Disclaimer: The following blog post is not a reflection of the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s opinion on the below topics.
Bobby Sands was an incredibly multifaceted figure in modern Irish history. He was a writer and poet, a member of Parliament, and a volunteer to the Irish Republican Army (IRA). After sixty-six days on hunger strike in the Long Kesh Prison in Northern Ireland, he died in an attempt to regain political status for himself and his fellow Republican prisoners. Since 1976, the British government had tried to deny the humanity of the Republicans in Northern Ireland by refusing political prisoners their rights to be treated as prisoners of war. Until his tragic death, Sands participated in three nonviolent protests within the prison which aimed to restore the Republicans’ political status: the Blanket Protest, the Dirty Protest, and the 1981 Hunger Strike. During these protests, he wrote about what was happening to him inside the prison using toilet paper and a refillable pen which he stored inside his body, giving the world a first-hand account of what was happening inside of the prison.[2] Sands was only twenty-seven in 1981 when he died and had spent about nine years – a third of his life – in prison because of his strong belief in a unified Ireland. Through his tragic death, his fellow inmates were once again granted political status and Sands became a martyr for Northern Ireland.
Sands was born in Northern Ireland in 1954 to parents John and Rosaleen. He was the oldest of four children. He had two sisters, Marcella and Bernadette, and a brother named John.[3] As they grew up close to the border between the United Kingdom and Ireland, tensions were rising among those who believed Northern Ireland belonged to Ireland and those who believed it should remain under British control. Sands’ parents were Republicans, meaning they believed in an Irish Republic encompassing both the country of Ireland and the territory of Northern Ireland.[4] These beliefs would get them forcibly evicted from their home which Sands later wrote about: “I retraced my gaze and found with ease our old house, Nobody I knew was here any more, just strangers, who trimmed the lawn around the ash tree I grew up with.”[5] This caused them to move into public housing in 1961 during his adolescence. Around this time, Sands was also harassed by Unionists, those who supported the continued occupation of Ireland, they “stabbed him several times with knives and left him badly wounded.”[6] Once he was old enough, he began working a job, which he was then forced out of because he was a Republican.[7]
These continual disruptions to his life led him to join the IRA in an attempt to better his life situation by trying to free Northern Ireland from British imperial control. The IRA was an organization known for their bombings across Northern Ireland which they believed were the best way to fight against ongoing British colonialism in Ireland. While Sands belonged to this organization and was willing to do whatever it took to free his homeland, his ability to engage in protest was limited to nonviolent forms of action in prison. As other scholars have written, hunger strikes are only really a viable strategy when one side has all of the control and others, “namely those who are in a position of relative powerlessness” have none.[8] So while it is true that Sands was a leader in a nonviolent resistance against the British, this was more a function of his situation than of true belief in the efficacy of nonviolence.
His involvement with the IRA is in fact what landed him in prison on two separate occasions. During his first time in prison, Sands was afforded the privileges of a political prisoner. Some of these included the ability to wear normal clothing, accept gifts and care packages from the outside world, engage in education, and to not work the menial jobs in the prison which were often used as a way for British prison wards to inflict abuse among Republican prisoners.[9] While still heavily restrictive, these conditions afforded the prisoners with a certain level of status. In allowing them these privileges, the British were showing them respect as an enemy combatant in accordance with the modern laws of war.[10] However, this was an image problem for the British because it required them to treat the Republicans, which they were labeling as criminals, as prisoners of war (POWs). As the government was making the decision to begin treating the Republicans as criminals instead of political prisoners, Sands was released from jail in 1976.
However, he would not be in the outside world for long, returning later in autumn 1976 without his previous privileges.[11] Sands was arrested and sentenced to 14 years as an accomplice for being in the car at the same time as a gun, which was theoretically connected to a bombing, an outrageous sentence for a case built on a convoluted connection to a crime.[12] Upon arrest, Sands had been taken to a special interrogation site and beaten by police who attempted to make him confess to a greater crime. Despite this, he refused to confess to any crime and was imprisoned nonetheless.[13] It is important to note that during this period Republicans were tried in juryless courts run by Unionists.[14] When he arrived there, the other men were already participating in the Blanket Protest as a way to resist their designation as criminals instead of POWs.[15] This would be the first of three protests Bobby Sands participated in during his second time in the H-Block, a maximum security wing of the Long Kesh Prison.
