QUB Ógra Shinn Féin Remember the 1981 Hungerstrikers

by Gemma Fri Apr 28, 2006 16:21

Great to see in such what was once the bastion of unionist supremacy..................................well done Ógra.

by ok Mon May 01, 2006 14:23

OSF has NO claim on the 10 men who died and neither does their parents in PSF. What distinguishes the 7 IRA hunger strikers from the 3 INLA ones is that the INLA and the IRSM have not shifted or changed their direction or policies significantly since 81, apart from a ceasefire but that does not constitute a change in direction just that this line of action is not required AT THE PRESENT. PSF are COMPLETELEY different from 81 and therefore it begs the question would their men have agreed with them today? I don't know for sure but I seriously doubt it as their main reason for giving their lives was for political status and this very thing was signed away by the provos via the GFA. I feel it safe to say that Patsy, Kevin and Michael would still stand by the IRSM today as we still stand by what we stood by in 81. OSF claiming these men’s deaths as a reason to join them is as good as spitting on their graves as the beliefs of these men in 81 is worlds apart from the new PSF we see today. Indeed PSF have more in common with the DUP than they do with the 10 vols that gave their lives. Why can't these morons just leave these men in peace? They fought their war. They died for their cause. Stop trying to profit of them.

by ok Mon May 01, 2006 18:01

Brendan McLaughlin sits jack-knifed in his wheelchair, a knot of gathered anger, and snaps the filter off another cigarette. He hasn't been able to taste tobacco, or much else, since the stroke he suffered seven years ago, so breaks the tips off before smoking them . . . 40 a day . . . right down to his kippercoloured fingers.
Photographs and republican paraphernalia wainscot the walls of his council bungalow . . . photographs of volunteer graves, pictures of famous IRA men, a bodhran made in Portlaoise jail. But it's a pencil sketch of the 10 men who carried their protest right to the end that draws his eye.
"You see them boys up there?" he says. "They died for nothing."
He's angry about a lot of things . . .
Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness ("scum bastards"), the peace process ("a sell-out") and the Brits ("no business being here . . . never had, never will").
"They're all getting ready to sit in Stormont, " he says, "when there's still a war to fight."
Paralysed down one side, he's no longer capable of prosecuting that war, but it goes on in the theatre of his head.
"I haven't changed, " he says. To him, it's a badge of honour. "See the rest of them . . . all them other boys you're talking to . . . they have changed.
They're supporting what's going on.
McGuinness and Adams . . . accepting the 26 counties! Accepting the six!
They're sitting in Dail Eireann. Now they're sitting up in Stormont.
"The next thing they're going to do is go on the police board and you know what that means. They're following the same lines as Michael Collins and Eamon de Valera. It's Irish history repeating itself, that's what it is. What did Michael Collins do? He turned the gun on his own men in Dublin. De Valera . . . what did he do? He got into power and done the same thing in the '40s. IRA men killed. The same thing will happen when they go on this police board. You can take it from me."
His two teenage boys come in and out at regular intervals. He's separated from their mother, who lives just a few doors away.
"We still get on okay. I'm easy-going.
I try not to get down, " he says, anxious not to sound like an ornery old man trapped not only in a wheelchair but in a perpetual past.
To him, the Troubles were part of a long continuum that started eight centuries ago and will only end once the last British soldier has left and Ireland is unified. Ten or 15 years ago just about every republican he knew believed this. Now, all he sees is compromise and fudge. "Money, big jobs, big houses . . . that's all it's about, " he says.
In 1981, he was 29 and well into a 12year sentence for possession of a pistol when he was chosen to replace Francis Hughes, the second man to die, on the hunger strike. But less than a week into his fast he was rushed to hospital suffering from a perforated ulcer and internal bleeding.
The aim of the hunger strike was to crank up the moral pressure on the British government by way of a series of drawn-out, highly publicised deaths. A sick hunger striker was a liability. The doctors said that a combination of gangrene, blood loss and oxygen starvation to the brain would have killed McLaughlin within 48 agonising hours. The IRA took him off the protest.
"I'd have gone the whole way, " he says. "I'd have done it. They [the prison authorities] were putting the food in the cell every day, hoping I'd have a nibble. I was too f**king hard for that. I'd no fear of death. I've been around too many corners in my time."
Would he have gone on hunger strike had he foreseen where the republican movement would be 25 years on? "Probably not, no. It's sad that 10 men died. And for what? See, I knew the best of them boys. Joe McDonnell was in the cell next to me. I knew Bobby Sands as well. I think they'd turn in their graves, them 10 there, with the way things are now."
His voice rises an octave. "Hit them in England, that's what I say. Forget about this country. I said that over 30 years ago. Hit them in their own country, where it hurts."
Some of his old comrades, who ask about him and still think fondly of him, say that it's being largely housebound and cut off from the mainstream of republican thinking, that has him still thinking about the conflict in abstract terms.
"No, it's just that they've changedf and I haven't, " he adds, flashing a proud smile, then twists a cigarette in the bottom of the ashtray and lights another.

by Alex Mon May 01, 2006 18:20

Some old dissident rhetoric.

