Remembering 1981 — Bobby Sands contests Westminster parliamentary by-election

ON the fifth day of the 1981 Hunger Strike, Frank Maguire, the MP for the constituency of Fermanagh/South Tyrone, died of a heart attack.

Over the following three weeks the number of candidates for the by-election fluctuated up and down with, at one stage, as many as seven candidates being mooted, and almost an eighth candidate when by mistake an over-enthusiastic member of Sinn Féin took out under her own name, a second set of nomination papers for Bobby Sands.

Noel Maguire, brother of Frank Maguire, was first to declare his candidature, and lodged nomination papers at the electoral offices in Dungannon on Wednesday 25 March. Bernadette McAliskey had also declared herself as a runner on a Smash H-Block/Armagh and anti-repression ticket.

Former Ulster Unionist leader Harry West was elected as their candidate at a party convention, and Ulster Defence Regiment lieutenant Roy Kells, with the encouragement of Ian Paisley, was announced as being prepared to stand, but only as an ‘agreed’ loyalist candidate. And, as expected, an SDLP convention in Irvinestown ratified Austin Currie, who had previously attempted to wrest the seat from the late Frank Maguire in the bitterly-contested May 1979 election.

The 1979 election – contested without endorsement from the SDLP party executive who correctly feared repercussions from splitting the nationalist vote – placed the local SDLP in a difficult position. They too were deeply divided over the wisdom of not just contesting the seat but contesting it on an anti-IRA ticket, their fears being proven justified when Currie lost the election.

Currie’s self-serving attitude in 1979 forced the party leadership to temporarily remove him from his executive position, though he was reinstated by 1981. It was the fear of being ostracised for good, should he do a repeat performance, that forced Currie to swallow a bitter pill when the party executive decided to overturn the local selection convention and not to contest the election.

The SDLP had mistakenly calculated that Noel Maguire was a definite runner and that between him and Bobby Sands, who by this stage had emerged as a definite candidate, that the nationalist vote against a single loyalist contender would be already split enough. The SDLP withdrew from the election, only to be dumbfounded when Noel Maguire also withdrew at the last minute and joined the broad-based backing for Bobby Sands, which included Tommy Murray (SDLP), Neil Blaney (Independent MEP), Frank McManus (Irish Independence Party), and Bernadette McAliskey (National H-Block/Armagh Committee). Two members of the Irish Independence Party and the SDLP’s Tommy Murray, signed Bobby Sands’s nomination papers.

The confirmation that Sands would be a candidate had come from a Sinn Féin announcement on 26 March. Earlier that morning, Bernadette McAliskey had revealed that if a hunger-striker was to run then she would stand down in his favour and ‘work the shirt off my back’ for him.

The Sinn Féin statement said that Sands’s candidature provided the electorate with the opportunity of quantifying their support for the political prisoners and against attempts to criminalise opposition to British rule. The statement made clear that under no circumstances, following Sands’s election, would the seat be allowed to fall to the runner-up, in the event of a court action to dislodge him

Meanwhile Ian Paisley’s attempts to push Harry West out of the running floundered when Paisley’s choice, Roy Kells, withdrew when he did not get the full support of the UUP. But Paisley continued to orchestrate a campaign against Harry West, which included personal visits and appeals from the widows of four UDR and RUC men. West, however, performed a minor coup, got photographed smiling with the widows, and stood his ground. Even a poster campaign against West favouring the UDR lieutenant, with transport and manpower laid on by the UDR in the middle of the night(!), failed to change West’s mind.

Bobby Sands’s nomination papers were lodged by Jim Gibney and Owen Carron on the last possible day, Monday 30 March. Noel Maguire intended to withdraw just before the deadline, when it would be too late for Austin Currie to respond. As the 4pm deadline approached, Gerry Adams and Owen Carron waited in a car beside the electoral office just in case Maguire failed to withdraw. In his pocket, Gerry Adams carried a statement announcing Bobby Sands’s withdrawal. With less than ten minutes to go, Maguire arrived, went into the office and emerged with his nomination papers and called on his supporters to back Bobby Sands.

In a message to the electorate of Fermanagh/South Tyrone, their candidate Bobby Sands said:

“There is but a single issue at stake, the right of human dignity for Irish men and women who are imprisoned for taking part in this period of the historic struggle for Irish independence.”

He went on to say:

“We are not elitist; we do not seek a different status to that afforded the ordinary prisoner because we supposedly frown upon them. Our protest and this hunger-strike are to secure from the British Government an end to its policy of labelling us as criminals. This can be done by them conceding to us the same status that several hundred men in the cages of Long Kesh and three women in Armagh prison have. The eyes of this nation and many parts of the world will be on the people of Fermanagh and South Tyrone on polling day.”