On this day, 5 May 1981, Bobby Sands died after 66 days on hunger-strike. There is a brief, heart-breaking video clip of his mother a few days earlier, saying she will not give orders to have him fed – that he had asked her not to and she had given her word. “I love my son” she concluded.
The Troubles had many stark events but few matched that of the 1981 hunger strikers and their deaths. It is a testimony to their sacrifice that so many, within and without the republican community, have tried to blur what happened, to suggest that the hunger-strikers were tricked, that they were taking their own lives, that they were criminals.
No matter what way you cut it, the courage of ten men who over long weeks endured the increasing agony of hunger, loss of sight, loss of hearing, loss of life shines out with uncomplicated purity. These men weren’t attacking anyone, campaigning for attack on anyone. Like those executed in 1916, they knew that their enterprise would very likely result in their deaths but their commitment was firm, irrevocable.
The 1981 hunger strike left us many unforgettable images – crude mocking graffiti in unionist areas, Catholic Church condemnation, clapping and jeering as Francie Hughes’s body was taken for burial. But when all those have faded, when the clatter of bin-lids has fallen silent, we’re left with the heroic, undeniable fact that ten men chose death rather than have the cause for which they fought framed as, in the words of Francie Brolly, “800 years of crime”.
Such sacrifice should humble and encourage us all.
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