Join Sinn Féin.

by respect Mon May 01, 2006 18:42

how could a 81 hunger striker's view be considered to be "dissent old rhetoric"? do you represent sinn fein with this statement? and why would you insult such a person who gave so much to the movement?

i can understand though, it must be hard to handle when someone that was there on the front lines, knocks the leadership of a party that now no longer recognizes political status for republican prisoners and is now enforcing the partition of ireland while recieving millions from the capitalist elite of america and the english crown. some radical revolution there!

by Keith Mon May 01, 2006 18:54

Of course Sinn Fein has changed. But has it changed for the better? I think not. All they do is give and give and then take it up the ass from the DUP.

by GPJ Mon May 01, 2006 19:12

My respect to any person who has lived their life in the struggle for national and economic independence.

I still believe that the British have no political or economic rights here, but surely the vote for Sinn Fein and the Irish yes vote for the GFA, mean that its politics and not war that is the correct tactical path to take for achieving the republican agenda .

Going back to armed struggle can only be initiated when the british government puts legal barriers to unity. Has the GFA not replaced the Act of Ireland Act in spirit, and in the GFA there exists a mechanism for unity and is the means to build the 32 county republic.

The Irish republican tactics of political engagement and party building has replaced military action. It has been done because it is what the majority of the republican base of this island and its allies world wide want, because they can see movement towards a united democratic socialist state on this island.

I always listen to the wisdom and thoughts of soldiers, their testimoney is vital for the political struggle...

'....war in abstract terms..." the irish republican base has made its voice heard through elections and the democratic socialist structures of the party tht they do not want to pursue the struggle with arms but through party politics..this and building independent, strong communities is, the path to unity and socialism for the people..All power to the irish people".

by gerry mcguiness Mon May 01, 2006 19:13

provos stopped being republican 20 years ago.
modern day fianna fail

by sceilg Mon May 01, 2006 19:23

This is the speil provos usually come out with ..that the only other option is war. the problem is that the provos arent Republican in ANY sense , not that armed struggle is over. if psf were engaged in Republican politics i would support them tommorrow. its not about war,ffs. its about authentic revoluitionary Republican politics, or the complete lack thereof in regards to the provisionals. they re all about the stus quo, they dine with kissenger, they have betrayed all for what? money and prevlige. if i wanted to be part of corruption id join any other mainstream party, at least they dont have the audacity to try and sell me booby sands diary in the meantime. remember those men died because they wouldnt compromise, yet their memory is for sale to prop up those who have turned their backs on everything.

by ok Mon May 01, 2006 19:48

No Irish nationalist could support any treaty which institutionalizes British government claims to a part of Irish national territory. Indeed, the term - 'constitutional nationalism' - used by Mr.Mallon (SDLP) and his colleagues to describe their political philosophy is a contradiction in terms. The only constitutional nationalist in Ireland today is Sean McBride. He puts his nationalism within a framework of Irish constitutionality. Mr. Mallon, however, puts his within the framework of British constitutionality. Irish nationalism within British constitutionality is a contradiction in terms."
- Gerry Adams, 1986
("The Politics of Irish Freedom", Gerry Adams, Brandon Book Publishers, Ltd., Dingle, County Kerry, Ireland 1986, page 112, lines 26-35. NOTE: REMOVED FROM 1995 and 1996 EDITIONS)

"There can be no such things as an Irish nationalist accepting the loyalist veto and partition. You cannot claim to be an Irish nationalist if you consent to an internal six county settlement and if you are willing to negotiate the state of Irish society with a foreign government."
- Gerry Adams, November 22, 1984 (AP/RN)

"There is those who tells us that the British Government will not be removed by armed struggle. As has been said before, the history of Ireland and of British colonial involvement throughout the world tells us that they will not be moved by anything else".
- Gerry Adams, 1986 (1986 Ard Fheis, as quoted by AP/RN)

by Jonah Tue May 02, 2006 18:33

Out of idel curiosity though, why did you omit the three other interviews that appeared in the Sunday Tribune with comrades supportive of the current strategy of the republican movement?

