to crush the IRA and other Irish
nationalists by criminalizing the struggle for national liberation &
self-determination. As such, normalization was also termed
“criminalization”. Criminalization required a four prong attack on the
Irish people:
First local police and British occupation forces would cease to refer to
the IRA and other Irish nationalist groups as political organizations
with a political mandate. Instead Irish revolutionaries would begin to
be labeled as “thugs”, “criminals” and “terrorists”.
Second, criminalization would entail eliminating juries and diluting the
rule of evidence in IRA and INLA trials to make it easier to obtain
convictions. As can be expected the number of prisoners sentenced in
Northern Ireland spiked from 745 in 1972 to 2,300 in 1979.(pg 19)
Third, criminalization required that Britain begin to pull its troops
from Northern Ireland delegating national oppression to local police
with special military and counter-intelligence training, thereby giving
the public the impression that fighting the IRA was a law and order
issue and not a war.
Finally, the linchpin towards normalizing Britain’s 800 year oppression
of Ireland would be the repealing of Irish political prisoner status
known as “special category”: special category was granted to captured
IRA and INLA members. Prisoners granted special category were given
preferential treatment. More importantly, however, from the IRA point of
view the fact that special category existed was an admission of sorts
that British occupation of Ireland was something to be contested, even
by the Brits.
As in any struggle, the 1981 hunger strike didn’t simply develop
overnight, rather it was the product of a series of protests almost a
decade in the making. When Britain announced an end to special category
status in 1976, prisoners immediately got to work. For Irish
revolutionaries the fact that they had been captured didn’t mean the war
had ended. Instead prisoners viewed Long Kesh as just another front line
in the war for national liberation.
The struggle to re-instate special category was first sparked 16
September 1976, when a fight between guards and a prisoner broke out
after the prisoner refused to put on a prison uniform while being
admitted into the general population following a conviction on a
terrorism charge. Prior to 1 March 1976, there was no such thing as
terrorism charges being applied to Irish revolutionaries. Once in
prison, IRA and INLA members were segregated from the general
population. They were also allowed to wear their own clothes. Soon other
IRA & INLA members began to refuse to wear prison uniforms which
marked them as criminals. As a reaction to this resistance
administration then refused to clothe prisoners who refused to comply
leaving them confined naked in their cells 24 hours a day with only
blankets to cover themselves.(pg 16) The “blanket” protest had
officially begun.
Two years later, the “no wash” protest was initiated when special
category prisoners were given one towel to wear around their waist on
their visits to the bathroom while being denied a second towel for their
faces. Rather than continue to be humiliated in this way prisoners
refused going to the bathroom facilities all-together and were given
chamber pots for use in their cells. Fights with guards soon followed
however when guards refused to empty the chamber pots. These events then
led to the “dirty” protest in which prisoners began throwing the
contents of the pots out of their cells thru windows and tray slots.
After windows and tray slots were covered prisoners began “pouring urine
out the cracks and dispensing excrement by smearing it on the wall.”(pg
17)
Wimmin also participated in the dirty protest after thirty-two
prisoners at a Northern Ireland wimmin’s jail were beaten by male and
femals guards in a pre-meditated attack after prisoners attempted to
defend themselves during a search. The search was for IRA military
uniforms which the wimmin had worn in a defiant para-military parade
held in violation of jail rules.(pg 20)
Afterwards prisoners began to organize more effectively when IRA
leaders began to arrive in Long Kesh. In 1979 efforts by prison
administrators to isolate IRA leadership backfired when top IRA figures
were transferred to H Block 6. According to the author it was the
equivalent of setting up an “officers training academy” inside the
prison, as prisoners began to further develop “a philosophical and
strategic approach” to Irish national liberation. (pg 18) Nine months
later administration became alarmed with how prisoners had taken control
of their new social conditions. They soon split up the “academy”, but
not before prisoners began to discuss hunger striking to protest
normalization and an end to special category. However, outside IRA
leadership was opposed to a hunger strike by prisoners on the grounds
that the IRA’s limited resources would be better spent on the military
campaign against Britain instead of on building public opinion on behalf
of the hunger strikers.(pg 21)
After much discussion the IRA Army Council and Sinn Fein the political
wing of the IRA gave the go-ahead for prisoners to begin a ten man
