Bobby Sands, 1981.05.05. Died on hunger strike in prison – Maze

Robert Gerard Sands (Roibeárd Gearóid Ó Seachnasaigh),  9 March 1954 – 5 May 1981 was a member of the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) who died on hunger strike while imprisoned at HM Prison Maze in Northern Ireland. Sands helped to plan the 1976 Balmoral Furniture Company bombing in Dunmurry, which was followed by a gun battle with the Royal Ulster Constabulary. He was arrested while trying to escape and sentenced to 14 years for firearms possession.

He was the leader of the 1981 hunger strike in which Irish republican prisoners protested against the removal of Special Category Status. During Sands‘ strike, he was elected to the UK Parliament as an Anti H-Block candidate. His death and those of nine other hunger strikers was followed by a surge of IRA recruitment and activity. International media coverage brought attention to the hunger strikers, and the republican movement in general, attracting both praise and criticism.

Sands was arrested and charged in October 1972 with possession of four handguns found in the house where he was staying. He was convicted in April 1973, sentenced to five years imprisonment, and released in April 1976.

Upon his release, he returned to his family home in West Belfast, and resumed his active role in the Provisional IRA. Sands and Joe McDonnell planned the bombing of the Balmoral Furniture Company in Dunmurry on 14 October 1976. The showroom was destroyed but as the IRA men left the scene there was a gun battle with the Royal Ulster Constabulary. Leaving behind two wounded, Seamus Martin and Gabriel Corbett, the remaining four (Sands, McDonnell, Seamus Finucane, and Sean Lavery) tried to escape by car, but were arrested. One of the revolvers used in the attack was found in the car. On 7 September 1977, the four men were sentenced to 14 years for possession of the revolver. They were not charged with explosive offences.

Immediately after his sentencing, Sands was implicated in a fight and sent to the punishment block in Crumlin Road Prison. The cells contained a bed, a mattress, a chamber pot and a water container. Books, radios and other personal items were not permitted, although a Bible and some Catholic pamphlets were provided. Sands refused to wear a prison uniform, so was kept naked in his cell for twenty-two days without access to bedding from 7.30 am to 8.30 pm each day.

In late 1980, Sands was chosen Officer Commanding of the Provisional IRA prisoners in the Maze Prison, succeeding Brendan Hughes, who was participating in the first hunger strike. Republican prisoners organised a series of protests seeking to regain their previous Special Category Status, which would free them from some ordinary prison regulations. This began with the “blanket protest” in 1976, in which the prisoners refused to wear prison uniforms and wore blankets instead. In 1978, after a number of attacks on prisoners leaving their cells to “slop out” (i.e., empty their chamber pots), this escalated into the “dirty protest“, wherein prisoners refused to wash and smeared the walls of their cells with excrement. Sands wrote about the brutality of Maze prison guards:

“The screws [prison guards] removed me from my cell naked and I was conveyed to the punishment block in a blacked out van. As I stepped out of the van on arrival there they grabbed me from all sides and began punching and kicking me to the ground … they dragged me by the hair across a stretch of hard core rubble to the gate of the punishment block. The full weight of my body recoiled forward again, smashing my head against the corrugated iron covering around the gate.”

The 1981 Irish hunger strike started with Sands refusing food on 1 March 1981. He decided that other prisoners should join the strike at staggered intervals to maximise publicity, with prisoners steadily deteriorating successively over several months. The hunger strike centred on five demands:

• the right not to wear a prison uniform;
• the right not to do prison work;
• the right of free association with other prisoners, and to organise educational and recreational pursuits;
• the right to one visit, one letter, and one parcel per week;
• full restoration of remission lost through the protest.

The significance of the hunger strike was the prisoners’ aim of being considered political prisoners as opposed to criminals. Shortly before Sands‘s death, The Washington Post reported that the primary aim of the hunger strike was to generate international publicity.

Sands died on 5 May 1981 in the Maze’s prison hospital after 66 days on hunger strike, aged 27. The original pathologist’s report recorded the hunger strikers’ causes of death as “self-imposed starvation“, amended to simply “starvation” following protests by the dead strikers’ families. The coroner recorded verdicts of “starvation, self-imposed“. Sands was one of 22 Irish republicans (in the 20th century) who died on hunger-strike.

Sands became a martyr to Irish republicans, and the announcement of his death prompted several days of rioting in nationalist areas of Northern Ireland. More than 100,000 people lined the route of Sands‘s funeral from St. Luke’s Catholic Church in Twinbrook, and he was buried in the ‘New Republican Plot’ alongside 76 others.