Remembering 1981 – Time is running out

“By this Easter Sunday, Bobby Sands will be on his 50th day of hunger strike, Frankie Hughes will be on his 36th day, and Raymond McCreesh and Patsy O’Hara will be on their 29th day”

TODAY, H-Block Hunger Striker Bobby Sands, IRA Volunteer and Westminster MP for Fermanagh/South Tyrone, is slowly dying inside Long Kesh Prison Camp. Time is running out for Sands, whose markedly deteriorating physical condition is now increasingly giving grave cause for concern.

On Wednesday, a prison doctor informed his family that his life span should now be measured in days rather than weeks.

Just as in 1916, there were men and women in Ireland prepared to lay down their lives in repudiation of British rule and in assertion of Irish sovereignty, so too this Easter weekend four young Irishmen, including Sands, lie in the Prison Hospital in the H-Blocks of Long Kesh on hunger strike, preparing to lay down their lives in the service of that same cause.

The battleground for this, the last necessary rising against the injustice of British rule in Ireland, has, because of partition, been in the occupied Six Counties. But the real battleground for the political status campaign has been within the confines of jail, fought by imprisoned republicans.

They, like the signatories who put their names to the 1916 Proclamation, have fallen into the clutches of a brutal enemy, and even under these harsh conditions make no apology for having upheld in arms, and now through force of personal courage, their Irish republicanism.

To the fore in this battle is Bobby Sands, whose principled stand was overwhelmingly endorsed by the nationalist people in the historic by-election victory in Fermanagh/South Tyrone last week. By this Easter Sunday, Bobby Sands will be on his 50th day of hunger strike, Frankie Hughes will be on his 36th day, and Raymond McCreesh and Patsy O’Hara will be on their 29th day.

But Bobby Sands’s life and the lives of his three comrades can still be saved, and the H-Block/Armagh prisoners’ just demands can be won.

The euphoria naturally felt nationwide at Sands’s truly historic electoral victory must be urgently transformed into decisively effective political pressure. The rising anger and tremendous solidarity of the nationalist people – as unquestionably demonstrated by the election victory – must be impressively demonstrated on the streets and forcefully transmitted to London via what levers of power are available in Dublin and Belfast, especially through pressurising the Fianna Fáil and SDLP leaderships who pose themselves as the representatives of the nationalist people.

The formula for a prisoners’ victory remains precisely the same as ever despite the continued intransigence and arrogant contempt for Irish opinion demonstrated this week by British Premier Margaret Thatcher and Northern Direct Ruler Humphrey Atkins.