Blanketmen: An Untold Story of the H-block Hunger Strike

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Sinn Féin has since turned much of the history of the 1981 hunger strike into a legend, placing itself at the middle of the struggle and airbrushing out the involvement of the IRSP, socialists like Bernadette McAliskey, trade unionists, and others. O’Rawe claims that he and ‘Bik’, as the senior IRA officers inside the jail, and the only two who ‘needed to know’, accepted these terms, although ‘Bik’ McFarlane has always refuted this. We need to know about the big issues - the economy, health, the environment. I agree with unionists when they say about the potential to lose the National Health Service in a united Ireland. I'd love to see NHS being part of 32-county Ireland but we need to answer questions about funding beforehand." At the time, the British establishment was reeling from the collapse of the Sunningdale Agreement, forced by the reactionary ‘general strike’ called by militant loyalists. They demanded a ‘Protestant state for a Protestant people’ and no power-sharing with nationalists, rejecting the terms brokered by the British government.

In 1920 several hunger strikes (Mountjoy and Cork) were conducted by Irish Republicans demanding political status, resulting in two deaths from starvation. In the 1923 Irish hunger strikes thousands of Irish prisoners went on hunger strikes resulting in several deaths. Richard O’Rawe (born 1956) is a former Irish republican activist and author of several books about The Troubles. Only a few years earlier, Republican prisoners Michael Gaughan (d.1974) and Frank Stagg (d.1976) had died in English jails while on hunger strike for political status and repatriation to Ireland – the former as a consequence of brutal attempts to force-feed him. It is a considerably dangerous form of protest, and having Volunteers slowly die in prison after years of fighting had the potential to depress the movement rather than inspire it. Despite the reservations from Republican leaders, PIRA prison commander Bobby Sands began the 1981 hunger strike on 1 March. Sands joined the Provisionals at the age of 18, after he lost his apprenticeship and his family was forced to move home due to intimidation from loyalist gangs.He will bring "some left-leaning republican analysis" to the deliberations but insists there'll be "no dogma". Despite Sinn Féin’s apparent ‘turn’ after the hunger strike towards ‘democratic’ methods, and radical leftist posture, it never broke its sectarian line of only appealing to Catholic or Nationalist voters. The new ‘community’ politics paradoxically strengthened sectarianism, as it became institutionalised in the new Stormont Assembly after 1998. Prison guards subjected the political prisoners to beatings and torture and many of the latter submitted to the Long Kesh regime leaving only a core of “hard men” resisting. Since 1976 some Republican prisoners, furious at being classed as criminals rather than politicals, refused to conform to prison rules, wearing blankets instead of “monkey suits”.

O’Rawe attempts to peel “away the layers of carefully scripted myths that have surrounded this momentous event in Irish history, the most insidious being that the prisoners were always in complete control of the hunger strike”. Apparently the ‘Mountain Climber’ offered: their own clothes, parcels/ visits and letters, unofficial segregation, regular free association and acceptable ‘work’. Blanketman" redirects here. For the homeless man known as "Blanketman" or "Blanket man", see Ben Hana. So present day N.Ireland, still a part of the UK, and I don’t see the country doing that badly. The republic of Ireland just went bankrupt and got bailed out by Germany…and N.Ireland didn’t.

Mr O'Rawe will join more than two dozen community activists, academics, business people and politicians in exploring the priorities for potential constitutional change. The Official IRA line is that Gerry Adams and his colleagues had been awaiting a second, better, but undelivered, offer from the ‘Mountain Climber’.

However, the Army Council of the IRA rejected the offer and six more men died, the last one on August 20. The strike ended, partly due to the strikers’ families intervening, on October 30 and, soon after, most of the rights demanded were granted. Forty years after the hunger strike ended, the idea that reform through Stormont can achieve an end to sectarianism, genuine equality and improved living conditions for the working class – much less a 32 county socialist republic – has been completely shattered. The situation was getting out of control, and the British state stepped-up repression of Republicans to appease Paisley’s ‘No Surrender’ mobs – who were preparing for all-out civil war. The Blanketmen

The promised ‘peace dividend’ of the Good Friday Agreement has not materialised, as the North of Ireland continues to be economically stagnant, with record poverty and deprivation. The Assembly collapses whenever there is a political crisis or the parties renege on their commitments.

Now a successful writer with a number of factual and fictional books under his belt, the self-styled "independent republican", who cut ties with Sinn Féin in 1985, has accepted an invitation to sit on the experts and reference panel of the SDLP's New Ireland Commission. Brendan Hughes’s family was there and Brendan was honoured on the night as he was the OC on the first blanket; Kieran Nugent’s family was there too, Kieran was the first blanketman.O’Rawe’s account of the organisation of the hunger strikes displays an unsurprising disconnect between the Army Council on the outside and the inmate leaders. In relation to linking up with a party that was historically critical of the IRA, Mr O'Rawe said he believed the "SDLP were right and demonstrably so". The youngest to die were Patsy O’Hara (Irish National Liberation Army, ‘INLA’) and Thomas McElwee (Provisional Irish Republican Army, ‘PIRA’), both at the age of 23. Like many others, they had joined the Republican cause so young because they saw no way out of the oppressive sectarian Six County state other than through struggle. Across the sectarian divide the working class had an honest desire for peace. This does not mean it was ‘neutral’ in the conflict or passive, but tired of tit-for-tat sectarian bombings and killings that led nowhere. Only a genuine Marxist revolutionary tendency could have explained the way forward then, as now. The IRA did not want to be part of the UK, mainly for nationalistic reasons. I’m guessing lots of money didn’t go there at the time for rebuilding as it was like a war zone in places.