Editorials
The Republic will be their monument
The struggle of political prisoners to resist criminalisation is as old as Irish republicanism itself. When Wolfe Tone was captured with a French military force off the Donegal coast in 1798 the French officers were treated as prisoners of war by the British but they took Tone to Dublin in chains as a common criminal. The Fenian prisoners suffered the worst privations of the Victorian criminal punishment system. From 1916 onwards the prisons became battlegrounds with republicans winning recognition as political prisoners through protests outside and inside the jails, including hunger strike.
