Conference tallis::celt

1223.0. "The Hunger Strike" by KOALA::HOLOHAN () Wed Jun 02 1993 13:46

  Article pulled from usenet author Eugene McElroy


               THE HUNGER STRIKE AND THE COMMUNITY
               (from An Phoblacht/Republican News)
                          May 27, 1993
                          by Des Wilson

                              *****
The annual Bobby Sands Memorial Lecture was given this year by
Des Wilson, a lifelong community activist and campaigner for
national freedom and social justice. In his lecture, which was
delivered earlier this month, Des Wilson focuses on the impact of
the hunger strike on the community and the role of the Catholic
Church.

                              *****

When the British government leaves Ireland, as it must do within
the next few years, and when we look back on the history of what
happened before they left we will see the Hunger Strike of 1981
as the event which more than any other brought about the final
British decision to leave.

When the Hunger Strike was over and the young men dead, I
remember saying to British reporters that when the history of
these years of British rule in Ireland was written we would all
recognize that the Hunger Strike was the beginning of the end
of British rule in Ireland. However long it might take,
eventually British withdrawal was inevitable.

Those who lived through those terrible times will remember only
too well the air of grief that was everywhere. Grief which seemed
often to come near to despair but never became despair. Every one
of us could suffer in our own homes at least some small part of 
the agony of those young men and the agony of their families as
they came nearer and nearer to death.

An air of unrelieved tragedy was everywhere.

The deaths of those young men could have been avoided. They could
have been avoided if the British government had kept the promises
it made to a number of people, including Cardinal O Fiaich.

Cardinal O Fiaich was treated disgracefully by the British
government and the British press, radio and television. Never in
my lifetime had I seen a cleric so insulted, so much condemned,
so much abused by the British press, except for Archbishop
Makarios of Cyprus. When Cyprus was trying by every means to
induce the British to leave in peace, Archbishop Makarios was
portrayed by the British government and the British press as a
beast, a scowling, evil man behind the scenes of every atrocity,
plotting against democracy and guilty of every kind of evil. The
British press treated Tomas O Fiaich the same way. The British
government and press crucified no Christian cleric as viciously
as they did Makarios, until Tomas O Fiaich came under their 
lash in Ireland.

The British government and the British press have never yet
apologized for that insult anymore than they have apologized,
or given compensation for, the grievous insults heaped upon
Irish democrats at any time.

Tomas O Fiaich believed during the Hunger Strike that he had
succeeded in making the British government see sense and to act,
if not with humanity, at least with some regard for its own
internationals reputation. Promises were made to  him that the
prisoners would get some of  the things they asked for. Because
of those promises made to him, Tomas O Fiaich came back from
Rome so that he could go to the prison and give guarantees to
the prisoners that the British would keep  their word. But he
got only as far as London when he learned to his  horror that
the British were not going to keep their word. They were going
to let the prisoners die.

The cardinal went back to Rome because there was nothing more he 
could do. Tomas O Fiaich dealt as an honourable man with others
whom he expected to be honourable too. The British government
acted dishonourably, and for O Fiaich there was no answer to
this; he would not act dishonourably just because they did.

The Northern Ireland Office at that time, even under direct
British rule was substantially the same establishment that
caused the present war. But the Northern Ireland Office realized
that some concessions would have to be made and that such
concessions were quite possible. The secretary of state at the
time did just as most , if not all, secretaries of state have
done, he obeyed the instructions of the Stormont civil servants.
Some concessions to the prisoners were possible.

This was the message given to Cardinal O Fiaich. This was the
message that persuaded him to return from Rome where he was
attending meetings. Even the British cabinet, it seems, would
have been willing to grant some concessions to the prisoners.

Thatcher was possibly the most dangerous prime minister the
British have had for many generations. An overbearing bully, 
she appears to have dominated the British government in which
many men shrank away in fear opposing her. They were not afraid
because Thatcher was intellectually brilliant or personally
persuasive, because she was neither. It was because she
represented interests which could make or break any cabinet
minister. To defy Thatcher was not only to offend a crass and
threatening bully and risk her personal vengeance but to risk
also the destruction of one's political career. When in course
of time conditions changed and the very interest which upheld
Thatcher no longer needed her she was dismissed, firmly and
viciously.

But of course her fall was much too late to save the lives of the
men on hunger strike and the lives and liberty of the many
victims of her viciousness. For a moment Thatcher dominated the
Northern Ireland Office, the secretary of state and the British
cabinet.

Because of this she is the person most guilty of the deaths of
those ten men.

It is likely that if she had not intervened to impose her will 
upon everyone else, the ten men might well be alive today and
many other lives as well could have been saved. We should
remember this when we watch television films of Thatcher piously
reciting the prayer of St. Francis outside 10 Downing Street or
taking part in discussions about peace anywhere else in the
world.

