Fasting to death is old I.R.A. protest

Press, 30 April 1981, Page 8

Fasting to death is old I.R.A. protest

By

ED BLANCHE

of the

Associated Press London Bobby Sands, near death after 60 days on hunger strike in Northern Ireland’s Maze Prison, follows the tradition of other I.R.A. men who have starved themselves to death protesting their imprisonment and their treatment behind bars. Twelve have died this century on hunger strike, a particularly Irish form of political protest that dates to the eighth century. In those days, Irishmen with a grievance against someone of higher rank fasted outside the offender’s door until the dispute was settled. The Irish Republican tradition of political protest was started by Thomas Ashe, a leader in the 1916 Easter Rising in Dublin against the British. Jailed in Dublin’s Mountjoy Prison, Ashe stopped eating to demand that he and other nationalist leaders be treated as prisoners-of-war, and died after five days as a result of force-feeding. More than 30,000 people followed his coffin through Dublin.

The most famous hungerstriker was Terence McSwiney, a rebel Lord Mayor of Cork, who died in London’s Brixton Prison on October 25, 1920, after a 74day fast. Two other nationalists also died on that hunger strike.

McSwiney; a member of the outlawed 1.R.A., declared: “The contest on our side is...one of endurance. It is not those who can inflict the most, but those who can ■suffer the most who will conquer.” .

That spirit was to inspire later hunger strikers. The next deaths came in the aftermath of the Irish Civil War between the I.R.A. seeking full independence from Britain, and the “Free State” forces supporting limited home rule.

Two I.R,A. men, Dennis Bary and Andrew Sullivan, died in Mountjoy after 43 days without food in October 1923.

In 1940, Jack McNeela and Tony D’Arcy died after a 55day fast in the Republic’s Arbour Hill prison. Describing that fast, a survivor, Michael Traynor recalled: “We’d take it in turns to tell each other about the best we’d ever eaten. “After a while, we all had to have our joints bandaged because they were only skin and bones and bedsores, otherwise gangrene would have set in easily...! could smell death on myself—a sickly nauseating stench.” Another I.R.A. man, Sean McGaughey, died in May, 1946, after a 31-day hunger and thirst strike in the topsecurity Portlaoise Prison, west of Dublin.

The full potency of the hunger strike weapon did not emerge until the early 1970 s after Northern Ireland’s sectarian feuding began in August, 1969. After a 38-day mass hunger strike by I.R.A. men in Long Kesh prison camp near Belfast in 1972, the British Conservative Government granted, the jailed "special category” status, allowing them to wear their own clothes, do no prison work, and run their own affairs in their “cages” or compounds. The “special category” status was withdrawn in

March, 1976, by a Labour Government. There were several mass fasts in Portlaoise, where I.R.A. men were held.

In the Republic’s Curragh military prison, Sean MacStiofain, the Englishborn commander of the I.R.A.’s Provisional wing, wept without food for 58 days. He came off the fast after Catholic churchmen warned of. widespread bloodshed if he died.

In Britain, Marian and Dolours Price, I.R.A. activists from Belfast jailed for life for 1973 bombings in London, were force-fed during a 206day hunger strike. They eventually won their demand to serve their sentences in Northern Ireland. Marian Price was freed last year after serving eight years of her sentence, suffering from anorexia nervosa, the so-called “slimmers” disease. She could not hold down food and doctors said she was slowly dying. Dolours; known as “the widow-maker” for terrorist activities in Northern Ireland, was freed on similar grounds last week despite an outcry from Protestants.

The British abandoned force-feeding for all except mental patients in 1974 after the controversy stirred by the Price sisters’ fast.

Although hundreds ofI.R.A. men and women have staged hunger strikes over the last decade, only two have died. Michael Haughin, an I.R.A. bank robber serving a sevenyear sentence, died, in Parkhurst Prison in England after 65 days. Frank Stagg died in Wakefield Prison, England, after 62 days on his fourth strike to demand political status.