Fast Forward — Frank McNally on the forgotten mass hunger strike of 1923

Cavan man Andy O’Sullivan, who died 100 years ago on Wednesday (November 22nd), was a victim of what has been called the largest mass hunger strike in history.

Paradoxically, the protest begun at Mountjoy jail in October 1923 is also among the least well remembered of its kind.

The sheer extent of participation – with up to 8,000 inmates of various Irish prisons refusing food at one point – seems to have militated against its success as a propaganda weapon.

Free State authorities, knowing well the power of hunger strikes in republican history, kept publicity for the Anti-Treaty protest to a minimum.

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They also maintained a hard line against the prisoners’ demands, insisting that early release would be denied those taking part.

Their intransigence was supported by the Catholic bishops. When Denis Barry from Cork became the first of the prisoners to die, on November 20th,1923, his body was refused entry to a church and no priest was allowed officiate at his funeral. But by then, anyway, the numbers still on strike had dwindled to hundreds.

O’Sullivan, whose death two days after Barry’s effectively ended the protest, is the subject of a new book written by his grandniece Micil Ryan: Forgotten Hero – The Life and Death of Andy O’Sullivan.

Born in Denbawn in 1882, the eldest of eight children, he won a scholarship from the Anglo-Celt newspaper to attend an agriculture college in Monaghan, then completed his studies Dublin’s Albert College, a forerunner of DCU.

Employed as an agricultural inspector in Mallow, he doubled as the captain of an IRA intelligence unit in North Cork during the War of Independence. He later opposed the 1921 treaty and, after his arrest, was interned in Mountjoy.

On October 13th, 1923, he was one of some 300 inmates there who began a local hunger strike, unsanctioned by the leadership, to protest against their internment without trial and poor prison conditions.

This soon escalated to include the Curragh and Gormanston camps, Cork and Dundalk gaols, and the prison ship Argenta in Belfast.

Among those who took part, reluctantly at first, was Ernie O’Malley. In his Civil War memoir, The Singing Flame, O’Malley admitted fear at the prospect but also considered death by starvation “unsoldierly”.

More practical considerations against the strike included escape tunnels, digging of which was at an advanced stage and required energy and hard work.

Many internees also preferred the idea of a mass break-out, O’Malley wrote: “It was thought a better thing to die fighting than to die on hunger strike, yet this had to be ruled out. In the action, [Free] Staters would be killed and reprisals would assuredly be taken against the unfortunate prisoners remaining.”

So the strike went ahead, and its height, some estimates put the numbers involved at 8,200, including almost 4,000 in the Curragh camp alone. Women prisoners took part too, joined eventually by Countess Markievicz, who was arrested in November in time to spend several days without food.

Despite his fears, O’Malley’s period on hunger strike was not all privation. Although he found it difficult to hold a book, or prop himself up, he spent most of his days reading:

“I chuckled with Mark Twain and adventured with Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer; admired [Robert Louis Stevenson’s] splendid villain from Ballantrae; pilgrimaged with Chaucer [...] laughed with Pickwick, and thought of the food that had built his rotund form”.

His reflections also eventually included a spiritual insight. “All carnal thoughts seemed to disappear after the first four weeks”, he wrote:

“One could realise why the early Christians and the priests of Eastern religions fasted and mortified the body. The result seemed to be a state of exultation in which one is removed from worldly thoughts and cares, where one obtains a clarity of mind difficult to realize when engaged in the ordinary course of existence.”

On a related note, O’Malley also recorded a humorous story from the end of the protest when an unnamed inmate of Mountjoy asked a doctor what day of the strike it was. “The forty-first,” he was told. “Be cripes,” replied the prisoner, “we bate Christ be a day.”

The protest was called off on November 23rd and within 24 hours, after signing an oath of loyalty to the Free State, more than 500 prisoners were released.

A similar number followed in December. But O’Malley was among those who refused to sign the oath and spent several more months in prison. Some detainees were not released until 1926.

According to Ryan’s book, O’Sullivan’s family did not find out about his participation in the strike until its last stages. A brother-in-law who was also a priest, Fr James McCabe, was then sent to Mountjoy to try and persuade him to relent but failed.

The funeral cortege in Mallow, where he was buried, stretched “over a mile long”. Back in his native Cavan, the dead man was later commemorated for decades by “The Captain Andy O’Sullivan Dancehall”.

That closed in the 1980s, however, and is now a ruin.