Thatcher started her political career begging for the votes of
Irish emigrants in Finchley and when she got her seat and her
position she referred to the Irish in general as "shiftless,
snivelling, spineless Irish." She was too much of a racist to
understand the customs or the laws or the demands of a people
of another nation. So she failed to even begin to understand
the customs, laws or demands of the Irish. She understood our 
customs, laws and demands and dignity just as little as she
understood those of other nations whom she also treated with
contempt.

Those who lived through those times will remember the sadness of
those days and how as the nights drew in and the darkness came we
all spoke quietly behind closed doors, afraid of what was going
to happen and yet hoping that even the British government would
do something reasonable and honourable to avoid the ultimate
disaster of death and destruction. We remember also how as one
death followed another the air of sadness thickened into almost
despair. It was one of  the blackest periods any of us had ever 
experienced. But people did not allow sadness, frustration and
despair to overcome them for long.

Out of those hunger strikes there was born not just frustration,
not just near despair, not just fear. Out of the hunger strikes
there was born also a terrible anger, a deep and burning rage
which has not been extinguished since. It is the same rage the
people of South Africa felt when at last they saw that their
oppressors had become so drunk with their own cruelty that their
defeat was ceratin. When Black people started their boycott of
buses, their demonstrations on the streets, their anger showed
the oppressive White community that their defeat was only a
matter time. The oppressive White regime realized too late that
within the Black community there was a deep and abiding rage
which they had caused and which they could never again suppress.

Under the Nazis in Europe in the 30's, and during the Second
World War, Jewish people were persecuted, hounded and insulted.
They had no alternative but to take it patiently and wait for
their time to come. But even among them, quiet and patient as
they were, a terrible rage was born. It was the rage that
produced the awful battle of the Warsaw Ghetto in which so many
Jewish inhabitants died, fighting is despair.

Here in Ireland, in the aftermath of the hunger strikes, this
terrible anger was also born. And it was the overbearing cruelty
of the regime here and the anger of the people that made it
certain that we had entered into the final phase of the struggle
for freedom, justice and peace.

What did the hunger strikes achieve?

We can measure this partly in terms of what was achieved for  the
prisoners. They suffered too much and got too little.

But you can measure it also in terms of what it did to and for
the people outside.

Even before the death of Bobby Sands, some people in high places
in the Church had decided that if any of the men on hunger strike
died, there would be no public ceremonies for their funerals.
This
decision was greeted with anger by some priests and others who
made it clear that if the ultimate tragedy occurred and if men
died they would be honoured with all the dignity of our people,
even if religious ceremonies had to  carried out in the streets
or in the fields. The message was clear.

The church leaders drew back and watched with surprise as tens
of thousands of people came together in great sadness but with
great dignity to mourn those whom they had now come to admire
so deeply. Among those tens of thousands of people there were
many who would never have walked in a procession before this,
who would have been afraid because they knew they were being
photographed by British soldiers and police. These people were
not afraid any more. The paralysis, this fear that many of
us felt before this, suddenly disappeared and gave place to
determination. then to defiance, then to a mighty anger.

We all recall certain incidents of those times which will remain
with us forever. I would like to recall one event which I
remember for very good reasons.

We were gathering into the church for the funeral of one of  the
men who had died. There were great crowds, many of whom stayed
outside the church building either because they did not want to
go in or because there was no room for them inside. I went into
the church, went upstairs to the gallery. I asked people there
to allow me to sit at the end of the seat. I explained to them
that I might want to leave during the sermon if there was one.
I was afraid that at this awful time the priest would take
to condemn his fellow citizens and making the sadness of the
people even worse than it already was.

So I sat at the end of  the seat. The Mass began. The time for
the sermon came. I prepared to leave.

The priest began to speak. He told us how he had brought Holy
Communion to this young man. "I have been honoured", he said, "to
be able to attend such good people as this man and his family.
This was a good man...it was my privilege to share the Eucharist
with him..."

There must have been many people in the church that morning who
said thank God, as I did, for what the priest said. It was one
of the most moving tributes any of us had ever heard. And coming
as it did from a priest, it was important because it had 
been made clear to the clergy that such tributes to the men
and their families would not be welcomed.

Neither the British nor Irish television reported what he
had said.

But through the words of that man the spell was broken. It 
was no longer a taboo to speak well of the dead, to praise
the lives of these men and to praise the sacrifice they had
made. True enough, it would take a long time before their dignity
would be completely acknowledged, but that is coming, slowly.

I think it right to remember who that priest was. It was Father
Fred Hanson who at that time was working in St. Theresa's
Parish.

