Blanketmen

Blanketmen is Ricky O’Rawe’s 2005 account of the 1981 hunger strike and its aftermath, and a direct challenge to the accepted republican narrative of how the strike was handled. Its central allegation—that the Gerry Adams leadership spurned a British offer that might have ended the strike before the final six hunger strikers died—turned a former prisoner’s testimony into a public controversy over political responsibility and historical memory.

Origins and historical stakes

O’Rawe’s decision to publish grew out of an oral-history interview with Mackers, conducted for the Belfast Project. He held back his account until the interview’s final session, then found the act of disclosing it so invigorating that he resolved not to wait until his death for the story to become available to researchers. He wanted to reach the wider public, not only future students of Boston College. The revelation was therefore bound up with a larger question: whether a confidential archive could preserve a story that its witness believed should be heard in his own lifetime.

The dispute concerned the 1981 hunger strike, in which six more prisoners died after an offer that O’Rawe said the leadership had rejected. The allegation carried particular force because it attributed a consequential decision not simply to the British government or the prisoners, but to the republican leadership’s political calculations. O’Rawe’s account suggested that Gerry Adams had knowingly allowed the deaths to advance Sinn Féin’s electoral prospects. That claim was the explosive core of the book, and Ed Moloney, director of the Belfast Project, warned O’Rawe that publishing it would bring severe personal and political attack.

The prison context gave the argument its weight. After the end of internment, convicted republican prisoners were treated as ordinary criminals: at Long Kesh they were confined in individual cells in the H Blocks and made to wear prison uniforms. The prisoners’ refusal to wear those clothes developed into the blanket protest, and then into the dirty protest as confrontation with prison staff escalated. The dispute was not merely about clothing: the prisoners sought special category status, association with other prisoners and the right to receive mail. Against that history, the hunger strike was both a physical ordeal and a struggle over political recognition. Blanketmen entered a history in which the body, the uniform and the right to define a prisoner’s status had become inseparable.

Publication and contested claims

O’Rawe published Blanketmen in 2005 despite Moloney’s warning. The book presented Adams as both a coolheaded visionary and a slippery operator, a portrait that resisted a simple verdict. O’Rawe’s own account acknowledged Adams’s importance to the later political outcome: he wrote that without Adams and the hunger strikers there would be no semblance of peace in Ireland. That qualification did not blunt the accusation. Instead, it placed strategic achievement beside the alleged human cost, leaving readers to confront the tension between political success and the price at which it was secured.

The book provoked a fierce response from people who saw it as a weaponised personal history directed at Adams. Adams did not answer O’Rawe directly. As O’Rawe described it, allies and proxies instead attacked the book publicly. Bik McFarlane, who had worked closely with O’Rawe during the hunger strikes, called it totally fictitious and denied that the British had made an offer; if no offer existed, he argued, Adams could not have sent a message telling prisoners not to accept it. The book’s dispute thus became a dispute over whether the pivotal offer had existed at all, as well as over who had made the decision to continue the strike.

Rebuttal, support and legacy

The attacks did not silence O’Rawe. He debated those who challenged his account and decided to write a second book about the strike and its aftermath. His willingness to contradict republican orthodoxy also brought him supporters. Dolours Price praised the book in a review in The Blanket, crediting it with providing access to a vital piece of the historical puzzle. Her response placed Blanketmen within a widening contest over whether the movement’s history could be told only through its established public account.

Brendan Hughes also defended the book before his death. He wrote to the Irish News that he was a former prisoner who had spoken with O’Rawe about the matters that eventually appeared in it. In his final years, the two men met from time to time to remember their prison years. O’Rawe urged Hughes to write those memories down; Hughes replied that he had made tapes. His support gave O’Rawe’s account the backing of another former prisoner, while the mention of Hughes’s recordings echoed the Belfast Project’s larger effort to preserve testimony that might otherwise remain unheard.

The book’s significance lies not in settling the hunger-strike controversy, but in making the competing claims impossible to keep separate from the human and political stakes. McFarlane later acknowledged that a secret offer had been made, while continuing to insist that the hunger strikers themselves—not the leadership—judged it unworthy and chose to continue. That later change narrowed one disagreement but did not resolve the central question of responsibility. Blanketmen became both a published accusation and an enduring point of fracture: evidence invoked by critics of the republican leadership, contested by its defenders, and supported by witnesses whose memories complicated any single authoritative version of the past.