‘Our Whole History has been Ruined!’ The 1981 Hunger Strike and the Politics of Republican Commemoration and Memory

†. The quotation in the title comes from McIntyre (2005); in the wake of allegations made by O'Rawe (2005) concerning the conduct of the hunger strike in 1981, the broad republican community was thrown into confusion and disarray: ‘listening to a 19-year-old woman last evening, born half a decade after the hunger strike, she described the shock to her system [of O'Rawe's allegation] – “Our whole history has been ruined”'.

Abstract

This article will analyse the contested and complex commemorative politics associated with the Irish republican hunger strikes of 1980–1981, and the struggle over their legacies during the course of the last 40 years, and the last decade in particular. This contest has been framed not simply by the expected disputes between the republican narrative and those memories associated with the Protestant/unionist/loyalist communities or the ‘official’ interpretation of the British state. For many years, the broad republican ‘family’ could commemorate and celebrate the self-sacrifice and martyrdom of the hunger strikers as a foundational and unifying narrative for the movement. The first section of the article will establish the central significance of the commemoration of these events for Irish republicanism's sense of continuity with past incarnations of the movement. The second section will analyse the politics of memory in the contemporary, post-Good Friday Agreement Republican commemorative landscape. This landscape is no longer pristine and uncomplicated. In 2005, the former Public relations officer for the IRA prisoners in the Maze/Long Kesh prison, Richard O'Rawe, alleged in his book Blanketmen, that the hunger strike had been prolonged by the Provisional IRA leadership outside the jail for political gains. These claims have triggered a long-running and ongoing dispute between erstwhile comrades. All sides in the contemporary political conflict within republicanism have attempted to recruit the historical and mythical ‘symbolic capital’ of the hunger strikers to their respective causes. This has seen the practices of commemoration become weapons in the battle over the past of the movement, but also over the current and future trajectory of Irish republicanism. The article will argue that conflict over the commemoration of the hunger strikes is now one of the most visible and important dimensions of the fragmented character of the republican family, and represents a crucial component in the contemporary politics of Irish republican memory.

Keywords:

• Provisional republican movement
• Commemoration
• Hunger strike
• Dominant narrative
• Counter-memory

Notes

†. The quotation in the title comes from McIntyre (2005); in the wake of allegations made by O'Rawe (2005) concerning the conduct of the hunger strike in 1981, the broad republican community was thrown into confusion and disarray: ‘listening to a 19-year-old woman last evening, born half a decade after the hunger strike, she described the shock to her system [of O'Rawe's allegation] – “Our whole history has been ruined”'.

1. For analysis of the Provisional movement's recent trajectory, and its republican critics, see Bean (2007), Frampton (2011), Rafter (2005), Maillot (2005), McIntyre (2008), De Bréadún (2015).

2. For general historical analysis of the hunger strikes see inter alia Hennessey (2014), Beresford (1987), O'Malley (1990), Clarke (1987), English (2003) and Walker (2006).

3. The five demands comprised the right for the prisoners to wear their own clothing, to refuse to engage in prison work, to organise free association with other political prisoners, the right to one visit, one parcel and one letter per week, and the full restoration of remission of sentences.

4. For a general history of hunger striking in Ireland in the twentieth century, see Flynn (2011); he devotes specific chapters to the cases of Ashe, MacSwiney, Gaughan and Stagg. For the Provisionals’ own commemorative publications, see Michael Gaughan – Prepared to Fight or Die (in the Irish Republican Legends series, 2009), as well as Tírghrá – Ireland's Patriot Dead (2002). The biographical entries relating to Gaughan and Stagg are at pp. 142 and 186 respectively. Brown and Viggiani (2009: 225) make the point that republicans were ‘rigorous in memorializing their dead’ throughout the conflict, but arguably initiatives like Tírghrá have shown the movement to be even more assiduous in the post-conflict era.

5. It should be noted, however, that many other organisations, movements and parties also claim allegiance to these commemorative traditions, both amongst ‘mainstream’ parties of government in the Republic of Ireland, and amongst extra-parliamentary (and often marginal) splinters of the republican family; see Ní Dhonnchadha and Dorgan (1991), Daly and O'Callaghan (2007) and Higgins (2015) for the changing context of the Republic of Ireland's official commemoration of the 1916 Rising.

6. See, for instance, the annual commemoration for Francis Hughes, the second hunger striker to die, in Bellaghy, Co. Derry in May, or the commemoration held in West Belfast to remember Joe McDonnell, the fifth to die, in July.

