Remembering Bobby Sands

When he was first put in a cell with Tony O’Hara, whose brother later also died on hunger strike, he watched Tony sleeping all day. After a while, he asked him, “Tony, what do you do all day?” Tony replied, “I sleep, there’s nothing else to do.” So Bobby said, “Isn’t that a waste of your opportunities.” 

He convinced his fellow prisoners to take their monthly visits with their families and friends, even though they had to wear a prison uniform to do it. Then they started smuggling messages out to tell the public what was happening in the H-Blocks. They smuggled in ballpoint pen refills and cigarette papers, as well as tobacco for a bit of luxury. Then the corridors and other prison spaces became battlegrounds, as prisoners and guards struggled over who controlled them. This raised the morale of the prisoners tremendously. 

Within weeks of arriving, Sands started writing articles about prison life and smuggling them out. When they were published they provoked public awareness and outrage. Without these accounts, public support for the prisoners would never have taken hold. Sands organized a letter-writing “factory” on his prison wing. He got other prisoners to write letters, hundreds of them, to influential people, from Jane Fonda to Leonid Brezhnev to trade union activists to folk singers. 

How did the prison authorities react to this challenge? 

Things got violent as the guards tried to catch prisoners smuggling. The prisoners had to keep things hidden, usually up their backsides. You can imagine the horrific scenes that resulted where prison guards were sticking their gloved fingers up a man’s anus and then using the same fingers to probe his mouth. The authorities devised new types of searches, each one more violent than the last. This was all made worse because some guards were drunk. They had a bar in the prison, can you imagine? The guards went to lunch and came back after several drinks. It was a recipe for violence. 

What effect did this have on the prisoners? 

They were often in fear, but the more the authorities took away from them, the stronger they became. The more they tried to degrade them, the more dignity they maintained. The guards took away their furniture, soap, and toothbrushes. The only thing the prisoners could not get rid of was their bodily waste. When they tried to throw their urine and shit out the cell window, the guards threw it back in. Eventually, the blanketmen had to throw their food into piles in the corner of the cell—we’re talking about 2 men in a 8 by 10 foot cell with two urine-soaked mattresses and a couple of blankets—and spread their shit on the walls. I’m sure you cannot imagine living in such conditions, but it is incredible what people can endure together for a cause they feel is just. The prison guards made snide comments about how the blanketmen were animals, but the blanketmen actually strengthened and gained dignity through it all. We’re not talking about a few weeks or months. They lived on this “no-wash protest” for several years. 

What was Bobby Sands doing during this period of escalating conflict? 

He was right in the middle of it. He was second in command of the prisoners. Their officer in command was Brendan Hughes who they called “the Dark.” For some reason, the prison authorities always kept Bobby Sands and Hughes in adjoining cells, for nearly four years. They talked through the crack by the heating pipes at the back of their cells and planned prison protests that way. 

The thing that really made Bobby Sands a leader was his energy and the way he turned his energy to organizing things that could raise the prisoners’ morale. It wasn’t only things like getting men to write letters and poems and stories to send outside. He also organized Irish language classes. In time some prisoners who were hardly literate in English could speak and write in Irish. This gave them power over their jailers because they could speak openly without being understood and felt they were getting one up on the guards. 

How did things escalate to a hunger strike? 

One of the side effects of Bobby’s propaganda work was that it helped supporters to build a protest movement around the issue of political status for the blanketmen. Eventually, it became a wider human rights campaign, organized around five key demands, like the prisoners’ right to wear their own clothes and to organize educational activities. When conditions in the cells got really bad, the prisoners began to talk about a hunger strike because it was the ultimate protest. Hunger strikes had often succeeded before and they saw it as a way out of their conditions, perhaps the only way. 

But the movement outside prison was opposed to a hunger strike. The IRA felt that it would divert resources away from the armed struggle. Gerry Adams opposed it because he felt that Margaret Thatcher would let them die and to no good purpose. So Adams and others convinced the prisoners to postpone hunger striking while they negotiated with Thatcher over the five demands. They had powerful support from public figures like the Irish Cardinal Tomás O Fiaich. But Thatcher would not move. Eventually the prisoners felt that they had no choice. 

