Politics: There has been loud controversy and recrimination over this book since it came out. The author, a former IRA prisoner, claims an acceptable deal was offered to end the republican hunger strike in the H-Blocks in 1981 after four people had died.
There has been loud controversy and recrimination over this book since it came out. The author, a former IRA prisoner, claims an acceptable deal was offered to end the republican hunger strike in the H-Blocks in 1981 after four people had died. He alleges the IRA Army Council vetoed the deal, leading to another six unnecessary deaths. All this has been strongly challenged and a major dispute is raging.
Without taking in any way from the importance of that dispute and the need to clarify the historical record, it would be a pity if the claim and counter-claim in that particular argument obscured the real value of O'Rawe's account of that terrible time.
Those of us who lived through it as spectators can still recall the near-universal feelings of helplessness and anguish as, one by one, young men in the prime of life died a slow and doubtless agonising death.
Had Bobby Sands lived, he would have been 51 on March 9th. While it is difficult, if not impossible, to approve of his decision to lead a group of his peers into eternity through a process of self-inflicted starvation, it certainly suggests he was a person out of the ordinary. Had he lived, would Bobby Sands be flitting through the pages of the newspapers and flashing across our TV screens as another member of the Sinn Féin leadership with Gerry Adams, Martin McGuinness and their colleagues? Or would he be a disillusioned dissident, secretly plotting a return to war? Or maybe a writer, since he had evident literary talent?
Sands became a household name around the world. A street beside the British embassy in Tehran was named after him and this product of a Catholic ghetto became an icon even to Islamic revolutionaries. I have had the unique experience of being lectured by an Iranian Mullah on the theme of self- sacrifice as exemplified by the career of Bobby Sands.
Richard O'Rawe was the public relations officer for the hunger strikers. His insider's account is a stark and chilling but impressive contribution to prison literature. By no means has he the literary skills of a Solzhenitsyn but this is still a powerful and affecting piece of writing that should be read by everyone interested in the Northern Ireland situation and its endless capacity for converting banality into tragedy.
Why did they do it? How did they do it? How could they do it? O'Rawe's book goes some way towards unravelling the mystery. While few would dispute that the nationalist population were treated as second-class citizens by the unionist regime in the North, the depth and scale of oppression were not on a sufficient scale to justify - as if anything ever could - the horrors of the IRA campaign: La Mon, Enniskillen, the Shankill Road massacre, and so on through the tragic litany.
But these young men were caught in a mindset: Somewhere along the line, the comparatively measured and decorous protests of the Civil Rights movement gave way to full-scale warfare and they were only too willing to play their part.
Because the hunger strikes were war by other means. Instead of causing physical damage to the "enemy", you inflicted it on yourself and thereby indirectly on your opponent. It must be said that British Government policy at the time created, or at least exacerbated the situation. Many on the outside, who hadn't a republican bone in their bodies, could not see what was wrong with letting IRA prisoners wear their own clothes. Clearly, in a normal society, most if not all of these men, as well as their women colleagues in Armagh Prison, would have been leading conventional lives, picking up the children from school, heading for the pub on a Saturday night, and so on.
Trapped in a unionist agenda at the time, from which, mercifully, it has since escaped to a considerable extent, London took a bull-headed and stubborn approach to these Fenian upstarts. The British policy of criminalising people who regarded themselves as the latest in a long line of patriots was never going to work. The martial spirit this aroused in the prisoners is epitomised in O'Rawe's account of a mass beating by the "screws" at an early stage of his incarceration. He describes the aftermath, when they returned to their cells; "Someone started singing, 'Provos, march on!' Soon the whole wing was belting out the song, amid shouts of "Tiocfaidh ár lá" ("Our day will come"), the battlecry of the Blanketmen. At that moment, I felt proud to be a Blanketman, proud to know such honourable comrades and proud to be part of a protest that was the bane of the British Government's existence."
WHATEVER ABOUT LATER on, O'Rawe acknowledges that the republican leadership, particularly Gerry Adams, did not want a hunger strike because they believed it could not succeed and the British government would simply let the prisoners die. But militant activists, fresh from launching the ambushes and bomb attacks for which they had been imprisoned, could not be contained by the leadership of a movement that was waging war outside on a daily basis.
Hunger striking is an awesome and terrible weapon, whose chief victim is of course the hunger-striker himself. But there are other victims: the families who suffer beyond measure, the people who die in attacks carried out by way of support or "vengeance" and, at a more abstract level, there is the bitterness that permeates society at large. Hunger-strikes are also unpredictable and difficult to manage. As O'Rawe tells it, no clear strategy had been worked out in advance, assuming such a thing was possible. If the British refused to give in, what would the hunger-strikers do? "In other words, at what point would we say enough is enough?"
There was also a personal dilemma and he felt guilty about helping to decide which of his friends and comrades should join the fast when he was not taking part in it himself.
After Sands and three others had died, and Joe McDonnell was nearing death, an offer came through via the MI6 agent known as "The Mountain-Climber" which O'Rawe believed was the basis for a settlement. He claims the officer commanding the prisoners, Brendan "Bik" McFarlane, shared this view and that they were both "shattered" when the IRA Army Council vetoed the deal.
Prior to publication of his book, he did not consult McFarlane, who has since vehemently disagreed with this version of events. The dispute has become entangled with the current raging controversy over the Northern Bank raid and other allegations and counter-allegations of Sinn Féin perfidy and IRA criminality. At this point in time, an agreed and indisputable version of events seems unlikely and people are believing whatever suits their political attitudes to Sinn Féin and the peace process in general.
O'Rawe also suggests that the real reason for rejecting the British offer of a settlement was to ensure the election of Owen Carron to succeed Bobby Sands as MP for Fermanagh-South Tyrone and boost the shift away from "armed struggle" and towards constitutional politics.
"If that were so, Joe [McDonnell] and the five other hunger strikers who died after him were used as cannon fodder," he writes.
It's a very serious charge and has found instant favour with the conspiracy theorists who see almost everything that has happened in the North in the last quarter century as part of a Machiavellian grand strategy worked out by Gerry Adams.
It would really help the rest of us to make up our minds about this dispute if O'Rawe had been able to ensure, before publishing this book, that himself and McFarlane were singing from the same hymn-sheet. In his 1997 book, Provos, the respected television journalist Peter Taylor suggests that, instead of a cynical decision taken on the outside, the continuation of the fast was a reflection of the mood among the hunger strikers themselves. Taylor wrote: "The sheer intensity of what had happened and the bonds that had been forged between the prisoners meant that there could be no compromise."
O'Rawe himself is still clearly anguished by his own role in those terrible events, which is one of the reasons he wrote the book. "I personally displayed an appalling degree of moral ambivalence," he confesses. Only after the 10th man had died did he call for an end to the protest.
Whatever the truth or otherwise of allegations about manipulation of the hunger-strike, this is an immensely valuable book in other respects, which deserves a wide audience.The madness of the time and the ideological obsession which drove these young men, led by Bobby Sands, to give up the lives that lay in front of them is caught to a degree that will shake the reader. One hopes that, whatever the outcome of the present crisis in the peace process, the hunger strike will never again be used as a tactic by either side in the conflict and that anyone who considers it will first of all be obliged to read Richard O'Rawe's searing chronicle.
Blanketmen: An Untold Story of the H-Block Hunger Strike by Richard O'Rawe New Island, 261pp. £9.99
Deaglán de Bréadún is Foreign Affairs Correspondent and a former northern editor of The Irish Times. He is the author of The Far Side of Revenge: Making Peace in Northern Ireland (Collins Press)