7. Danny Morrison makes the point that the most famous image of Sands, smiling and with shoulder-length hair (‘a very pacifistic photograph’), was taken in Long Kesh during his first period in jail, when he enjoyed ‘political status’. According to Morrison, the British tried, during the Fermanagh-South Tyrone by-election, to get the media to use an arrest photo of Sands, but the iconic image was already too well-established (see ‘The Wrong Man Interviewed’; http://thepensivequill.am/2014/09/the-wrong-man-interviewed.html) [Accessed 5 November 2015]. The photo has been reproduced on a long-standing mural at SF's Belfast headquarters in Sevastopol St.; this was recently re-painted and re-designed, to include small portraits of other IRA hunger strikers, Joe McDonnell and Kieran Doherty (from 1981) and Seán McCaughey (who died on hunger strike in Portlaoise jail in 1946; see Flynn, 2011: 102–125). See An Phoblacht, May 2015, p.14.

8. See Rolston (1992) for a pictorial selection of contemporary murals in republican areas during the 1981 hunger strikes. For later murals memorialising the hunger strikers, either individually (particularly Sands), or collectively, see Jarman (1997) and Borthwick (2015: 142–143). The image and certain phrases of Sands (especially ‘our revenge will be the laughter of our children’ and ‘everyone, republican or otherwise, has their own particular role to play’) continue to be used with reverence by SF. O'Doherty (1998: 5) perceptively recognised the way in which the latter quote from Sands had been pressed into service to persuade republicans of the merits of working alongside the SDLP during the peace process.

9. There were objections amongst some republicans to this apparent commercial usage of the hunger strikers by SF, although perhaps of more significance was the opposition which existed to the political use of the hunger strikes to bolster SF's contemporary message. Tony O'Hara, brother of INLA hunger striker Patsy, and a republican prisoner in his own right, accused SF of ‘hijacking’ the ‘images of Patsy and the other INLA men’ (Price, 2001; McDonald, 2008: 105). See also McDowell (2007: 731) for commemorative practices associated with the twentieth anniversary in 2001.

10. The most significant ex-Provisional groups are Republican Sinn Féin (founded in 1986 after SF voted to enter the Dáil Eireann, and widely believed to be the political wing of the Continuity IRA) and the 32 County Sovereignty Movement (the 32CSM was founded in 1997, and the political wing of the Real IRA). See their respective publications, Saoirse and The Sovereign Nation for regular denunciations of the Provisionals’ besmirching of the hunger strikers’ legacy and memory. Other more recent groups which have been critical of the Provisionals include Republican Network for Unity and Éirígí.

11. For analysis of the historical roots of martyrdom and self-sacrifice in the Irish republican mythos see Kearney (2006), O'Brien (1994) and Boyce (1986).

12. The statement drafted by O'Rawe, and agreed by the prison leadership, offered a compromise that would involve all prisoners (and not just IRA personnel) receiving the five demands. The full statement is reproduced in O'Rawe (2005: 167–171). See also Hennessey (2014: 16–17).

13. In his first book, O'Rawe argued that it was the IRA's Army Council that took the fateful decisions over the course of the hunger strike. In a second volume, Afterlives (2010: 76–82), dealing with the dispute he had unleashed, and defending his stance, O'Rawe stated that he now believed it had been the ‘kitchen cabinet’ (formed around Adams) that had been the critical body.

14. Morrison (2006) has edited a series of reflections on the hunger strike, and has also been Secretary of the Bobby Sands Trust.

15. McKeown spent 70 days on hunger strike, and was taken off the protest by his mother when close to death in September 1981 (Hennessey, 2014: 439). McKeown has written (2001) and co-edited with Campbell and O'Hagan (Campbell, McKeown, & O'Hagan, 1994) important oral histories of the experience of IRA prisoners in Long Kesh.

16. See McIntyre (2003: 181–183) for a personal account of this process of marginalising ‘dissenters’ amongst former Provisionals. See Hopkins (2013: 41–61) for a discussion of the dilemmas facing such ‘dissenters’ and the memoir-writing that some of them have produced.

17. Sands’ sister, Bernadette, became a leading figure in the 32CSM, and has sought to refute the efforts of the Provisionals to maintain their ‘ownership’ of her brother's legacy. O'Hearn (2006: 383) cites her as follows: ‘Bobby did not die for cross-border bodies with executive powers. He did not die for Nationalists to be equal British citizens within the Northern Ireland state'.

18. The quotation is from a mural unveiled to commemorate the fortieth anniversary of the ‘Battle of St. Matthew's’ in the Short Strand in 2011. It was used by Adams (2010) in a speech to commemorate hunger striker, Joe McDonnell.