Joe Horgan Column
By Joe Horgan
A IT MUST be something in the air or just one of those strange historical
configurations but just after the Easter 1916 commemorations had brought
about a discussion concerning the whole nature of violence and Irish nationhood
we have another anniversary.
Some 25 years ago, IRA prisoners in the H-Blocks began a hunger strike
which was to see 10 of them die. Those 10 men starved themselves to death.
Hunger-striking does have an ancient Irish pedigree. It even had a place
in the civil code that was part of Gaelic Ireland and was seen as a legitimate
and accepted form of protest. It is also something that the British had
encountered before with a certain Mahatma Gandhi opposing the British
Raj by, amongst other things, enduring some 17 hunger strikes.
Of course they had also encountered Irish Republicans in this way before
— with one of the most notable being the death in Brixton prison
in 1920 of the Lord Mayor of Cork Terence MacSwiney.
He passed away after 74 days without food and left a legacy of words that
later Republicans were to seize upon. It is not those who can inflict
the most, he said, but those that can suffer the most who will conquer.
Ireland and Britain have moved on so much from those days of 1981 that
it seems almost impossible to imagine them.
Even for those of us who were already adults at the time they have taken
on the grainy patina of film footage and the general bitterness of those
days seems like something that could only be recreated by film or book.
There are current generations around us here in Ireland and Britain to
whom those days are as historical as anything from the Second World War.
So it is hard now — when even the interminable, faithful hatreds
of the North of Ireland could yet coalesce into a working, just society
— to fit those days into any kind of contemporary context.
Those 10 men did not die because they directly believed it would bring
about their dream of a united Ireland free of British rule.
They died more in response to the internal politics of the troubles and
their belief in the sanctity of the Republican cause.
They died in order to legitimise their struggle as a political one.
They were refusing to be treated as mere criminals and wanted instead
for their status as virtual prisoners of war to be reinstated. They had
once had such a status and much like the Prevention of Terrorism act it
is worth remembering that it was a Labour administration in London that
had introduced their new status as common criminals.
Now it is not necessary in any way to sympathise with Republicans or to
condone their terrible violence in order to suggest that a good percentage
of those men would probably never have been serving prison sentences were
it not for the conflict in the North.
Those who would suggest they were only criminals engaged in criminal acts
are discarding an awful lot of context to serve what can only be political
prejudice.
The terrible violence in the North happened because of specific social,
political and historical reasons.
That is not to condone it or excuse it but to genuinely explain it. That
some of the people caught up in it may well have followed a criminal path
anyway is probably true but it is just as true that many others never
would have.
It is reported that one of the men who survived the hunger strike, when
his family intervened after he fell into a coma, died recently at the
age of 55. He had sworn that whatever happened there was someone he would
outlive and through a grim illness surprised doctors by clinging on and
on.
Only when a family member whispered to him the loving lie that Margaret
Thatcher was about to pass away did he give up his own struggle and die.
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