1920 Cork hunger strike

Documentation, published in The Nine Survivors (2021), indicates that nine days into the strike, JJ Kinsella, the prison's chief medical officer, warned that "an appalling incident is imminent", and called on the British government to intervene and release the hunger strikers.

[5] It was however decided, early on, that the government would take an approach of ignoring the strikers' demands, out of fear that to do otherwise would undermine the judicial system and serve as a morale boost to the IRA.

This was the view expressed by Andrew Bonar Law, who was deputising at Westminster due to Prime Minister David Lloyd George being on holiday.

Lloyd George returned two weeks into the strike, and repeated Bonar Law's decision that the hunger strikers' demands would not be met.

While it was denounced by some priests, mainly in England, as leading to suicide and therefore a sin, the majority of the clergy in Ireland threw their support behind it, portraying the strikers as soldiers willing to fight and die for their country.

[8] A number of other British newspapers spread rumours that the hunger strikers were being fed by visitors in an attempt to undermine support for them, though any effectiveness of this strategy was lost following the deaths in October 1920 of Michael Fitzgerald and Joseph Murphy in Cork, and Terence MacSwiney in Brixton, proving that the hunger strikers were not being fed.

Future international leaders, among them India's Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, Vietnam's Ho Chi Minh, and Italy's Benito Mussolini, all noted at various points that they were moved by the hunger strike.

Three deaths occurred during this large scale hunger strike: Joseph Whitty (aged 19), Denny Barry and Andy O'Sullivan.