A letter from Margaretta D’Arcy to Fintan O’Toole

Dear Fintan,

In the spirit of our age of critical awareness and analysis, as championed by our president, Michael D Higgins, I invite you to fully engage in a discussion on of the role of Bobby Sands in history. I had hoped that you would kickstart this discussion after the screening of the documentary “66 Days” at the Galway Film Fleadh on 8 July, as you had been billed to do. But was very disappointed when, after setting out your views about the film (in which you had featured), me and the rest of the audience were left with a mere 10 minutes to express our views. In fact, we got the distinct impression that you and the rest of the panel wanted to avoid a full and open discussion about the film at all costs. We felt quite insulted.
Director Brendan J Byrne has his own take on the events which led to Sands’ untimely death and makes a case that the power of self-inflicted suffering is more effective than violence. In the panel discussion, Byrne admitted that he had to omit details from the film that interfered with his image of a singular heroic figure starving himself to death rather than blowing other people up. In other words, a protagonist who is more acceptable to the present establishment view of rejecting armed struggle. His objective, as Variety puts it, is “respectfully examining Sands’ folk-hero legacy, rather than amplifying it.” In other words, airbrushing and sanitising history.
A film director, of course, is perfectly entitled to airbrush as much as they like. An intellectual of integrity is not. You have the status of one of Ireland’s eminent intellectuals. You lecture to students at Princeton University as the voice of Ireland. You write for the British Guardian. Earlier this year you wrote a piece about the facts of the Easter Rising finally emerging from the long shadows of myths. About how the power of 1916 can be contained to prevent its imaginative logic being perverted by any Tom, Dick or Harriet terrorist through the use of facts, context and an understanding of the virtue of the Rising’s guiding idea of a republic of equal citizens.

So why do you not follow your own practice when it comes to Bobby Sands?

“66 Days” reduces the cause of the hunger strikes to one grievance: the removal of political status for prisoners. The film airbrushes out more complex factors: the British government’s ruthless policy in putting down the modest demands of the civil rights movement; Bloody Sunday and internment; the torture used on the hooded men; the “missing” documents which show that torture did take place and that the methods were a precursor of what happened in Iraq (water boarding, simulation of being thrown out of helicopters etc); the impact of life sentences; the taking of hostages from the nationalist community, particularly women, and their treatment in Castlereagh, where the women were deliberately humiliated in relation to their menstruation (denied sanitary towels, jeered at as blood trickles down their legs) and subject to constant internal examinations, which in one case produced a miscarriage.

Bobby Sands carried the weight of all these grievances and the struggles of his comrades on his shoulders. Especially the women comrades in Armagh. The role of these women was crucial for the psychological strength of the men. Not one woman in Armagh refused to give up her fight for political status despite having to make sacrifices such as giving birth in jail and seeing the child taken away, the ultimate sacrifice of giving up motherhood. The men understood that the sacrifices the women were making far exceeded anything they had to endure.

When I was in Armagh jail, a woman told me that when she was being tortured in Castlereagh it was not fighting for Ireland’s freedom that motivated her; it was about preserving her integrity, a burning sense of her against them, her awareness of blatant injustice.

Bobby Sands wrote: “I am trapped and all I can do is resist. I know some day I will defeat this monster but I weary at times. I think and feel that it may kill me first. When I repel the torture … I feel ten feet tall for I know I am right. I know that no matter what may be inflicted upon me, it will never change me.”

And behind the torture was a body of law and networks of collusion in Ireland and the UK to protect its use. The Prevention of Terrorism Act, total censorship on media, Offences Against the State Act. I, for example, was arrested under the PTA for reading a book on a train from Belfast to catch the ferry to the UK. I was reading Father Raymond’s book on the H Block. A fellow passenger asked what I was reading. When I got off the train I was arrested. I was due at a meeting with a theatre in the UK who were preparing a production of the Non Stop Connolly Show. When I was in custody, the police rang the theatre and told them that I was being held under PTA and did they know me. The production was cancelled. This was happening all over the UK. The Irish population was subject to a climate of intimidation and fear.

The same muffling in the USA. In New York on a visit meeting with some of the intellectuals, they were only concerned with the violence of the evil IRA. They were not interested in torture.

And in Galway, Fintan, you too engaged in muffling. You contributed to building a new mythology around Bobby Sands, which hides the truth about torture, in the same way the Irish government has sought to hide the truth about Shannon’s use as a war and torture port. You applied your intellectual airbrush to history. You airbrushed truth.

You need to put away the airbrush and consider that maybe, just maybe, a defining element of Irish history in the 20th century, a defining element in the life of Bobby Sands, a defining element in the recent history of the Middle East, is the experience of torture and resistance to that torture.

Yours sincerely

Margaretta D’Arcy