Surely not bias?

by Paul Tue May 02, 2006 19:09

Stop this dissident talk and join Sinn Féin

by ok Tue May 02, 2006 19:20

because that article was just way too long!! that article had several interviews with several hunger strikers but i found this one to be very interesting at the time when sinn fein is capitalizing on the 25th commeration of the hunger strike. but the article was on 30th april in the sunday tribune if you wanna read it all.

and to comment on "dissent stuff, join sinn fein", well this man was on the frontlines of the movement and the hunger strike....so i dont find his view to be dissent, in fact i find it very interesting. sinn fein of 2006 does not recoginize republican prisoner status anymore after the GFA (after all wasnt that a major part of the hunger strike?), have joined stormont, and will join the police force very soon --- while collecting money from the elite capitalists of america as well as the british crown! some radical revolution there, makes you wonder how many more touts and british agents have and still are influencing the PIRA surrender, destruction of arms, and the peace processs.

by Fergal O'Hanlon Tue May 02, 2006 19:33

'OK' thinks that we are not capable of reading a 'long' article. He excerpts out from it the bit he agrees with - without telling us about the rest of it.

Why not let readers be the judge of whether they want to read the entire piece - if that is okay with 'OK'?

The Hunger Strikers 25 years later
by Paul Howard Sunday Tribune April 30 2006 - www.tribune.ie

MATT Devlin didn't enjoy reliving his days on hunger strike. But on the rare occasions he mentioned it to his friends, he talked about a swarm of bees that he was convinced had infested his head while he lay, wasting away in the prison hospital.

Their steady and insistent thrum almost drove him mad in the hours before he finally slipped into a coma and his family . . .

against his wishes . . . asked doctors to intervene to save him, after 52 days without food.

Almost 25 years later, in the last days of his life, the same continuous low murmur returned. He died three days after Christmas, at the age of 55, at the end of a long battle with stomach cancer, an illness that may or may not have had its seed in the 1981 prison protest. In a final twist to his life, he spent his last month on an enforced fast, too sick to allow anything to pass his lips for 32 days. The bees, he told friends at his bedside, were back.

Yet he clung grimly to life, right to the very end. The doctors told Geraldine, his partner and the mother of his four-yearold son, that he seemed to be railing against the inevitable. Then she remembered something he used to say. Throughout his battle with cancer, he swore that however and whenever the end came, he'd live long enough to see Margaret Thatcher die first.

So in his final hours, his family told him a white lie. Someone said that Thatcher had been taken to hospital and was seriously ill. It looked like she wouldn't last the night. That was the day the bees stopped. The day Matt Devlin finally gave up the fight.

At his funeral in his native Tyrone, Martin McGuinness said Devlin never fully recovered from the 1981 hunger strike that defined him forever in republican eyes. He might have been speaking about any one of the 13 men who stared death down during the most extraordinary political drama of the Troubles but lived to argue over its legacy and whether it was worth it.

To Thatcher, it was the IRA's "last card" and it failed, just as she vowed it would. To the IRA, the stailc and the election of two dying prisoners . . . Bobby Sands to Westminster and Kieran Doherty to the Dail . . . brought down the shaky edifice of British security policy in Northern Ireland, which was based on the hypothesis that the conflict was caused by a small rump of criminals who enjoyed no community support.

The events leading up to the protest began in 1976, when Britain's Labour government abolished special category status as part of a strategy to "normalise" the security situation in Northern Ireland. From the beginning of March, those convicted of offences committed in relation to the Northern conflict would no longer enjoy de facto POW status in the second world war-style compounds known as the cages. Instead, they were housed in eight, purpose-built, H-shaped blocks, where they were expected to wear uniforms and work like the regular criminal prison population.

More than 400 republican prisoners refused to wear the new uniforms, beginning the so-called blanket protest, which escalated into a no-wash protest, then a dirty protest and then two hunger strikes.

Twenty-three IRA and INLA prisoners took part in the second, which lasted 217 days, reaching well into the autumn of 1981. The images of the 10 who died stare out from the murals that bookend hundreds of republican homes in Belfast and Derry. They're remembered in the black flags and white crosses that line the roads in south Armagh. But the 13 who lived have become a mere parenthesis in the story; scratched from the scene in the popular imagination.

Devlin wasn't the only survivor to die an early death. Pat McGeown, who passed away in October 1996 after years of heart trouble, is often referred to as "the 11th hunger striker". Most of those who lived admit that the two deaths are a shadow on the x-ray of their own being.

They wonder whether the effect of starving themselves for up to 70 days has shaved years off the end of their own lives, whether nature will one day claim its forfeit.

Almost all of them were in their early 20s when they embarked on the strike.

Now, they're in their middle years. For some of them it shows in grey or thinning hair, or faces that look far older than their years.

Age may have softened the set of their features, even leavened their anger, but the hunger strike left the tracery of its shadow on them all. Some of those who were taken off the strike by their families were left with confused feelings. Some have suffered a lifetime of health problems, from strokes to failing eyesight.

Others report no problems at all, other than that of not being able to get work.

For most of them, their release from prison was the yeast of a new beginning.

With no war to fight, they settled down and started families, uncommonly late in life. Most . . . but not all . . . look back at the strike through the prism of the peace process and say it was worth it.

