This weekend sees the anniversary of the death on hunger strike of Joe McDonnell, the fifth hunger striker to die in 1981. To mark his death the Lenadoon 1981 Committee have organised a weekend of events to commemorate the death.

The programme begins with a football match at St Teresa's GAC club between the Lenadoon `81 Committee and an ex-POW select team. Both Joe McDonnell and Kieran Doherty were members of St Teresa's.

White line pickets will take place on the main routes throughout Belfast from 12pm and 1pm while later at 1.30pm people are being asked to assemble at the Lenadoon shops for a march through the area to the house on Lenadoon Avenue where McDonnell lived before his arrest in 1976.

A commemorative plague will be unveiled at the house.

At 4pm a memorial Mass will be celebrated in St Oliver Plunkett's for the hunger strikers. There will be a lecture on the history of hunger strikes in Ireland in the Rodaí MacCorlaí Club on the Glen Road, followed by a question and answer session and a social evening.

From Monday 9 July through to Wednesday 11 July, the National Hunger Strike exhibition will be on display in the Rodaí MacCorlaí Club's Tom Williams room.

Parliament House tribute to Hunger Strikers in Australia

More than 80 people gathered at a luncheon in the Speakers Garden of the New South Wales Parliament on 22 June to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the 1981 Hunger Strike and to celebrate Sinn Féin's recent election victories and the defeat of the Treaty of Nice referendum.

Among them were 15 Members of Parliament (another five MPs, including Police Minister Paul Whelan, sent their apologies). They were joined by Irish community leaders, Aboriginal representatives and trade union leaders from the maritime, public service, mining, construction and rural industries.

The celebration was organised by Australian Aid for Ireland and hosted by Labour MPS Jim Anderson and Paul Lynch. Jim Neeson, from Sinn Féin's International Department in Belfast was the invited speaker.

The celebration was booked for a function room in Parliament House but had to be moved to the Speaker's Garden to cater for the large turnout.

Clonakilty remembers 1981

Around 300 people of all ages attended last Sunday's 1981 Hunger Strike commemorative ceremony in Clonakilty in glorious sunshine. The march included some of those who were the driving force behind the Clonakilty Anti H Block Committee of 1980 and `81. Bandonian Seán Kelleher, who stood as an Anti H Block candidate in the general election of 1981, carried a croppy pike with the national flag attached.

At Astna Square, Cathaoirleach Cionnaith Ó Súilleabháin welcomed the large attendance and paid tribute to the Hunger Strikers. He praised the leadership shown by the local Anti H Block Committee in Clonmakilty at the height of the prison protest, which was ``in stark contrast to those in positions of political authority both locally and nationally who choose to stand idly by and allow the prisoners to die''. On occassions they had draped the Tadhg an Astna monument and erected black flags on it, which led to lengthy debates during UDC meetings at the time.

Mrs. Kay Campbell, Honourary President of the Clonakilty 1981 Hunger Strike Commemoration Committee, whose son Seán was a blanketman in Long Kesh at the time of the Hunger Strikes, laid the wreath.

Guest speakers were Bernard Fox, who spent 22 years in total in Long Kesh and was on hunger strike for 32 days in 1981. Newly elected Sinn Féin MP Michelle Gildernew, Sinn Féin M.P. said she was delighted to be in Clonakilty and traced the long republican history of the West Cork area back to the Battle of the Big Cross in 1798.

Later, at the Strand Hotel, an exhibition of newspaper cuttings from ``The Southern Star'', ``Cork Examiner'' and ``An Phoblacht'' aroused a lot of interest, as did a special Hunger Strike publication by Australia Aid for Ireland. The local snippets were taken from the 1981 period, and dwelt a lot on the UDC debates over the draping of the monument by the Clonakilty H Block Committee.