hunger strike to the death if their demands weren’t met. However, the
hunger strikers were prohibited from making any explicit references
towards the re-instatement of special category or normalization in order
to give the government some room to compromise. Instead the protest
would officially be known as the struggle for the “five demands”.(pg 27)
The five demands the prisoners put forth were: “the right to wear their
own clothing; the right to refrain from prison work; the right to have
free association with other prisoners (a right implying freedom to
separate from other paramilitary groups); the right to organize
recreation and leisure activity – with one letter, parcel and visit
allowed per week; and the right to have remission lost, as a result of
the blanket protest restored. A suggestion that demands for the reform
of the Diplock court system – the system of trial without jury and
related dilutions of the rule of evidence – be included was vetoed by
the external leadership as being too ambitious.”(pg 27)
For the government to give in to the prisoners’ demands from the IRA
point of view would have meant a de-facto re-implementation of special
category and a step towards repealing criminalization. Criminalization
was turning out to be a very effective public opinion/smear campaign
against the IRA and was having a real effect on how Irish Catholics were
viewing the IRA:
“The phasing out of special category status in 1975 was an integral part
of a new security strategy developed by a high powered government
think-tank – which included representatives of the army, police and the
counter-intelligence agency MI5 – in an attempt to break the IRA and end
the fighting in Ireland. Known as the”criminalization” or
“normalization” policy it was essentially an attempt to separate the
Republican guerrillas from their host population, the Catholics;
depriving the fish of their water to echo Mao Tse-Tung’s famous
dictum.”(pg 15)
Once the decision to hunger strike was made it was decided that only ten
of the most dedicated volunteers would be chosen being that they would
be hunger striking to the death if the government refused to meet their
demands. Leading the strike would be a young revolutionary named Bobby
Sands. Sands was one of those “young Turks” deemed to be responsible for
the “Marxist strain” that seemed to be spreading in the IRA at the time.
At age of 19, Sands was made an officer in the Provisional IRA
commanding one of the huts in Cage 11 where he was housed. According to
the author, Sands “showed himself to be a prolific as well as a
politicized writer: He read voraciously – his favorites including Frantz
Fanon, Camilo Torres, Che Guevara, Amilcar Cabral, George Jackson and of
Irish writers, Connolly, Pearce and Mellows – keeping a fat growing pile
of exercise books full of political analysis, quotations and notes. He
was planning to write a book with it all, but they were destroyed in
1974 when the IRA in the compound burnt their huts in a dispute with the
administration over rights and privileges.”(pg 43)
Sands also contributed articles to the Sinn Fein newspaper
Republican News, which he was able to smuggle out of the prison
thru the use of couriers.(pg 46) Something else that was relevant about
Sands, and which is worth noting here, is that he showed the correct
attitude with comrades when it came to discussing revolutionary
politics. Sands would push his comrades hard on the topic of political
study. Whenever he lent someone a book he’d question them on what they’d
learned, and if he didn’t think they’d seriously absorbed the material
then he’d insist they read it again.
When Sands first arrived in Long Kesh he was sent to a segregated
area called the “Cages”. The Cages was where IRA, INLA and other
nationalists were sent to prior to the 1 March 1976 cut-off date for
special category. Because the IRA as a organization never developed or
held to one particular ideology that they believed or upheld to liberate
Ireland meant that there existed different cliques and factions within
the IRA that believed that different roads would lead to Irish
liberation. This had a huge impact on the IRA and surely contributed to
many of the set-backs and stagnations in the national liberation
movement there. One example of this was how the younger prisoners housed
in Cage 11 were looked down upon and called “renegades” by the older,
more conservative “veterans” of the IRA who were housed in Cage 10 due
to Cage 11’s belief in a socialist road to liberation. The veterans in
Cage 10 despised Marxism so much that they went so far as to stage book
burnings of such works as Marx’s Capital, The Communist
Manifesto and The Thought of Mao Zedong. Cage 10 outranked
the younger Cage 11 and considered ordering them to stand down after
word spread that the Cage 11 presented a series of lectures called
Celtic Communism.(pg 42) No doubt, that prior to these lectures the
speakers in Cage 11 studied On the Origins of the Family, Private
Property and the State by Freidrich Engels, which is a revolutionary
study from a dialectical materialist standpoint of how property
relations and the patriarchy influenced and shaped humyn society from
the primitive stage of humyn development to civilization.