The Blanket Protest was a several years long protest which brought attention to the fact that the Republicans were not being given their rights as political prisoners. It was so named because instead of prison uniforms, all of the men who participated wore their prison-issued blankets as clothing. This was a serious undertaking which required incredible resolve. As Sands describes it One Day in My Life, a snapshot of his life he wrote during the protest, “My three flimsy blankets were no match for the bitter, biting cold that came creeping through the bars of my window, situated above my head.”[16] It was made worse by the fact that the men had no flushing toilets or way to dispose of garbage in their rooms, so without any foot protection they were forced to wade through their own refuse.[17] Their high security status, which could end at any time given they conceded to wearing the prison uniform, led to further abuses. The men were not allowed to have any entertainment such as literature, they were placed in solitary cells, and the monthly visitations were limited. Despite these harrowing conditions, Bobby Sands wrote about how much of a blessing the days when he got to visit with his family were, “…it’s only a few hours to my visit. The thought of seeing my family was comforting. It was the highlight and only highlight of each long torturous month.”[18]
As it became clear that the government was not interested in ceding to their demands, the men added a second protest, the Dirty Protest. This was an escalation from the Blanket Protest because the men were now also refusing to participate in basic hygiene such as showering. As Sands relays it in his writing, the conditions within the prison were already disgusting: “I looked at the stinking, dirt-covered walls, the piles of disease-ridden rubbish and decaying waste food that lay scattered in the corners of the damp floor…and the disease-ridden chamber-pot that lay beside the door.”[19] The Dirty Protest can be seen mainly as a move to heighten public awareness of the rancid conditions they were already being forced to live in. Yet, it soon became clear that this was also not enough.
The Hunger Strikes to restore political prisoner status happened in 1980 and 1981 respectively. During the first strike, Sands was given the title of Commanding Officer of the prisoners when the current one, Brendan Hughes, went on strike. In this time, he was given special privileges which allowed him further communication with outside representatives and the strikers.[20] The first strike in 1980 did not receive much outside press or deliver the prisoners their goals of allowing them to wear their own clothes. They had negotiated through a Catholic representative, Cardinal Ó Fiaich, with the prison about allowing them this privilege and ended their strike with the understanding that this agreement would hold.[21] However, the British broke their promise, prompting another strike beginning on Sunday, March 1st, 1981.[22] Bobby Sands would now be the first to start the hunger strike and many of his fellow prisoners followed him. Although IRA leadership was against this second strike, the men felt this was the best way to advocate for their cause within the prison.[23]
During the first seventeen days of the strike, Sands kept a diary that would later be shared with the world. In it, he detailed the cruelty displayed by the guards who kept trying to get him to break his strike. Before the hunger strike Sands wrote about the poor quality of the food: “The white squares of discarded stale bread added a new feature to the rubbish piles in the corners [of his cell]. I noticed the marks in the sides of the slices of bread and lifted one from the rubbish. It was blue-moulded.”[24] After he began his strike, he described the increasing amount of food being brought to him: “Tonight’s tea was pie and beans, and although hunger may fuel my imagination (it looked a powerful-sized meal), I don’t exaggerate: the beans were nearly falling off the plate.”[25] However, throughout these early days, Sands kept a positive attitude. He wrote repeatedly during the first two weeks of the strike that he was not experiencing complications and that the pain of not being free was far worse than any hunger pains.[26] As many successful hunger strikers do, he framed this self-deprivation as the British murdering him. He shared that “Many Irishmen have given their lives in pursuit of this freedom and I know that more will, myself included, until such time as freedom is achieved.”[27] This tactic is often how hunger strikers assert their cause as a protest rather than a suicide.[28]
Then, in a strange twist of fate, Bobby Sands– while still on hunger strike– was elected to Parliament. The current member of parliament where Sands resided, Frank Maguire, died in the middle of his term, causing an emergency election to fill his seat.[29] Sinn Féin members, the political party which represented the IRA, wanted to replace Maguire with another pro-strike politician and thought it would be worthwhile to run Sands as Maguire’s replacement as a form of symbolic protest.[30] They wanted to counter the dominant British narrative, seen in British news sources like the London Times, which claimed that the people of Northern Ireland did not actually support the IRA or the strikers efforts.[31] With the help of over 30,000 constituents, they were able to make this a reality. From his deathbed in prison, Bobby Sands was democratically elected as a member of Parliament. This was a public relations disaster for the British Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, who was now letting a sitting member of Parliament die and not just another random IRA volunteer.[32] The world watched in horror as Sands was allowed to die over sixty-six days.
