History: IRA man and Sinn Féiner Bobby Sands remains the Provisionals' most famous icon even 25 years after his death. He had joined the IRA as a teenager and, imprisoned for most of his tragically short life, he became a leading figure in Northern Ireland's gruesome prison war during 1976-81.
The state had sought to treat republican prisoners as criminals; in contrast, Sands and his comrades maintained that their struggle was political. After years of attrition, and a failed hunger strike in 1980, republican prisoners then embarked on a second fast for political status in 1981. It was here that Bobby Sands became a celebrity as the first hunger-striker to die. Sands refused food at the start of March, and his fame increased when he was elected MP for Fermanagh/South Tyrone in April, and again when he died early in the following month on his 66th day without food.
His huge funeral generated intense world-wide interest and, as Denis O'Hearn rightly states in Bobby Sands: Nothing but an Unfinished Song, Sands "became an international symbol, even an icon of resistance". As such, he clearly deserves a serious biography and O'Hearn has done some good research (not least in his many interviews, which have yielded much vivid and evocative material). The book's detailed narrative shows Sands to have been as resourceful and courageous as he was rage-filled: he repeatedly emerges as a determined and defiant zealot, whose prison career demonstrated extraordinary resilience and energy.
O'Hearn's biography is utterly sympathetic to Sands, and the author is surely right to try to explain why a young man would pursue such a remarkable path as this. But the book's analysis could, I think, have gone much further. It shows that Sands' cause was political, but offers no serious reflection on whether his politics were viable and realistic.
And it's on the broader IRA campaign, rather than just the prison war, that Sands's politics should ultimately be assessed. Though famous as a hunger-striker, Bobby Sands was also an IRA bomber; and O'Hearn himself notes of the prison struggle that, "At its core the protest was about legitimating armed struggle outside of jail".
When we assess that latter struggle, greater reflection and scepticism are needed than O'Hearn's book ever offers. The IRA claimed that they would defend their Catholic community, force British withdrawal, and produce a non-sectarian Ireland. Yet none of these claims proved justified. The author's suggestion that "the Provisional IRA became the defender of the community" is misleading, since that is precisely what did not happen. Even during the Provos' first three years in existence, 171 Catholic civilians were killed by loyalists or the security forces. And we now know that the IRA's long war ended without British withdrawal, and that the post-conflict North remains ever-more sectarian after years of inter-communal violence such as that practised by the IRA.
But flaws in IRA thinking are not really on show in this book at all. The economic impossibility of British withdrawal (long-recognized by Dublin civil servants and politicians) never receives any discussion. And the true scale of IRA violence is not fully addressed. Republican prisoners' plight during 1976-81 was indeed awful; but should it so eclipse the fact that the IRA killed 472 people during these same years? The funerals of those people were less famous than that of Bobby Sands, but surely they were no less humanly important.
Of Sands himself, it might also be argued that O'Hearn is less sceptical than some observers would have been. He rightly stresses Sands's enthusiastic reading of novels and political non-fiction while in jail, but not the naivety of his interpretations. Sands was indeed "familiar with radical ideas", but his leftist arguments were often enough rather blurred, just as his literary tastes were deeply sentimental: he boldly proclaimed Theobald Wolfe Tone and James Fintan Lalor to have been radical socialists (which they were not); and his favourite novels included Leon Uris's mawkish Trinity.
For all of its fascinating detail, this biography presents an implausibly one-sided and glowing picture of what was almost certainly a more complex, uneven subject. This is a shame, since Sands's extraordinary and striking life does not require hagiography in order to reflect and explain its significance.
Bobby Sands: Nothing but an Unfinished Song, By Denis O'Hearn, Pluto Press, 434 pp. €18.95
Richard English is Professor of Politics at Queen's University, Belfast. He is currently writing a history of Irish nationalism