1981 Irish hunger strike

These included a UFF gun attack which badly injured McAliskey and her husband,[50][51] the assassination of Miriam Daly by the UDA while her house was under military observation,[47] and, of the Irish Independence Party, John Turnley's death at the hands of the UVF.

[64] Following "intense" and "highly secret" negotiations involving the Irish Government, the British clarified their position in a thirty-page document detailing a proposed settlement, which touched on many of the demands, although without conceding any.

With the document in transit to Belfast, Hughes—having already been informed that rights to free association and to their own clothing had been granted, which he deemed 'close' to what they wanted—took the decision to save McKenna's life and end the strike after 53 days on 18 December.

[68] The final British offer made no promises but gave assurances that the government "will, subject to the overriding requirements of security, keep prison conditions—and that includes clothing, work, association, education, training and remission—under continuing review".

As further demonstration of our selflessness and the justness of our cause a number of our comrades, beginning today with Bobby Sands, will hunger-strike to the death unless the British government abandons its criminalization policy and meets our demand for political status.

[90] There was debate among nationalists and republicans regarding who should contest the election: Austin Currie of the Social Democratic and Labour Party expressed an interest, as did McAliskey and Maguire's brother Noel.

[100] The New York Times described the result as "a stunning blow to the Protestant establishment of Northern Ireland" and that it "cast into doubt the view often expressed by politicians in London that the IRA is supported only by a fringe of the Catholic voters".

[103] Several European Commission of Human Rights (ECHR) officials also sought a meeting with Sands, but he refused unless representatives of the IRA and Sinn Féin could attend, and this the Maze authorities could not allow.

[123] The British government passed the Representation of the People Act 1981 to prevent another prisoner from contesting the second by-election in Fermanagh and South Tyrone, which was due to take place following the death of Sands.

[133][134] The long-term effect of the change of prisoner strategy and the opening up of lines of communication in 1978 was that, three years later, the world now had a thorough, if a third party, knowledge of conditions inside the Maze, due to the volume of information that had previously come out.

[141] Following Hughes's death, the Irish country homes of James Comyn, a British High Court judge, and Lord Farnham, were burned out by the IRA,[142] and in Belfast, the night before his burial, there were seven shooting incidents and an explosion.

[168] Kenneth Stowe—at the time Permanent Under-Secretary of State of the NIO—later said that Thatcher was "fully aware" of the necessity in negotiating with Sinn Féin[note 14] if one wished to settle Northern Irish affairs.

[161] According to Thatcher's biographer, Charles Moore, Adams and McGuinness wanted to bring the hunger strike to an end but required something to take back to the republican movement which demonstrated British good faith.

As a result, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) threatened to release a statement condemning her government for brinkmanship and requesting that civil servants be allowed openly into the Maze to negotiate.

In France, the Foreign Minister Claude Cheysson talked of the strikers' "supreme sacrifice", and threatened to boycott the royal wedding that July;[192] in response the British Ambassador, Reginald Hibbert, pointed out that it was no different to how the French government treated demands for Corsican independence when it was backed by the FLNC's armed struggle.

[193] The French Communist Party praised the strikers in a statement to the embassy,[194] and in New York City, the consulate said they dare not fly the union flag for fear it would be stolen and burnt in protest,[192] while in Milan, the Red Brigades firebombed a British Leyland showroom.

[note 19] Approximately one thousand people attended a public mass in New York's St Patrick's Cathedral by Cardinal Cooke calling for reconciliation, while also in the city Longshoremen boycotted British ships.

[213] Two days later, Laurence McKeown's became the fourth family to intervene and ask for medical treatment to save his life; Cahal Daly issued a statement calling on prisoners to end the hunger strike.

[239] Authors Jack Holland and Henry McDonald have speculated that Thatcher's uncompromising attitude towards the hunger strikers may well have stemmed from losing her close friend and associate Airey Neave, who was assassinated by the INLA in the House of Commons underground car park a few months before her election.

[250] As Professor Robert Savage puts it, "television images of emaciated Christ-like figures with long hair and beards confined to hospital beds contrasted with the stern countenance of the intransigent prime minister".

It has been argued that the hunger strikes are part of a deliberate Sinn Féin tactic of preserving the past in the party's favour: simplified to "a cause, political status, and the recognition of their struggle for a united Ireland", albeit by a "selective and reductive" process.

[267][note 21] Those that remained on hunger strike, being unaware of the alleged offer and "weighed down by the deaths of their comrades and the fear that ending the protest in such circumstances would amount to betrayal, they decided to carry on".

[267] Richard English also believes that a "substantial British offer was indeed available" before McDonnell's death; the question, he argues is not so much whether the evidence exists but whether it bears the weight of the claim that it was good enough to accept in June 1981.

[276]A memorial to the men who died in the Irish Rebellion of 1798, the Easter Rising, and the hunger strike stands in Waverley Cemetery, Sydney, Australia, which is also the burial place of Michael Dwyer of the Society of United Irishmen.

[281] In 2011, Sinn Féin launched a thirty-year anniversary exhibition of the hunger strike at the Linen Hall, Belfast; mild criticism came from one DUP politician, Lord Browne, who emphasised its "highly sensitive" nature.

[282] Similar exhibitions were held across the country, involving several different media, and ranging from sculptures by Irish artists to rebuilding a makeshift H-Block cell on the Falls Road but also including more symbolic events, such as tree planting ceremonies.

[288] This is especially true of hunger striking, where the scholar George Sweeney noted, the "meshing of religious practice with aspirations of nationalism and militant republicanism"; in other words, quasi-religious self-sacrifice[289] and immortality in song.

[296] In visual culture, wall murals—often painted on the gable ends of terraces—have been an important method of communities on both sides of the sectarian divide to transmit history and ideology to the viewer, and statements of resistance.

In the cities, these include Belfast—where a smiling Sands fills an external wall of the Falls Road Sinn Fein office;[300] Dublin, with Yann Goulet's 1983 granite sculpture in Glasnevin Cemetery;[301] and Derry, which gained a new mural in 2000, from the Bogside Artists, depicting local 1980 hunger striker Raymond McCartney as a "Christ-like" figure alongside an anonymous female striker in Armagh, who looks similar to the Irish famine victims as illustrated by the London Evening News at the time.

Duddy recorded both republican and British positions in his handwritten diary, along with brief personal comments while 'Tom'[note 16] wrote detailed reports on the first eight phone calls (over a period of fifty-two hours).