Symbolism and serendipity are two qualities we tend to ignore in any accounts of political activity but both were to the forefront in a series of events which had a profound impact on the politics of these islands 20 years ago. I refer to the hunger strikes and to the deaths of 10 young Irishmen.

Bobby Sands was the first to die. As OC of the Provisionals inside the Maze prison he had been mortified by the failed hunger protest before Christmas and he was the first to volunteer for the hunger strike beginning on March 1st, 1981. Sixty-six days later he was dead, to be followed by nine other prisoners before the end of August.

Sands was ideal material. He was the victim of an intimidatory culture: his family had been driven out of their homes twice in loyalist estates and he had been forced out of work where he had been apprenticed as a coachbuilder. This background made him a likely recruit for the IRA, which he joined in 1972. He served one prison sentence from 1973 to 1976, and in 1977 he was sentenced to 14 years' imprisonment after being found in possession of weapons.

Inside prison he became a prolific writer of prose and poetry, some of which was used to raise him to iconic status. The nature (and the outcome) of his protest placed him in the republican pantheon; hence the current dispute as to where he would have stood on the Belfast Agreement.

His death, and that of his comrades, changed the nature of the republican struggle with a fusion of the political and the military. In his Politics of Irish Freedom Gerry Adams comments: "From Thomas Ashe to Bobby Sands the concern has always been to assert the political nature of the struggle in which the IRA has always been engaged." It illustrated the extent to which the campaign was based on a sacrificial ideology, was infused in martyrology and drew heavily from the symbolism surrounding the executions of the 1916 leaders. After the 1916 Rising posters appeared around Dublin depicting the martyred Pearse in a pieta position and brandishing a Tricolour. The caption read "All is Changed".

The same images and symbols appeared in the aftermath of the hunger strikes. But the imagery touched, too, on the fundaments of Irish Catholicism. In one of his poems Sands writes:

The time had come to be, To walk the lonely road Like that of Calvary.

Sands's biographer John M. Feehan had described his second prison sentence as the beginning of his "Via Dolorosa"; and his funeral "as if the republican movement had reached its Calvary with no Resurrection in sight . . ."

We can assume the politico-religious imagery was deliberate. He could expect to be dead by Easter - both a secular celebration of destruction and renewal, as well as of a holy beginning - if his demands were not met. His inspiration extended back to Christ: "No greater love hath a man than to lay down his life for his friends." Even the manner of his death discommoded the religious and political establishments. What was the cause of his death: suicide or selfstarvation? While it would not be correct to suggest that an intense debate on the Thomist tradition took place at every street corner on the Falls Road, the manner of his dying had a profound impact on the Catholic community. Some estimates placed the numbers at his funeral as being up to 100,000 (whereas only a few thousand had demonstrated when he began his protest). Equally it reinforced the Protestant sense of victimhood and helplessness.

The immediate political consequences were enormous. When Charles Haughey called a general election on May 21st, he claimed it was "because of the grave and tragic situation in Northern Ireland". The electorate showed more interest in the faltering economy, although there were enough moved by events in the North to return two hunger-strikers and deprive Fianna Fail of government.

IN A SURVEY of 64 newspapers in 25 countries across the globe the Sunday Times (May 31st, 1981) concluded that world opinion had begun to shift away from the British government and in favour of the IRA. But it was the New Statesman some months later (August 14th, 1981) that highlighted the IRA's tactical advantage when it argued that Mrs Thatcher had unwittingly set a new agenda: "She has made politics in Northern Ireland into a straight confrontation between the British government and the Provos, in which everyone else is rendered powerless or irrelevant."

In short, the hunger strike had become a confrontational event endowed with political symbolism that was itself a strategy which changed the political process from accountability and consensus to a politics of spectacle, theatre, violence and drama. It was a vivid example of the disordering and reordering, and of the shattering of the conventional boundaries of political language and discourse.

So resurrection was in sight. But few realised it at the time - hence serendipity. The unexpected death of Frank Maguire and Bobby Sands's subsequent election as MP for Fermanagh and South Tyrone on April 9th - "Your vote can save this man's life" - opened up the prospect of electoralism. The 36 seats won by candidates identifying with the hunger strikes (none of whom was in Sinn Fein) at the local government elections in May suggested there was a latent constituency out there. The independent actions of relatives of the hunger-strikers seemed to offer an alternative to a pointless military campaign.

There was evidence of republican incomprehension of this nuisance that was distracting attention away from the "war". Adams conceded as much when he wrote: "We were temperamentally and organisationally disinclined to engage in any form of action with elements outside the movement itself."

ONE of the consequences of the hunger strikes was that Sinn Fein moved out of the world of being a sect full of moral certitude and into the more challenging uplands of debate, dialogue and uncertainty.

The new strategy was not without its cynicism. The policy of the Armalite and the ballot box - a classic Leninist tactic - was encapsulated in an editorial in Republican News in April 1982: "So while not everyone can plant a bomb, everyone can plant a vote." In fact, they were to discover that planting bombs and votes were incompatible; soon it was to become a case of the Armalite versus the ballot box, another example of serendipity. Gerry Adams's victory in the 1983 general election and subsequent Sinn Fein success introduced a note of hubris but, more significantly, an appetite for electoral politics. A new departure was under way.

The hunger strikes were about a republican sense of victimhood and of memory. It was a practice which flourished in pre-Christian times and was derived from the Brehon Laws. Even before the 1980-81 protest 12 republicans had starved to death for their beliefs earlier in the century.

But it was also about what Richard Kearney has called an "anticipatory memory capable of projecting future images of liberation drawn from the past".

It was the impact of the hunger strikes that led to even closer relationships between the two governments, to the Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1985 and ultimately to the Belfast Agreement. The pity is that more than 1,200 men, women and children were to lose their lives in the interim years.

Paul Arthur is professor of politics at the University of Ulster. His Special Relationships: Britain, Ireland and the Northern Ireland problem (Blackstaff Press) was published recently.