They are bound by the adhesive of a common experience but only a handful of them remain in touch with each other.

Some would prefer to forget it . . . but without forgetting it.

"We all made up our minds that we were going to die, " says Gerard Hodgins, one of the 11 men alive. "It's not the kind of thing you have a reunion for."

Laurence McKeown 70 days His life is a riot of activity, his head full of plans and schemes and jobs-to-do, jostling to get in lane, like motorway traffic. Right now, he's leading the campaign to have the prison where he served the best part of a life sentence reopened as a museum.

Then there's his work with Coiste na nIarchimi, helping hundreds of ex-prisoners fight their corners on a whole range of issues. Few have found it easy segueing back into ordinary lives, most finding it almost impossible to get jobs, mortgages, insurance and travel visas because they have criminal convictions.

In a way he's still fighting the same fight that took him to the brink of death in the summer of 1981.

"Our argument back then was that there was a difference between the ordinary prisoners in jail and us, " he says, "and that distinction was accepted in the Good Friday agreement, because people who were in jail for offences connected with the conflict were released early. But, once you get outside, you discover that there's no differentiation between a criminal and political conviction."

Then there's his work as a playwright and screenwriter. He has co-written two plays, with the late Brian Campbell . . . The Laughter of Our Children and A Cold House . . . not to mention the award-winning screenplay for H3, the definitive film about the 1981 hunger strike that counted Martin Sheen among its most enthusiastic reviewers. Four years after its original release, it again played to packed audiences at this year's Belfast Film Festival.

Drama, though, can only go partway to capturing the corporeality of a body being slowly starved to death. Some of his own most vivid memories are smells;

the most repellent of all, that of his body decaying. "As your other senses deteriorate, your sense of smell is heightened.

And you start to become conscious of this one particular smell, which is . . . it's like no other smell in the world . . . rotting flesh. It's hard to describe it. It's not like food going off. It's live meat . . . your body . . .

rotting."

He lived without food for 70 days . . .

longer than eight of the 10 men who died . . . and escaped with nothing more serious than ulcerative colitis (an inflammation of the bowel) and nystagmic (involuntarily twitching) eyes. He only recently got his first pair of glasses, at the age of 49.

He sometimes wonders about the reason for his robust good health. At the time of the strike, Bik McFarlane, the OC of the republican prisoners in the blocks, suspected that his rate of deterioration was being controlled . . . by way of vitamin boosters in his drinking water . . . to suit some unknown political agenda.

Earlier in the summer, Kieran Doherty had been given 48 hours to live, but rallied unexpectedly in the days leading up to the wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana and died four days afterwards, 73 days after first refusing food.

"What's interesting is that last year I applied to the Northern Ireland Office to get my medical records from that time. I just got word back this morning that they were destroyed in October last year . . .

after I applied for them.

"I suppose I'll never know. I do think it would have been difficult to organise, though, involving a collaboration of a lot of people, including prison guards. But stranger things have happened in the North."

His parents were devastated by his decision to join the hunger strike, though his mother came to understand it quicker than his father did. The McKeowns were an ordinary Catholic family from a mixed neighbourhood in Belfast, where electricity, running water and indoor sanitation remained a thing of the future. They were nationalist with a small 'n', voted SDLP and listened with excitement to the speeches of Bernadette Devlin, John Hume and Gerry Fitt, as civil rights fervour swept across the North.

"For me, the turning point was the creation of the UDR. People who I knew and who knew me were suddenly stopping you in the street and asking your name and where you were born. And then that slow realisation that there are two communities here. One is armed. And they could do whatever they wanted with you."

He'd started work as an apprentice quantity surveyor at 16 . . . around the same time he joined the IRA. From there it was a quick hop-skip to life imprisonment, found guilty of causing explosions and the attempted murder of an RUC man in an attack on a jeep. He CCONTINUED FROM PAGE 1 joined the prison protest in its innocent early days. At 19, he was one of youngest of the so-called blanketmen.

His memories of the time all feature graphically in H3, from the stomachcurdling expedient of rubbing his faeces into his cell wall . . . "decorating" . . .

to the daily ritual of picking maggots out of his Amish-style beard.

He has another memory of sitting in a bath. With no flesh left on his frame, it felt like the bones would break clean through his skin if he moved too suddenly. It took every amp of his energy just to sit up in bed. He was tired but wouldn't close his eyes for fear of never waking up. His eyesight had all but gone. Then his bowels suddenly opened . . . the final indicator that death was near.

"The last thing I remember was my family being allowed in to say goodbye. My father was there and my brother and sister. They all asked me to come off the hunger strike. I said no."

His mother never asked him to break the strike, but he remembers looking at her before he lapsed into a coma. Her face was configured to make a decision. "She said to me, 'You did what you had to do, son. Now I'll do what I have to.'