The story of the hunger strikes, there were actually two of them, is complicated. But, briefly, Brendan Hughes led the first hunger strike in late 1980. He called it off on the verge of a settlement in order to save one hunger striker’s life. He thought he had a settlement, but it was not in writing. When Sands finally saw the agreement that the British government put on paper, he exploded. It was not even near what they wanted. By the time Sands got back to his cell that night after visiting the hunger strikers in the prison hospital, he vowed that he would lead a new hunger strike and this time it would be to the death. He knew he would die, but he was determined to go through with it. 

How could he follow such a course when he knew that he and others would have a very slow and painful death? 

I put that down to two factors. One is the intense solidarity he felt with his comrades, a level that we cannot understand unless we have been in such a remarkable situation. Such solidarity can empower people to do things that are beyond the usual. Many ex-blanketmen express a surprising nostalgia for life in the H-Blocks, despite the violence and deprivation. One told me that he had never experienced such intense comradeship and he really misses that. Another described a time when he was in his cell and he was listening to Bobby Sands singing. He asked himself, “Even if I do get out of here, will I ever experience anything as good as this?” Bobby Sands told a cellmate that life as a blanketman was the closest thing he would ever get to true communism. So this intense solidarity, even love, for his comrades provoked him to do anything to help them to get out of their horrific situation. I know, it is ironic that a prisoner would say at the one time that his life is almost utopian and in the next sentence talk about what extremes he is willing to go to in order to get out of it. But that was the reality of the H-Blocks. 

The second factor, of course, was Bobby’s political commitment. He believed in himself and he knew that someone would have to die for the prisoners to win their rights. So he took a personal responsibility to ensure that the second hunger strike was not interrupted short of victory as the first one had been. 

Well, he won a by-election to British parliament while he was dying in a prison hospital and that opened a new form of struggle for Irish Republicans, one that provoked much debate and controversy. It is worth noting that although Bobby Sands was in favor of fighting elections he was never in favor of taking office. He thought winning elections would gain legitimacy for the struggle and he argued that his movement should bank those gains by creating autonomous, parallel structures of governance in communities where it had popular support. 

Times have changed and in many ways Irish Republicanism, like other movements, has become less radical since the death of Bobby Sands. Many people ask me where I think Bobby would stand today, were he alive, on Sinn Féin’s peace strategy and the IRA’s ceasefire. I cannot say, although it is worth noting that almost all of Bobby’s closest friends support the current peace strategy. 

Some people see “irony” in Bobby Sands supposedly giving his life for armed struggle while Gerry Adams used the hunger strike and Sands’s election victory to move the IRA away from armed struggle. Yet Bobby did not die for the armed struggle, he died to defend the right of people to resist oppression and to be able to choose the means by which they resist—armed struggle if necessary, other means if possible. Bobby’s commitment to grass-roots organizing shows that his politics were far more developed than simple adherence to armed struggle. 

These days people are talking about autonomy and prefigurative politics, that is, the idea that we base our political actions today according to the future we want to build. Back in the cages, Bobby Sands and others were developing precisely these ideas. Gerry Adams, for example, was talking about “making the Republic a reality” by building autonomous representative governance in the communities and building alternative and autonomous services, administration, even industry and healthcare. Bobby tried to introduce these ideas into his own community of Twinbrook during the six months of his adult life when he was not in prison. 

You know, as soon as he went into jail he learned Irish and within two years he was writing really interesting essays in Irish about building autonomous Irish-language communities in Belfast, with autonomous schools, services, and factories. The school part of it has actually become a reality in Belfast, to some extent. I spent time in Oventic and I saw parallels between what he was trying to do and the kinds of things the Zapatistas, for instance, are now making a reality in Chiapas. 

What I would hope, 25 years after his death, is that more people will recover memory of him. I hope that those who never heard of Bobby Sands will learn to remember him and that others to whom he is an example for his way of dying will rediscover how extraordinary he was for his way of living.