Legacy and its Creators

By AM Saturday, May 5, 2012

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We will always remember May the 5th. How could it be otherwise? We remember it even more poignantly when, unlike today, it falls on a Tuesday. The phrase will forever resonate in our minds: Tuesday the 5th of May. 31 years ago this very day Bobby Sands lost his life on hunger strike having endured 66 days without nutrition. His journey was not for the faint hearted. After he had completed it and people could be in no doubt what lay in front of them, volunteers from the INLA and the IRA stepped forward to tread the same path, to meet the same fate, refusing to blink as the steamroller of Brutal Britain moved to crush their lives, but never their spirits. They may not be heroes in the eyes of their enemies but even adversaries cannot doubt their courage. Margaret Thatcher admitted as much in her autobiography when she spoke of admiring the bravery of Bobby Sands.

The hunger strikers proved victorious by July. That victory was concealed from them so that they would feel compelled to stride onward in pursuit of a victory they already had. Knowledge of their victory was denied them not by British intransigence, which they broke, but by the nefarious Committee who ran the hunger strike on the outside, always with their own political and literary careers in mind and never the interests of the dying men. Four hunger strikers were done in by the British alone, while six others were finished off by the British in tandem with the Committee which danced a murderous two step with its supposed foes. The Conservatives and the Committee, marching to the beat of different drums but in the end rendering the same tune. The men whose souls were purchased sacrificed the men whose souls were not.

The 5th of May is a very important date. It is important not just because Bobby Sands died on that day. It is important because 31 years after his death there are republican prisoners sitting in conditions that Bobby Sands had kicked into the dark ages as a result of his hunger strike. Now those conditions are back and are being given a free pass. They are being inflicted on Marian Price, Martin Corey, Gerry McGeough, Gavin Coyle, Harry Fitzsimmons ... we could go on.

These people are being either beaten, held in solitary confinement, strip searched. They often arrive in Maghaberry after undergoing dubious PSNI procedures. In general they are subjected to a punitive regime maintained by bigots with an unreconstructed turnkey mentality. Whatever people might feel about these prisoners they are, to use a term borrowed from former hunger striker Raymond McCartney, legacy prisoners. Theirs is a legacy of a violent political conflict that conditioned and shaped how many republicans still think.

The legacy creators who articulated the need for political violence have for the most part abandoned those who heeded them. They now call for them to be touted on, label them traitors, initiate whisper campaigns against them, undermine efforts to generate support for them when they are imprisoned, and only offer verbal concern when left with no wriggle room and weasel words have deserted them.

The legacy creators conveniently forget that they fed into the very legacy that helps sustain today’s political violence. They should not be allowed to wash their hands of it and pretend that their moral finger prints are not all over it. It was they who stated that if Sinn Fein ever stopped supporting the armed struggle it would not have them as a member, who insisted that British forces in Ireland made a violent response inevitable, who swore the armed struggle would never, never, never end until a British withdrawal had been secured.  Today’s problem of political violence is a legacy handed down by them. Try as they might disavowals of their past have few takers.

There is neither moral space nor political justification for republican political violence today. But to throw the baby out with the bathwater, to boot out wellbeing of republican prisoners because of a rejection of armed campaigning, is equally without merit.

The 5th of May is important because in every prisoner battered, beaten or brutalised because they are republican we recognise rather than forget Bobby Sands.