From the Archives: September 19th, 1996

The new film gives a humane and determinedly fair-minded account of the events surrounding the hunger strikes, and of the interests of the parties involved – the republican movement, the British authorities, the Catholic Church.

It is not my primary concern here to write of the film's artistic achievements, though it is worth noting that the director makes his political points with great skill. An Irish dancing class where Helen Mirren smiles with fond pride at her pupils is intercut with the shocking tension of an IRA attack on the British army.

The church’s spiritual and political involvement, the intimate, dangerous mythologising of the men’s sacrifice, is shown most poignantly when the priest breaks the host and gives communion to the bearded figures wrapped only in prison blankets.

Over all lies the weight of history and remembered wrongs. But Terry George never loses sight of how historic events, and the implacable righteousness of both sides, conspire to destroy and embitter the lives of the innocent. There were people on the British side who wanted a compromise which would allow both sides to claim that an honourable solution had been achieved.

Afterwards, when wives and mothers had been persuaded to implement a solution that could be presented as defeat, it became so easy for the authorities to grant the prisoners’ demands. It was this, as much as the deaths themselves, which left a legacy of mistrust of British intentions in the republican community which still poisons the political atmosphere.

Of course, the deaths of the 10 republican prisoners had mixed consequences, some of them benign. There was the move by Sinn Féin towards electoral politics and the development of a much broader communal base, something which came to seem possible after the election of Bobby Sands.

The hunger strikes, the extraordinarily powerful and sympathetic interest which they aroused at home and abroad, changed the republican leadership irrevocably, made it realise that there were more effective methods of achieving its aims than the bomb and the bullet. As Terry George pointed out, in an interview in this newspaper, the whole episode sowed the seeds for the present peace process.

There were also terrible, incalculably destructive effects. Much of the gut reaction of those who are opposed to the whole peace process, to any negotiated settlement that falls short of traditional republican aspirations, is emotionally rooted in the belief that this would represent a betrayal of all those who have suffered and died during the long years of the conflict.

In 1981, as the whole island waited to hear the announcement of yet another death, it was common to hear people saying: “They are dying for each other”. The suggestion was that as each man approached the point of no return, he could not bear to be the one to break faith with the comrades who had already died.

This appropriating of the Christian message, which appears so blasphemous to most Protestants, is spelled out quite explicitly in Some Mother's Son and still resonates powerfully. Perhaps ever more damaging, and we have seen this particularly in recent months, was the way the whole episode reinforced the ingrained mistrust of British motives in what Gerry Adams describes as the republican family. To many people on this island, very few of them sympathetic to the IRA or Sinn Féin, it seems that Mrs Thatcher and her closest advisers were prepared to let 10 young men die for a form of words – "political" or "criminal" – and that, once the protest was broken, the differences were resolved with quite appalling ease.

There were too the effects on the unionist community, both of the hunger strikes themselves and the fashion in which they were finally resolved. To very many Protestants the mythologising of the men as martyrs was a blasphemy.

These were terrorists, who had committed terrible violence against the unionist community, and who were now being elevated as sacrificial victims. They believed that the whole thing was a plot by the republican leadership who would stop at nothing, even sacrificing their own most loyal members in the most cold and calculating way.

The leaders of the Catholic Church, by refusing to condemn this mass suicide, simply proved that they were partners in a conspiracy which appeared to have the approval of the Pope himself.

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Selected by Joe Joyce; email fromthearchives@irishtimes.com