The great Hunger Strike of 1981 was of course one of many 
hunger strikes which occurred in recent Irish history. For
helpless prisoners it was seen as the last awesome attempt
to win recognition of their dignity from a government which
had never had the generosity or the political sense to grant
to them.  One government behaves just like another when
prisoners go on hunger strike against them. Nowadays they do 
not force feed people unless public opinion is too weak to
condemn them for it. But they always say, as they said in 1981,
that the hunger strikers are being manipulated by activists
outside, that they are being sacrificed to the evil designs
of people outside the prisons who will not go on hunger strike
themselves but will force others to do so.

None of this is true of course, but governments say it in order
to justify their refusal to give in to the demands which hunger
strikers make. When Paddy Cooney was Minister for Justice and
Connor Cruise O'Brien was Minister for Posts and Telegraphs
there was a hunger strike in Portlaoise. The men were eventually
transferred to the Curraugh where they were held in cages
with heavily armed soldiers guarding every entrance and every
corner. The men were weak at that time and very reluctantly
Cooney had agreed to allow one priest from Belfast to go in.
I was asked to do so.

When I arrived at the Curragh I was met by three soldiers,
one of whom said to me "You are going in to persuade the
men to come off hunger strike." I said, "No, I am not. I am going
in to talk to the men to see whether we can improve their
situation."

I thought they were going to refuse to let me in. But they did
not. Inside the Curragh Prison the scene was disgraceful. All
the men were in bed and very weak. One of  them told me, "I
would rather die than go back to that place." He meant Portlaoise
where the conditions were deplorable.

I spoke to all the men and left the prison. I tried to get an
interview with Cooney. I wrote a letter to him saying among other
things that clearly this hunger strike was decided by the men
themselves, not directed from outside as the government alleged,
and that it would help people inside the prison and outside it
if concessions were made. Cooney would not see me. The message
I was giving him was not the one he wanted to hear.

When some people asked him why he did not agree to meet me,
he replied that he was attending to it. He did nothing.

I was then driven to the extremity of approaching Conor
Cruise O'Brien to ask him to get me an interview with Cooney.
At that stage O'Brien was Minister for Posts and Telegraphs.
Nothing would have persuaded me to go to him in normal
circumstances for anything. But the situation was too serious
not to. I went to the General Post Office, where he had his
office, and asked him to arrange a meeting for me with Cooney.
He said he would approach Cooney and ask for a meeting with me.
I went home and never heard from either of them again. The other
priest and myself decided then to publicize what had happened
and ask influential members of the public to persuade the 
government to give the men what they asked for and in that way
take away the need for a hunger strike.

At that stage, people in high places in the Church and the
government had come together, decided that enough was enough
and a bishop was sent in to discuss a settlement with the
prisoners. They ended their hunger strike but if they did, it
was in the sense of having been betrayed.

Having seen all this it was not hard then to understand in 1981 
the dishonesty and cynicism with which the British government
treated people like Tomas O Fiaich, and their ultimate
betrayal of him. The government in Dublin would have done exactly
the same as long as it suited them to do so.

So as the 1981 Hunger Strike went on we experienced all these
emotions, fear, hope, determination, anger, rage. For Tomas
O Fiaich it was a humiliating experience. Those who believe that
cardinals are a protected species who live their lives free
from insult and hurt should reflect on this experience of his.
You are protected only if you are on the side of the government.
The British government led on by Thatcher, humiliated him. One
lesson the British government never learned was that you do not
humiliate Irish people. Another lesson they refuse to learn was
that you do not humiliate a cardinal. If Tomas O Fiaich had
been supported by his fellow bishops the British government
would not have been able to treat him the way they did. But
they did not support him. They left him standing defenseless
at the mercy of any politician or journalist who wanted to
insult him, as Thatcher did.

One day I asked him what it was that neither he nor the rest of
us ever got the support we needed from the Bishops of Ireland,
from all those churchmen all over Ireland. He paused for a 
moment and then he said, "Look, as far as we in the north are
concerned, we're on our own, we're on our own."

If the high churchmen in Ireland did not help the people 
or even their own cardinal archbishop it was hardly
likely that churchmen in foreign countries would help either.
As far as they were concerned we were on our own also. Basil
Hume, Catholic archbishop of Westminster, and head of the
Catholic church in England, intervened during the hunger strike
to torture Catholics who were already suffering agonies of mind
by telling them quite falsely that the men on hunger strike were
committing suicide. This was contrary to Catholic teaching. But
little else could be expected from Cardinal Hume. Before being
made head of the Catholic church in England he had been
headmaster of the Catholic school out of which the SAS was born
and which counted Captain Nairac among its most distinguished
pupils.

Out of all this anger people learned important lesson.

One was that no matter how weak any of us may be we are still
stronger than our oppressors because we have right and justice
on our side.

We also learned that, as Cardinal O Fiaich said, we could not
count on people in high places, either in the church or the
state, we had to create our own political salvation.