"I came around in the intensive care unit of the Royal Victoria hospital. I could hear a voice and I tried to open my eyes but all I could see were shapes and bright lights. But the voice, it was a woman's voice . . . a nurse . . . and I remember feeling I was in caring hands now."

Was he angry with his mother for asking the doctors to intervene?

"At first I didn't feel anything. I wasn't happy. I wasn't sad. I was alive but too exhausted . . . physically, mentally, emotionally . . . to care one way or the other. I know she was very much afraid that I'd hold it against her. But I think I made sense of what she said at the bedside. The way she rationalised it was that if I died suddenly, from maybe heart failure, then that was God's will. But if I lapsed into a coma, then God had put it in her hands."

How much she suffered during the years of the prison protest he only discovered later. In 1978 she had a heart attack but kept it from him. "I can see now when I look at photographs of her from 1980, then I see ones from 1982, there's like a 10-year difference between them. My being on hunger strike aged her."

She died in 1983. His father died too, four years before his son's eventual release, in 1992. By then they'd at least mended the fissure between them.

"With my mother dead, he was sole parent and he'd have come up to see me regularly. And the way we ended up, I suppose we never did see eye to eye politically, but we had a very good, amicable relationship.

"It probably helped that I decided to go into education. [He got a BA Hons in Social Science while in prison and, later, a doctorate from Queen's University. ] The political situation was changing too, I suppose. He would have seen the respect that the nationalist community had for the hunger strikers and I think that changed his perspective.

"That, I suppose, is the legacy of the hunger strike. Well, there's a whole pile of legacies. Some people say it was the start of the peace process, though I think sometimes there's too much read into that. But it did change a whole lot of people's perceptions on the outside of what the struggle was all about."

Paddy Quinn 47 days Amid a vast tablel and of fields and pastures at the heart of south Armagh is a nondescript farmhouse where Paddy Quinn today enjoys the quieter beats of an ordinary life. The kitchen bristles with the sound of children's voices. Deirdre, his wife, is taking their two young daughters shopping in Newry. He waves them off as the car trails slowly down the road, through the countryside . . . a salad of spring colours . . . until it's a speck in the distance.

He never imagined himself having a family at 50. Socially, he felt like a misfit for a long time after he got out of jail. It was 1976 when he went in and 1985 when he came out and, the way he tells it, it was like waking from a cryogenic sleep.

"It was like a different world, " he says. "The time I went in, I had a three-piece suit, with flared trousers, which was the height of fashion in the '70s. So I arrived home in this and after a while somebody said to me, nobody wears suits anymore, Paddy.

So I ended up giving it to an old boy up the road who didn't have any clothes."

All at sea, he stuck close to the familiar buoys of the GAA club in Beleeks and the local Sinn Fein cumann. Then he met Deirdre, who was working in a local bar. "We were together a long time and I thought, well, my chances of ever having children had gone. Then we ended up with two girls. It was a shock to the system.

They're still a shock to the system!"

He's an engaging man, quiet in conversation but with a loud and urgent laugh, a privet moustache and a pair of light-adjustable shades that keep the world at one remove. His eyesight was permanently damaged by the hunger strike and he's also spent many years on dialysis . . . as well as income support . . . for a kidney complaint and three years ago had a transplant. "That was a hereditary condition . . . it wasn't caused by the strike. The eyes was, though. The light hurts them and I can only look with one of them at any one time. The other eye's looking at nothing, " he says with the easy levity of a man who knows he shouldn't be here to tell his story.

To hear about his last hours before surrendering to a coma, it's a wonder that he is. A body starved of food eventually cannibalises itself. The onset of blindness was the first sign that it was feeding off the protein in the brain. Quinn had difficulty keeping down the eight pints of water the hunger strikers were advised to drink every day, which accounted for his quick deterioration.

"I remember . . . it would have been very close to the end . . . having this scraping going on in the back of my head, just this scraping and screeching sensation and the pain of it was unbelievable. And that was my brain just being eaten away, being eroded.

"I was hyperventilating, taking in too much oxygen and the blood was going around my body too fast. There was an MO [medical officer] there called Paul Lennon . . . a decent guy . . .

and he put a paper bag over my mouth to bring down my oxygen intake. And it eased and eased. But I'd started to hallucinate at that point and, when I saw this bag coming over my face, I thought someone was trying to strangle me. I got this thing into my head that I'd killed a couple of screws and their wives were trying to choke me.

"And I think what they done, while all this roaring was coming out of me, was they brought my mother within earshot, so she could hear the racket."

In his last lucid moments, he pleaded with her to let him die. "It's like this, " he told her, "you back me or you back Maggie Thatcher."

