A slow-burning fuse (Written after the deaths of H-Blocks Hunger Strikers Raymond McCreesh and Patsy O’Hara)

THE DEATHS of Hunger Strikers Raymond McCreesh and Patsy O’Hara in the H-Blocks last week, in quick succession on top of the deaths of Bobby Sands and Francis Hughes, has almost certainly touched off a slow-burning fuse.

For although there have been outbursts of popular violence on the streets, the feelings of dismay, frustration and anger run much deeper than the often intemperate and impatient actions of the young people.

At the top of the frustration there is a feeling of outrage – which will find no satisfactory channel until its conversion to IRA support – at the indiscriminate retaliation by British forces on innocent nationalist people.

● An Phoblacht/Republican News, 30 May 1981

All of the dead Hunger Strikers spent many years of their short young lives behind barbed wire and prison walls which are just some of the foundations of British ‘law and order’ in the North.

They could not tolerate what they saw going on in their land: a sectarian loyalist government discriminating against their people, peaceful protest routed, and eventually the use of British military force to shore up the collapsing Orange statelet.

They could not tolerate what they saw and the only choice they ever had was the choice offered to a slave. But instead they obeyed their consciences, found courage and energy, and went into battle with the odds overwhelmingly stacked against them.

No Irish army occupies England. No Irish army harasses the people of England, nor has divided one community from all other, nor systematically goes around mowing down civilians and children.

British troops do not fall into this category. They are not civilians nor children and the only pranks they get up to are murdering, torturing and maiming Irish people as they walk their own streets. They have a choice between following their consciences and staying at home or taking whatever punishment Mother England has inflicted on them and on the Irish. That is the true picture of the British soldier in Ireland, and therefore it is hard to sympathise with them when they meet their maker early.

The deaths of Bobby Sands, Francis Hughes, Raymond McCreesh and Patsy O’Hara are sweeping a change through the nationalist people of the North which is spilling over into increasing awareness in the South. The change will not necessarily be fully seen on marches or in elections. But people throughout Ireland are leaving behind whatever doubts or reservations they had in the past about answering our problems through the use of forces.

Many young people – the great hope for the future – who last month were nothing but soccer fans or into pop music, are now joining a growing queue to step into the shoes of Bobby, Francis, Raymond and Patsy.