The struggle for the five demands would rage for six months while the
British government publicly refused to negotiate with “criminals” and
“terrorists”. Behind closed doors however was a different story as the
government reluctantly began to give in on the demands after public
opinion began to shift in favor of the hunger strikers. International
pressure also became a strong factor as one country after another openly
condemned the Brits. Also, Guerrilla attacks and bombings on British
occupation forces were not only sustained during this period but were
stepped up. The five demands were finally met, but not until six months
had elapsed and the last of the hunger strikers had died of
starvation-related health complications. On 5 May 1981 Bobby Sands was
the first to expire, but not before managing to become an elected member
of the British Parliament, a seat he won while in prison for an
attempted bombing.(pg 39) 30,000 people voted for Sands, thereby
dispelling the government lie that the IRA had no support in Northern
Ireland.(pg 332)
Conclusions and Analysis
Unfortunately, the author doesn’t tell us what happened next, even
though six years had elapsed from the time of the hunger strike to when
the book was written. A new updated edition of this book would be great
to explain how Ireland’s national liberation struggle has played out.
According to MIM Theory 7: Proletarian Feminist Revolutionary
Nationalism, printed in 1995, the Irish struggle had greatly
degenerated as IRA leaders began to opt more and more for the ballot
over the bullet. The belief that bourgeoisie democracy and/or the
imperialists will ever consent to the people coming to power, or give up
peacefully thru a vote, the territories they have stolen and occupy is a
pipedream. Bobby Sands being put up as a candidate representing South
Tyrone Ireland in the British Parliament was only intended as a move to
agitate around the five demands and no one ever really thought he’d win,
not in the beginning anyways.(pg 72) That said, it seems that Sands’
victory spurned on those within the IRA who were already looking to put
down the gun in favor of taking up electoral politics. But as MIM
Thought has continuously re-iterated: the oppressed nations will never
be free to control their destiny so long as the imperialists hold a gun
to their heads.
Maoists understand that there can be no peace so long as the
imperialists hold power, therefore the only solution for the oppressed
nations is to take up armed struggle once the conditions are finally
right. Instead of looking to put more people from the oppressed nations
into the imperialist power-structure, Chican@s, New Afrikans, Boriqua
and First Nation people should be working to establish a United Front to
liberate their nations and towards the Joint Dictatorship of the
Proletariat of the Oppressed Nations.
Revolutionaries should always strive to push for the best possible deal
for the people without selling out the masses or trading out our
socialist principles. That is the excellent and heroic thing about what
the hunger strikers in Long Kesh did, even when the movement began
pressuring them to quit the hunger strike or settle for one or two of
the demands instead of the five they refused to budge. In the words of
Bobby Sands:
“They wont break me because the desire for freedom, and the freedom of
the Irish people, is in my heart. The day will dawn when all the people
of Ireland will have the desire for freedom to show. It is then we’ll
see the rising of the moon.”(pg 73)
The peddling of multi-culturalism, the temporary success of
globalization following the temporary defeats of socialism and
revolutionary nationalist movements as well as the election of Obomber
have created the notion that the struggle of the oppressed nations are
irrelevant. Even back in 1986 the author of this book was pandering this
idea when he said that the 1981 hunger strike “belongs more to humanity
than to a limited Nationalist cause, no matter how ancient …”(pg 333)
The reality of national oppression however contradicts the author’s
idealism, this is why the Black Lives Matter movement is so threatening
to AmeriKKKans and why it has slapped post-modernism in its face,
because it dredged up a reality they once thought distant and better
left repressed – best to pretend like genocide, slavery and annexation
never took place. Most importantly, however, because it signals the
contradiction coming to a resolution and the smashing of empire. What
the oppressed nations need are more national liberation movements, not
less.
Another point worth drawing attention to is the false distinction the
IRA made between political prisoners and “common criminals”. We believe
that is a bourgeoisie distinction and one that sets back both the prison
movement and national liberation as they are inter-related. MIM Thought
has consistently held that all prisoners under this system are political
exactly because the system is political. One need only to look at mass
incarceration in the United $tates and its many similarities to the
criminalization policy that helped derail the IRA at a time when it was
at its peak.
