1 March 2001 Edition

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We shall overcome

BY LAURA FRIEL

A hundred years of mourning was the time scale deemed appropriate by Native Americans to acknowledge their collective grief following the 1890 massacre at Wounded Knee. The heartbreak and suffering inflicted at Wounded Knee epitomised their shared experience of injustice and oppression.

For a century, the loss not only remained immediate in the collective memory of the tribes, but also, and perhaps more significantly, helped fuel the impetus demanding change.

In 1990, a delegation of Native American activists visiting the North of Ireland talked of their preparations to move from a period to mourning into one of healing. At the time Irish republicans were facing an anniversary of their own. Ten years after the deaths of the H Block Hunger strikers and for their families, friends and comrades, it still seemed like yesterday. And as Bik McFarlane, said at the time, for many of us ``it will always seem like yesterday''.

And now we've reached the 20th anniversary and at a commemorative Mass held in West Belfast's Clonard Monastery this week, Fr. Brendan O Callaghan reminded us that the immediacy with which many of us recall the hunger strike is no longer true for all of us.

Children and many young adults were either not yet born or were too young to share our sense of the events of 1981. ``And they need to know how the conduct of human affairs came to such a point,'' said O Callaghan. It was the duty of older generations to inform the younger, said the priest, ``with honesty and clarity''.

Music and song were provided by the McPeakes and soloist Eamonn Ó Faogáinn, with portraits of the hunger strikers forming the centrepiece before the altar.

Sunday afternoon was cold and dreary, but despite the weather over a thousand people turned out to attend the Mass. Many of the faces were familiar, older perhaps than their images captured on photographs and newspaper cuttings of the early 1980s and displayed in Clonard Hall as part of the afternoon's commemoration, but familiar all the same.

In the crowd were Gerry Adams and Joe Cahill, as well as many prominent members of Sinn Féin, the National Graves Association and the wider Republican Movement.

The exhibition, with its photographs, cuttings, posters and radio archive set the tone. It brought back many memories of people and protests and reminded us that as well as the hunger strikers, other people had also lost their lives - like Julie Livingstone and Carol Ann Kelly, children killed by plastic bullets; and latterly former hunger striker Mairead Farrell, shot dead in Gibraltar in 1988.

Families of many of the 1981 hunger strikers attended the commemoration as well as relatives of Frank Stagg. In February 1976, Frank Stagg died following a hunger strike in Wakefield jail in England. It was less than two years after the death of hunger striker and fellow Mayo man Michael Gaughan in Parkhurst. Both men were remembered during the Mass.

A commemorative booklet in memory of the hunger strikers and produced by the Greater Clonard ex Prisoners Association was given as a keepsake to each person attending.

``To many ex prisoners in jail at the time of the hunger strike, the passing 20 years has not removed the sadness and indeed the solidarity felt at that time,'' read the booklet. Highlighting the important role played by republican prisoners in the struggle for freedom and justice, it continued:

``Over the last 30 years Irish Republican Prisoners of War were continuously at the coal face of struggle. The British government, through the removal of political status, thought they could criminalise our struggle for freedom and deal republicanism a decisive blow. What they got instead was one of the most powerful and symbolic protests in human history.''

But in the end it was a hymn, sung in Irish and to the tune of ``We shall overcome'', which captured the moment for many of those attending. There had been tears throughout but even the most determined could not stem the tide of emotion with the strains of so poignant a song filling the air.

And yes, it is a song which belongs to the past but one, like the memory of Wounded Knee, which also remains part of the demand for change and the enduring will to achieve it.

An Phoblacht
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