Upon his death, more strikers took his place. The strike ended only after 217 days and at the behest of the relatives of the remaining hunger strikers. In total ten men, including Bobby Sands, died during the 1981 hunger strikes.[34] They brought international attention to the crisis happening in Northern Ireland and were able to eventually win back the privileges of political prisoners they had once enjoyed. As fellow inmate Bik McFarlane shared in the introduction to The Diary of Bobby Sands, “Today [1990], the H-Blocks are quite literally centres of learning.”[35] After only a few years, they were allowed all their old privileges and increased access to educational materials. Through his death, Sands was able to give these rights back to his fellow prisoners. His nonviolent protests, from the Blankets Protest all the way to the Hunger Strike which took his life, worked to accomplish a goal many thought impossible because of the long struggle the prisoners had undergone. He also gave the IRA a martyr, a young hero from Northern Ireland who never gave up on his country or his goals.
Although his legacy is still divisive, many cite his death and the Hunger Strike more broadly as part of the reason violence ceased in Northern Ireland. For one, his victory in the election proved that Sinn Féin, the political wing of the IRA, was an electorally viable party. As former American Congressman Peter King said in a 2021 interview with the Irish Times looking back at the strike, “Bobby Sands’s sacrifice and death inspired the republican movement and led to the continued rise of Sinn Féin as an electoral force, bringing Sinn Féin to the bargaining table and ultimately resulting in the Good Friday Agreement [the agreement which caused a permanent ceasefire].”[36] The current Sinn Féin president Mary Lou McDonald echoed this sentiment in the same interview, stating Sands’ protest “planted the seeds for what would become the peace initiative and the peace process and everything that flowed from that.”[37] More and more republicans were able to find political– rather than violent– solutions to gain their rights, which ultimately ended the violence. Despite being part of a violent organization, his protests are a lasting example of the efficacy of nonviolent political action.
[1] “Bobby Sands,” Bobby Sands Trust, Accessed March 14, 2024.
[2] Bobby Sands, Bobby Sands: Writings from Prison (Boulder, CO: R. Rinehart Pub., 1997): 23.
[3] John M. Feehan, Bobby Sands and the Tragedy of Northern Ireland (Dublin, Ireland: The Mercier Press Limited, 1983): 58.
[4] Ibid. 59.
[5] Sands, Bobby Sands: Writings from Prison, 88.
[6] Feehan, Bobby Sands and the Tragedy of Northern Ireland, 62.
[7] Bobby Sands, One Day in my Life, (Dublin, Ireland: The Mercier Press Limited, 1983): 15-16.
[8] Lionel Wee, “The Hunger Strike as a Communicative Act: Intention without Responsibility,” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 17, no. 1 (2007): 70.
[9] Feehan, Bobby Sands and the Tragedy of Northern Ireland, 68.
[10] Ibid. 69.
[11] Feehan, Bobby Sands and the Tragedy of Northern Ireland, 89.
[12] Ibid. 98.
[13] Ibid. 96.
[14] Sands, One Day in my Life, 15.
[15] Ibid. 16
[16] Ibid. 25.
[17] Ibid.
[18] Ibid. 42.
[19] Ibid. 43-44.
[20] Ibid. 111.
[21] Feehan, Bobby Sands and the Tragedy of Northern Ireland, 13.
[22] Bobby Sands, The Diary of Bobby Sands: The First Seventeen Days of Bobby’s H-Block Hunger-Strike to the Death (Dublin, Ireland : Republican Publications, 1990): 15.
[23] Feehan, Bobby Sands and the Tragedy of Northern Ireland, 121.
[24] Sands, One Day in my Life, 15.
[25] Sands, The Diary of Bobby Sands, 45.
[26] Ibid, 27-28.
[27] Ibid, 35.
[28] Aogán Mulcahy, “Claims-Making and the Construction of Legitimacy: Press Coverage of the 1981 Northern Irish Hunger Strike,” Social Problems 42, no. 4 (1995).
[29] Feehan, Bobby Sands and the Tragedy of Northern Ireland, 40-41.
[30] Ibid. 122.
[31] Mulcahy, “Claims-Making and the Construction of Legitimacy,” 460.
[32] Sands, Bobby Sands: Writings from Prison, 10.
[33] “Bobby Sands Funeral,” Bobby Sands Trust, Accessed March 14, 2024.
[34] Sands, Bobby Sands: Writings from Prison, 11.
[35] Sands, The Diary of Bobby Sands, 12.
[36] Freya McClements, “What Bobby Sands Means to Me: ‘The Hunger Strikers Chose to Die. Daddy Didn’t,’” The Irish Times, April 3, 2021.
[37] Ibid.