He woke up in Musgrave Park hospital, being fed through a drip. "My lips were sore and bleeding. I'd been chewing them while I was having convulsions. And I'd been ripping at them [he points to his testicles] as well. My foreskin was like a tube. And my eyes were sore, where I'm supposed to have been grabbing at them, trying to pull them out, to ease this pain in the back of my head."

But worse, he says, was the leaden dread of knowing that he was still alive. "I was angry, there's no doubt about that. The nurse said, 'Your mother's coming in to see you. Don't say anything this time, will you not?' I said, 'What?' and she said, 'You tore into her earlier for taking you off the hunger strike.' I had no memory of itf" His voice trails off and his eyes turn to the window.

It was out there, amid the stone walls and variegated fields of south Armagh that Quinn and Raymond McCreesh, his near-neighbour and the third hunger striker to die, fought a guerrilla war against the security forces. Quinn was of old republican stock, with an uncle who boasted a bullet wound in his neck that came from a shootout with the Black and Tans and a grandmother who had a whole repertoire of tales about the vainglories of the old IRA. He grew up on a 30-acre beef and dairy farm just outside Camlough with his younger brother, Seamus, and his widowed mother.

"I remember, around about 1969, this summer's day, working with a local farmer, who lived up on a hill a mile or two from Camlough. You couldn't quite see Belfast from there but you could see the smoke. Then you saw the images on television and it made you angry. The soldiers were supposed to be peacekeepers . . . to referee between two tribes, the British said . . . but it was obvious, long before Bloody Sunday ever happened, that they considered themselves to be at war with the nationalist people."

In his early 20s he was working as a draughtsman in a civil engineer's office in Newry. He was also an active member of the IRA. From the day he joined, he knew he was on a fast-track to prison. He and McCreesh were part of an active service unit caught redhanded preparing to attack an army observation post near Belleeks.

Quinn was convicted of attempted murder and in 1976 was sentenced to 14 years in prison. After four-and-ahalf years on the blanket, he volunteered for the second hunger strike, knowing that he would likely die on it.

The IRA had doubts about whether Quinn had the wherewithal to see the strike through. Seamus, who was on the run in the Republic, had recently suffered a brain haemorrhage and was discovered to have the same kidney condition that killed their father.

"The doctors wanted to check me out to see had I the same thing, which was polycystic kidneys. I wouldn't let them. I was afraid they'd discover something and I wouldn't be picked for the strike. So I just refused to be tested.

"I went blind at some point between 30 and 40 days into strike. I remember this wee doctor . . . Dr Ross . . . a civil man, he'd be examining me every day and he'd be telling stories to try to get me to see what I was doing to myself.

He's say, 'Think of yourself as one of those big chimneystacks. And you're pulling the bricks out, one by one, day by day, until eventuallyf boom!'

"But it was a strange feeling because I wasn't scared of dying. The only way I can think of to describe it is to say it was like crossing a bridge. I felt good within myself. It's how I imagined it would feel to escape from jail."

Catherine Quinn's intervention, on the day that her son would almost certainly have died, was the hunger strikers' worst nightmare realised. The staggered nature of the protest placed an unspoken moral prerogative on each volunteer to follow his last comrade to the grave . . . her decision to take him off was the first break in the chain. Other mothers would follow her lead in the weeks ahead and the protest would run aground.

By the time he was properly conscious again, Kevin Lynch and Kieran Doherty had become the seventh and eighth prisoners to die and for a long time he felt guilty of a solecism by his survival.

"I went back to the prison, back to the wing, and there were men still on hunger strike and that was very hard.

Tom McElwee died, then Mickey Devine and, of course, the worst thing is, I'm still here, still livingf" Brendan McLaughlin 12 days In the jaded, early evening light of his livingroom in Derry, Brendan McLaughlin sits jack-knifed in his wheelchair, a knot of gathered anger, and snaps the filter off another cigarette. He hasn't been able to taste tobacco, or much else, since the stroke he suffered seven years ago, so breaks the tips off before smoking them . . . 40 a day . . . right down to his kippercoloured fingers.

Photographs and republican paraphernalia wainscot the walls of his council bungalow . . . photographs of volunteer graves, pictures of famous IRA men, a bodhran made in Portlaoise jail. But it's a pencil sketch of the 10 men who carried their protest right to the end that draws his eye.

"You see them boys up there?" he says. "They died for nothing."

He's angry about a lot of things . . .

Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness ("scum bastards"), the peace process ("a sell-out") and the Brits ("no business being here . . . never had, never will").

"They're all getting ready to sit in Stormont, " he says, "when there's still a war to fight."

Paralysed down one side, he's no longer capable of prosecuting that war, but it goes on in the theatre of his head.

"I haven't changed, " he says. To him, it's a badge of honour. "See the rest of them . . . all them other boys you're talking to . . . they have changed.

They're supporting what's going on.

McGuinness and Adams . . . accepting the 26 counties! Accepting the six!

