On the 20th anniversary of the H-Block hunger strike, the world knew Margaret Thatcher was wrong and Bobby Sands and his comrades were right, said Mr Gerry Adams.
The Sinn Fein president was speaking at a tree-planting ceremony in west Belfast at the weekend to commemorate the 10 IRA and INLA prisoners who died in the H-Blocks in 1981 and hunger strikers Michael Gaughan and Frank Stagg, who died in English jails in 1974 and 1976, respectively. Around 100 people attended.
Mr Adams said the hunger strikers had focused attention on the British presence in the North and there were now more republicans in Ireland than there were 20 years ago. "We are blessed even to be remotely associated with these men who died on hunger strike because they brought our struggle to a moral threshold. The struggle, if it is to be successful, is about building an Ireland of equals, building a national republic."
The hunger strikers were "very, very ordinary people who in extraordinary conditions went on to do extraordinary things". Mr Adams noted that 60 people were killed outside the H-Blocks during the hunger strike and 50,000 plastic bullets were fired.
Among those taking part in the tree-planting were Sinn Fein Assembly members Mr Gerry Kelly and Ms Michelle Gilder new; 1980 hunger strikers Leo Green, Mary Doyle and Pat Sheehan and relatives of 1981 hunger strikers Francis Hughes, Raymond McCreesh, Kieran Doherty, Joe McDonnell and Kevin Lynch were also present.
Irish folk singer Christy Moore sang his hunger-striker lament The Time Has Come.
Meanwhile, some 130 people attended a debate on the hunger strike in Lisnaskea, Co Fermanagh, on Saturday, which was addressed by anti-agreement republican speakers, including former 1980 hunger striker Mr Tommy McKearney.
Mr McKearney said it was impossible to know if Bobby Sands and the other hunger strikers would support or oppose the Belfast Agreement had they lived. "What we can say is that at the time of his death, from his writings and his words, Bobby was part of the ongoing struggle to break the connection with Britain."
Mr Ruairi O Bradaigh, the president of Republican Sinn Fein, said the ideals of Bobby Sands had been "steadily perverted" by the Sinn Fein leadership. There was no direct link between Sands's election and current Sinn Fein policies.
"The former republicans who rebuilt the Stormont Assembly are now part of the British system in Ireland and have turned their backs on the successors of Bobby Sands.
"Their policy of acceptance of Leinster House and Stormont and of the unionist veto on Irish national independence has now become a classic counter-revolutionary stance."
He said Sands did not die "for mere civil rights under English rule or for a spurious equality but for human dignity and prisoner-of-war treatment as part of the ongoing struggle for Irish national liberation".
He said the political status the hunger strikers secured had been withdrawn from current republican prisoners in Maghaberry jail. Sinn Fein leaders who were "loud in their support" for the 1981 hunger strike were silent on the struggle of these prisoners.