How many of the 10 Irish republican hunger strikers who died in 1981 can you name? Understandably, many readers will be unable to remember all of those who passed away in that terrible sequence. But, as with the 472 people the IRA killed during the prison-war years of 1976-81, it is the individual stories and dynamics here that should probably command our attention most of all.
Thomas Hennessey's Hunger Strike is an admirably thorough narrative of what the archives in London, Dublin and Belfast suggest to have happened during this prison conflict and its hunger-striking finale. It is based on extensive and impressive manuscript research, and provides a detailed account for anyone wanting to understand the day-by-day developments of the period in Irish and British history.
Once special-category status for republican prisoners had effectively been removed in 1976, the prison battle centred around whether IRA and INLA inmates were to be treated as criminals or as politically motivated actors.
The emblems of this were five key republican demands: the right of prisoners to wear their own clothes; the right not to do prison work; free association with fellow prisoners; 50 per cent remission of sentences; and normal visits, parcels, educational and recreational facilities.
As so often in the North, it is easy enough to see the mutually hostile logic involved on each rival side. It was and is clear to anyone who understands the Northern Ireland conflict that the IRA and INLA campaigns were political in motivation (whatever aspects of criminality were involved at times).
Equally, the UK government was, from the perspective of the state, understandably insistent that people should remember the brutal actions of these paramilitary organisations (the legitimisation of which was the ultimate goal of the hunger strikes); that the running of the prisons should remain in the power of the authorities themselves; and that overconcession to republican demands might prompt a bloody backlash against Catholics by loyalist paramilitaries.
Shift in demands
The hunger-strikers in fact shifted from demanding different treatment from other prisoners to the very different position that their five demands should be granted even if they were to apply to all Northern Ireland inmates.
From July 1981 onwards, therefore, the issue focused less on special category status for the IRA and INLA than on the British government’s refusal to yield ground under the duress of an ongoing strike, and the strikers’ unwillingness to end the strike without definite concessions having been precisely and credibly established in advance.
The hunger strikes were a more significant problem for the Dublin government than for London, as Hennessey, a professor of history, rightly observes. Historically informed judgment might have helped some UK politicians to recognise why this was so, and to acknowledge more than they did at the time some of the counterproductive effects that an enduring hunger strike was likely to produce.
At the time of Margaret Thatcher’s leaving office in 1990, Garret FitzGerald told me his main concern about her had been her lack of a sense of the importance of history, and Charles Moore’s impressive recent biography of the late prime minister reinforces the suspicion that this was indeed a failing on her part. Irish history could certainly have made clear the degree to which Irish nationalists might be mobilised to sympathise with republican prisoners, despite not having supported the violence that had caused such republicans to be put in prison in the first place.
Hennessey's book does not resolve all hunger-strike controversy. The extent to which the prison dispute could and should have been resolved between the collapse of the 1980 strike and the beginning of the second fast remains slightly ambiguous. And aspects of Richard O'Rawe's claims about the exact prisoner response to the offer available from the British in July 1981, before Joe McDonnell's death, cannot be cleared up from the archives.
Glaring omissions
Hennessey should not be blamed for what the archives cannot decide. He might, perhaps, be criticised for the omission of certain very important nonarchival sources from his study. Despite the book's title, Thatcher's memoir on the period is nowhere mentioned in the footnotes or bibliography. Nor, despite their great relevance, are books by the former hunger-strikers Laurence McKeown and Tommy McKearney. Likewise, Garret FitzGerald's autobiography is missing from the bibliography.
Hennessey’s valuable book would have been much stronger had its detailed archival record been more systematically interrogated through comparative scrutiny of other sources, and vice versa.
The overwhelming majority of the book’s footnotes are to the archives, which presents a very useful foundation. But the essence of historical analysis is the mutually interrogative and challenging comparison of a wide range of different kinds of source, and this is not delivered as fully here as it might have been.
Similarly, with the exception of a brief, pithy and argumentative conclusion, the author’s own voice and interpretative stance are largely missing from the lengthy narrative. This is perhaps why we get such a limited sense of the human texture of the people involved in this dramatic period.
These were poignant, hate-filled, plangent, courageous, naive, tragic, cruel and often highly intransigent years, and no set of actors emerges entirely cleanly from them. But the human complexities and emotions, frailties and commitments that were involved – though occasionally evident from Hennessey’s rich manuscript narrative – are not as movingly evoked in his book by its knowledgeable author as I had hoped.
Despite this, the book represents a substantial account of an important episode, and is filled with helpfully intricate detail from the archives.
What are we to make of it all, looking back after so many years of political fluidity in Ulster? In November 1979, Humphrey Atkins, as secretary of state for Northern Ireland, wrote to a fellow MP that the IRA “are a small and isolated group of terrorists, representing no one but themselves and engaged in a brutal attempt to coerce a law-abiding people and a democratic government into their way of thinking”.
The central problem of UK policy in the years covered by Hennessey's impressive book is that the second half of that sentence must be judged much more persuasive than the first. The implications of that were to be worked out by later UK governments, and by later republicans, in a peace process that substantially managed to turn the polarising conflict of 1980-1 into the far less tragic form of politics that now, thankfully, exists in the North.
Richard English's books include Armed Struggle: The History of the IRA.