They're sitting in Dail Eireann. Now they're sitting up in Stormont.

"The next thing they're going to do is go on the police board and you know what that means. They're following the same lines as Michael Collins and Eamon de Valera. It's Irish history repeating itself, that's what it is. What did Michael Collins do? He turned the gun on his own men in Dublin. De Valera . . . what did he do? He got into power and done the same thing in the '40s. IRA men killed. The same thing will happen when they go on this police board. You can take it from me."

His two teenage boys come in and out at regular intervals. He's separated from their mother, who lives just a few doors away.

"We still get on okay. I'm easy-going.

I try not to get down, " he says, anxious not to sound like an ornery old man trapped not only in a wheelchair but in a perpetual past.

To him, the Troubles were part of a long continuum that started eight centuries ago and will only end once the last British soldier has left and Ireland is unified. Ten or 15 years ago just about every republican he knew believed this. Now, all he sees is compromise and fudge. "Money, big jobs, big houses . . . that's all it's about, " he says.

In 1981, he was 29 and well into a 12year sentence for possession of a pistol when he was chosen to replace Francis Hughes, the second man to die, on the hunger strike. But less than a week into his fast he was rushed to hospital suffering from a perforated ulcer and internal bleeding.

The aim of the hunger strike was to crank up the moral pressure on the British government by way of a series of drawn-out, highly publicised deaths. A sick hunger striker was a liability. The doctors said that a combination of gangrene, blood loss and oxygen starvation to the brain would have killed McLaughlin within 48 agonising hours. The IRA took him off the protest.

"I'd have gone the whole way, " he says. "I'd have done it. They [the prison authorities] were putting the food in the cell every day, hoping I'd have a nibble. I was too f**king hard for that. I'd no fear of death. I've been around too many corners in my time."

Would he have gone on hunger strike had he foreseen where the republican movement would be 25 years on? "Probably not, no. It's sad that 10 men died. And for what? See, I knew the best of them boys. Joe McDonnell was in the cell next to me. I knew Bobby Sands as well. I think they'd turn in their graves, them 10 there, with the way things are now."

His voice rises an octave. "Hit them in England, that's what I say. Forget about this country. I said that over 30 years ago. Hit them in their own country, where it hurts."

Some of his old comrades, who ask about him and still think fondly of him, say that it's being largely housebound and cut off from the mainstream of republican thinking, that has him still thinking about the conflict in abstract terms.

"No, it's just that they've changedf and I haven't, " he adds, flashing a proud smile, then twists a cigarette in the bottom of the ashtray and lights another.

GerardHodgins 20 days From his flat in the republican heartland of Andersonstown, Gerard Hodgins can see south as far as the Mournes and west as far as the Sperrins. And of course less than a mile away, rising out of the earth like two rotten molars, are the twin peaks of Divis and Black Mountain. For 30 years, the Belfast hills were a no-go area, controlled by the British ministry of defence, which operated a listening post at the summit of Black Mountain and a rifle range on its slopes. Stripped of the ugly appurtenances of war, locals can now once again breathe the mountain air and get a new perspective on the city . . .

another small brick in the process of rebuilding this fractured community.

The Troubles ended for Hodgins in 1996. He'd served two prison sentences that accounted for almost all of his adult years. Then something happened when he got out on parole.

He went on a date . . . she was a friend of a friend. They hit it off and soon he had a choice to make.

Lorraine or The Cause.

"I knew I couldn't have both, " he says. "That was when I decided I'd done my bit."

There remains some small part of him that never really left prison. The three weeks he spent on hunger strike in the autumn of 1981 are always there, on the periphery. Seven years ago, he and Lorraine were in Italy, on a ferry between Sorrento and the island of Capri, when he had his first 'episode'.

"I sometimes get these flashbacks, " he says, "which are really vivid . . . really, really vivid. Something inside of me just flips and I'm back in my cell in H6.

And it's there . . . the walls, the door, the bars over the windows. And the only way I can describe the feeling that goes with it is pure horror. It probably relates to depression. I get the odd bit of it."

It's mid-afternoon and he already has a day's work behind him, as a career adviser at a local job assist centre. Somewhere in the background Jack Johnson is picking through the chords of a song. There's a handful of travel books . . . Vienna, Amsterdam . . .

open, face-down, on the coffee table.

"I was in jail from the time I was 17, " he says. "I'm catching up on life."

It's not difficult to imagine the couple picking up friends on their travels.

There's a warm openness about them, the kind of strangers you could imagine falling into easy conversation with.

There's something about Hodgins, too, that doesn't quite fit the popular profile of a hunger striker. It might be the black sense of humour that suggests itself in the grim reaper tattoo he had put on his forearm a couple of years after the strike, in what he remembers as his "death instinct phase".