We also learned, as the British government learned, that the
hunger strikes of 1981 did indeed mark the beginning of the
end of British rule in Ireland.

The men should not  have been forced to die.

They could have been saved.

They ought to have been saved.

It remains for us to make sure that by our work in Ireland
and by mobilizing democratic international opinion abroad
the British government is never allowed to do  such a
monstrous thing ever again.

                           **********

                   An Phoblact/Republican News
                 /                            \      
58 Parnell Square                              51/55 Falls Road
Dublin, 1                                      Belfast
Ireland                                        N. Ireland

Irish People
363 Seventh Ave
New York, NY 


 
 








*******************************************************************************

  Mark Holohan, DEC, USA        "Character is what you are in the dark" - BB
  [email protected]
  
  The opinions expressed are not necessarily the opinions of 
  Digital Equipment Corporation.

*******************************************************************************

The Lark and the Freedom Fighter
                      -Bobby Sands (3/9/54 - 5/5/81)


My grandfather once said that the imprisonment of the lark is a crime of the
greatest cruelty because the lark is one of the greatest symbols of freedom
and happiness.  He often spoke of the spirit of the lark relating to a story
of a man who incarcerated one of his loved friends in a small cage.

The lark, having suffered the loss of her liberty, no longer sung her little
heart out, she no longer had anything to be happy about.  The man who had
committed the atrocity, as my grandfather called it, demanded that the lark
should do as he wished: that was to sing her heart out, to comply to his wishes
and change herself to suit his pleasure or benefit.

The lark refused, and the man became angry and violent. The began to pressurise
the lark to sing, but inevitably he received no result. So he took more drastic
steps.  He covered the cage with a black cloth, depriving the bird of sunlight.
He starved it and left it to rot in a dirty cage, but the bird still refused
to yield.  The man murdered it.

As my grandfather rightly stated, the lark had spirit--the spirit of freedom
and resistance.  It longed to be free, and died before it would conform to the
tyrant who tried to change it with torture and imprisonment.  I feel I have
something in common with that bird and her torture, imprisonment and final
murder.  She had a spirit which is not commonly found, even among us so-called
superior beings, humans.

Take an ordinary prisoner.  His main aim is to make his period of imprisonment
as easy and as comfortable as possible.  The ordinary prisoner will in no way
jeopardise a single day of his remission.  Some will even grovel, crawl, and
inform on other prisoners to safeguard themselves or to speed up their release.
They will comply to the wishes of their captors, and unlike the lark, they will
sing when told to and jump high when told to move.

Although the ordinary prisoner has lost his liberty he is not prepared to go
to extremes to regain it, nor to protect his humanity.  He settles for a short
date of release.  Eventually, if incarcerated long enough, he becomes institu-
tionalised, becoming a type of machine, not thinking for himself, his captors
dominating and controlling him.  That was the intended fate of the lark in my
grandfather's story; but the lark needed no changing, nor did it wish to
change, and died making that point.

This brings me directly back to my own situation: I feel something in common
with that poor bird.  My position is in total contrast to that of an ordinary
conforming prisoner: I am a political prisoner, a freedom fighter.  Like the
lark, I too have fought for my freedom, not only in captivity, where I now
languish, but also while on the outside, where my country is held captive.  I
have been captured and imprisoned, but, like the lark, I too have seen the
outside of the wire cage.

I am now in H-Block, where I refuse to change to suit the people who oppress,
torture and imprison me, and who wish to dehumanise me.  Like the lark I need
no changing.  It is my political ideology and principles that my captors wish
to change.  They have supressed my body and attacked my dignity.  If I were an
ordinary prisoner they would pay little, if any, attention to me, knowing that
I would conform to their institutional whims.

I have lost over two years' remission.  I care not.  I have been stripped of my
clothes and locked in a dirty, empty cell, where I have been starved, beaten,
and tortured, and like the lark I fear I may eventually be murdered.  But, dare
I say it, similar to my little friend, I have the spirit of freedom that cannot
be quenched by even the most horrendous treatment. Of course I can be murdered,
but while I remain alive, I remain what I am, a political prisoner of war, and
no one can change that.

Haven't we plenty of larks to prove that?  Our history is heart-breakingly
littered with them : the MacSwineys, the Gaughans, and the Staggs.  Will there
be more in H-Block?

I dare not conclude without finishing my grandfather's story.  I once asked him
what ever happened to the wicked man who imprisoned, tortured and murdered the
lark?

"Son," he said,"one day he caught himself on one of his own traps, and no one
would assist him to get free.  His own people scorned him, and turned their
backs on him.  He grew weaker and weaker, and finally toppled over to die upon
the land which he had marred with such blood.  The birds came and extracted
their revenge by plucking his eyes out, and the larks sang like they never
sang before."

"Grandfather," I said,"could that man's name have been John Bull?"

    
    What a lark