Bobby Ballagh was only partly right when he wrote the other day that when people reflect on the past 30 years, the names of Bobby Sands and the other hunger strikers will loom larger than most others.
Bobby Sands's name is ineradicable: he was, in the last days of his life and in the immediate period after his death, the most famous man in the world. Even today, he is probably remembered as a vague totemic figure from Ireland's Troubles, a sort of human rights martyr, though the issues for which he gave his life will probably not be accurately recalled outside this country.
But who can name the other hunger strikers who died 20 years ago this spring? Their names are as forgotten in the worldwide popular imagination as were the deaths of those other hunger strikers at the time of Terence McSwiney's fatal fast 60 years earlier. For, guided by emotion and simplification, the popular imagination is an unreliable recorder of historical truths, and vaster and more terrible truths can rest undiscovered beneath the phantasmagoria it creates.
Pacelli Dillon
We know the name Bobby Sands, who died 20 years ago. Who remembers Pacelli Dillon, the 25th anniversary of whose death passed last month? Pacelli Dillon, the father of a blind and crippled five-year-old girl, was a prison officer who was murdered at his home near Omagh in April 1976. The next prison officer murdered was John Cummings, a wages clerk who had absolutely no contact with prisoners. He was shot at his home in front of his wife, and IRA prisoners in the Maze cheered when they heard of this innocent stranger's death.
Through the late 1970s, with the British government continuing its insane policy of treating convicted terrorists as ordinary prisoners, in apparent defiance of everything it might have learnt from its history books, the dirty protest intensified and conditions in the Northern jails deteriorated. Thames Television made a programme about the looming crisis, openly featuring Desmond Irvine, the chief principal officer in the Maze. In his interview, he accepted the sincere motivation of the IRA prisoners his fellow officers were guarding.
Afterwards, he told the television reporter Peter Taylor: "I believe the programme will ease the burdens borne by my members. To be told by the spokesman of the Provos they respected my frank answers to your questions and they would act in a reciprocal manner gives me grounds for believing that we are entering a new phase when co-operation between staff and prisoners will improve."
More of the same
A few days later, the IRA revealed its interpretation of what acting in "a reciprocal manner" meant by shooting Desmond Irvine dead. More of the same was to follow. One morning Patrick Mackin, a retired prison officer, was found shot dead at his Belfast home. Beside him lay his murdered wife, Violet. In Armagh, four women prison officers on their way to lunch were ambushed in a gun and grenade attack, and one, Agnes Wallace, killed. The history is clear: even before the hunger strikes began, the IRA had embarked upon a tactic of opposing the policy of criminalisation, not by simple moral persuasion, but by naked, fascist terrorism. Give us our way or we will murder you or your agents.
Never mind for a moment the relentless and unremitting idiocy of the British government policy of trying to treat as simple criminals people who had behaved out of conviction rather than self-interest and who wore the name of felon as a badge of honour. The question is: what government anywhere surrenders abjectly to the butchery of its servants? For it was one thing for Sinn Fein-IRA to launch a broad popular campaign against criminalisation, and to refuse to comply with the new prison rules; another thing entirely to back that moral argument with the amoral argument of murder.
Before Bobby Sands began his hunger strike in January 1981, 20 prison officers had been murdered; another nine were to be killed in the course of the IRA prison campaign. According to Chris Ryder's excellent Inside the Maze, in the course of the Troubles, another 50 prison officers took their own lives. And, naturally, none of these victims were mentioned the other day by Bobby Ballagh, who himself expresses indignation that young people today "have been denied knowledge of the hunger strikes by official sources."
I don't know what "official sources" means, but I do accept that Bobby Sands was a brave young man who spent one third of his short life in jail. His death was tragic; but was it more tragic than the deaths of any of the hundreds of blameless innocents butchered by the organisation of which he was freely a member?
Not mentioned
We can be sure that those deaths will not be mentioned when the 81 Committees meet to commemorate the hunger strikes of 20 years ago. We can be sure no mention will be made of Violet Mackin; no mention either of Agnes Wallace; no mention of prison officer Michael Cassidy, 31, shot dead by the IRA in church grounds at his sister's wedding; nor any mention either of the 29 prison officers murdered and the 50 who broke under the pressure of their lives and killed themselves.
For a new and sinister narrative, as selective and as counter-factual as that which grew around and glorified the period of 1919-22 is developing; and left unchecked and unchallenged, it is assuredly laying the seed-bed for yet another generation needlessly to suffer and to sorrow all over again.