A couple of years back he had a letter published in the Sunday Independent, pointing out that "Rev Ian Paisley" was an anagram of "Vile IRA Pansey". There's something about the laughter that offends the popular narrative of the hunger strike . . . of serious-minded young men martyring themselves in the same proud tradition as Thomas Ashe and Terence McSwiney. The reality was never like that, he says.

"I don't think any of us was motivated by notions of heroism. I remember getting this comm [communique] from the Army Council. It just said, 'You have put your name forward for a hunger strike. Be advised that in eight weeks' time you're going to be dead and eight weeks after that the only people who will remember you will be your family.' There was no, 'We're proud of you here', or, 'You're doing a good thing for Ireland'."

Hodgins was an unlikely recruit for the IRA, having grown up alongside mostly Protestant neighbours in middle-class respectability on the Springfield Road. His father had developed asbestosis, a disease of the lungs, through his work as a pipe fitter in the shipyards and bought the house with his compensation payout.

"I had this crazy, mixed-up life. I went to a Catholic school . . . St Paul's secondary school . . . and for the last six months of my first year, I stopped going, because of bullying. Because I lived in a mixed area and knocked around with fellas who were Protestants, I was deemed an Orange lover."

The Troubles slowly insinuated itself into life on the street. The family was ordered to leave. An attempt was made to burn the house with his father still in it. "I was 11 or 12. I got interested in republicanism from there, joined the IRA at 16 and that was me."

Within a year he was arrested in Downpatrick, in possession of a pistol, and sentenced to 14 years in jail. His father died very shortly afterwards.

He doesn't think he'd have understood him joining the hunger strike.

"I think he would have had a very Catholic attitude about the sanctity of human life. My mother was devastated when I told her. I remember a few conversations where I said I didn't want her to intervene, that if I woke up from a coma I wouldn't be a happy person. She promised me she wouldn't have but a lot of mothers said the same thing until they were in the situation of sitting watching their sons die."

His last food before the fast was a salad . . . a slice of spam, a slice of cheese and a hard-boiled egg. A unionist salad, they used to call it, because there were no greens in it.

Some of the hunger strikers say they had no cravings once they'd fixed their minds on not eating. He thought about food constantly. He noticed for the first time how often it was mentioned in books and magazines. He wasn't fond of spicy food but he craved curry for the entire duration of the strike, his mother's stuffed pork and Fray Bentos steak and kidney pies.

"After a week of no food, your sense of smell becomes really intense. I could smell cornflakes from across the cell."

By the time he joined the protest in the middle of September, the momentum was already running out of it. The family interventions . . . the IRA blamed "cleric-led demoralisation" . . . forced an end to the hunger strike on 3 October, when Hodgins was one of six men still refusing food.

"Confusion, I suppose, was my main feeling that day. On the one hand, you're glad you're not going to die. On the other hand there were feelings of guilt that you survived and 10 others didn't. And at the same time we didn't get what we set out to get.

"We got our demands eventually but back then we were questioning ourselves. The lads who were dead, did we let them down? How could you look their families in the eyes?"

He was released from jail in 1985, he admits, "full of hatred". He got out at 10am and by noon had reported again for active service. He was told to "go away, get yourself drunk for a couple of weeks and get it out of your system".

"The blanket protests, the hunger strikes, were very vivid in my mind and that's what motivated me, the desire for payback. I didn't see my dad before he died. I was told I was getting parole to see him when he was bad. I put the prison uniform on to go from my cell to the reception area. I sat there for half an hour waiting. Then I was told it was a clerical error, they're not letting me out at all.

"Like, ha, ha, ha. I think it was understandable coming out of jail hating those bastards."

And it was inevitable that he'd end up back there. In January 1990, the RUC kicked open the door of a house in west Belfast and arrested Hodgins, Sinn Fein publicity director Danny Morrison and seven other men who were holding an IRA informer. He was jailed for eight years for false imprisonment.

"My life, I suppose, was a learning curve, " he says, looking back. "You mature. You come to a point where you start questioning yourself. You realise it's not about who you want to attack. You ask is what you're doing right? Is it morally justifiable? It there just cause? Is there another way?

"I'd still consider myself a republican. But the great thing about not being involved in politics now is that you can have an opinion without thinking, 'What's the party line on that?' If you think something's crap, you can say it's crap."

He's happy to have been a hunger striker, though. "I suppose, on balance, it was worth it. Sometimes you don't see it. You tend to dwell on the human cost. And I'm not just talking about the 10 men who died. There were 50 or 60 people killed as a direct result of trouble related to the hunger strike. But it was a necessary stage for us to go through. We realised that there was a broad constituency out there who were supportive of republican ideals and objectives but who didn't agree with armed struggle and people being killed.

"But you're constantly asking was it worth it. It's important to always question yourself."

It's that little part of him that will never escape H6.