Bobby Sands

Bobby Sands was an Irish Republican Army volunteer, poet and prisoner whose hunger strike in 1981 became a turning point in the movement’s political trajectory. He began refusing food at Long Kesh on 1 March; six weeks later he was elected to Parliament, and on 5 May he died after sixty-six days without food. His candidacy and death drew the struggle into public electoral life, even as the British government refused the prisoners’ demands. The sequence made Sands both a political figure and a martyr, with consequences that extended beyond the prison and outlasted him.

Identity and Background

Sands grew up Catholic in a Protestant neighbourhood. When he was seven, a neighbour discovered that his family were Catholic, and they were driven from their home. The experience belongs to the wider pattern of sectarian division described in the book: religious identity could determine whether a family was accepted in its own neighbourhood. Sands later joined the Irish Republican Army, and his path from displacement to armed republicanism was not presented as a simple personal conversion, but as part of a society in which communal allegiance shaped everyday security and political belonging.

At Long Kesh, Sands became a cultural organiser among republican prisoners. Gerry Adams encouraged political discussion and intellectual discipline, and prisoners met at the wire between their enclosures to talk about politics, history and news from outside. Sands, described as fresh-faced and headstrong, organised cultural classes, wrote poetry and became the prisoners’ official press officer. The cultural activity was not separate from prison politics: it helped prisoners sustain collective life behind the wire and gave them ways to articulate their cause beyond the immediate conditions of confinement. The prison could be an intellectual meeting place, but its fences also marked the prisoners’ exclusion from ordinary political and civic life.

From Prison Organiser to Hunger-Striker

The book places Sands’s leadership in the aftermath of Brendan Hughes’s hunger strike. Hughes had survived a fifty-three-day fast and felt ashamed that he had not died. The prisoners soon decided to mount another strike, this time staggering its start dates so that each participant would decide individually whether to continue, rather than making the outcome a single collective decision. Because Hughes was still recovering, they chose Sands to lead the new protest. He would be the first to refuse food and, in the prisoners’ expectation, the first to die.

Sands began his fast on 1 March 1981. His last morsel was a prison-ration orange, which tasted bitter. As he started the strike, he wrote on a scrap of toilet paper: "I am standing on the threshold of another trembling world," followed by, "May God have mercy on my soul." The smallness of the object contrasts with the scale of the act: a few words on prison paper accompanied the deliberate refusal of food, made in a place where the prisoners’ bodies and daily routines were under institutional control.

The protest grew in stages. A second prisoner joined after two weeks, a third a week later, and eventually ten men were on hunger strike at Long Kesh. The British government did not meet their demands. The broader conflict over prisoners’ status gave the protest its political stakes: the government treated paramilitary suspects as ordinary criminals, while the republican movement regarded its volunteers as soldiers and sought recognition of their political status. Sands’s fast therefore became a confrontation over more than prison conditions; it placed the meaning of republican identity and the government’s authority to define it before a public audience.

Election and Political Consequences

Four days after Sands began his fast, Frank Maguire, a nationalist MP representing Fermanagh and South Tyrone, died. His death required a by-election. Maguire’s brother initially considered standing for the seat, but republicans urged him to reconsider, and Sands was put forward as a candidate from prison. The plan used an electoral contest to focus attention on a hunger striker: if Sands won, the result would make it harder for the British government to treat him as politically insignificant while he was dying in custody.

Adams saw the election as an opportunity to bring republican politics to people who might reject the Irish Republican Army’s violence but still support a hunger striker at the ballot box. Working with Danny Morrison, he developed a strategy in which Sinn Féin would contest elections while the armed campaign continued. Morrison later gave the idea its memorable formulation: "Will anyone here object if, with a ballot paper in one hand and an Armalite in the other, we take power in Ireland?" Sands’s candidacy thus became a practical demonstration of a political strategy that held electoral participation and armed struggle together rather than treating them as alternatives.

On 10 April, after forty-one days without food, Sands was elected to Parliament. The victory did not secure the prisoners’ demands. His condition continued to deteriorate, and Margaret Thatcher faced mounting pressure as the strike continued. On 25 April she spoke with Humphrey Atkins, her Northern Ireland secretary; Atkins observed, "Sands is clearly determined," a brief assessment that registered the resolve confronting the government without changing its position. The election had brought Sands into public office, but it had not brought him out of prison or ended the fast.

Death and Public Response

Sands died on 5 May 1981, the sixty-sixth day of his strike. His death made headlines around the world. Adams later recalled that it had "a greater international impact than any other event in Ireland in my lifetime". In Belfast, one hundred thousand people came onto the streets to watch the coffin being carried to the cemetery. The scale of the funeral marked a surge of support for the republican cause on both sides of the border in Ireland, although public sympathy for Sands did not mean that every supporter endorsed the Irish Republican Army’s armed campaign.

Thatcher showed no remorse. After Sands’s death she said, "Mr Sands was a convicted criminal," and added, "He chose to take his own life. It was a choice his organisation did not allow to many of its victims." The contrast between the government’s criminal designation and the crowds’ public mourning exposed the struggle over how Sands would be understood: as a prisoner who had chosen to die, or as a political actor whose death testified to the cause he represented. The book does not erase the victims invoked in Thatcher’s response; instead, it shows how Sands’s death became contested ground in the wider argument over violence, legitimacy and the hierarchy of suffering.

After Sands died, the remaining nine hunger strikers followed one by one over the summer. The anticipated possibility that one of the ten would break did not materialise. Dolours Price, released as Sands was dying, later wept when she remembered the moment. The juxtaposition of his death and her freedom stayed with her for years; she would also wonder whether she was in some way responsible for allowing the ten men to starve. Her reaction shows how the strike’s consequences reached beyond those inside Long Kesh, binding survival and release to the deaths occurring there without making the experiences equivalent.

Legacy and Disputed Interpretation

Sands’s election became a model for the turn toward electoral politics. In 1983, his former commanding officer Gerry Adams sought a parliamentary seat for West Belfast. Adams announced that he would boycott Westminster if elected, maintaining the republican tradition of abstentionism, but Sands’s success had already demonstrated the appeal a republican candidate could find among voters. Dolours Price canvassed for Adams, called on people to vote for him and drove voters to polling stations; he won. In this way, the electoral opening associated with Sands continued into later campaigns, even though he had died before taking his own seat.

The book also distinguishes the political meaning of the strike from later claims about why it continued. Ricky O’Rawe, who had not been party to the Army Council discussions that made the decision, later came to believe that Adams had prolonged the hunger strike to capitalise on the popular support generated by Sands’s candidacy and death. O’Rawe described the strike as the moment that "split the atom" in republican policy, because it revealed the potential of electoral politics. This is presented as O’Rawe’s retrospective theory, not as an established account of Adams’s intentions; his own uncertainty about the decision and guilt at not speaking out at the time remain part of the story.

The strike also left consequences among those who cared for the prisoners. Hughes remembered Dr Ross, the physician who had tended him during his fast and brought him fresh water from a mountain spring. Sands had distrusted Ross, calling him a "mind manipulator", while Hughes valued the doctor’s kindness. Hughes later learned that, after watching all ten men die, Ross had taken his own life in 1986. This aftermath widens the account beyond public commemoration: the strike’s human cost did not end with the prisoners’ deaths or the crowds around their coffins. Sands’s brief life as an elected candidate, his death in custody and the political strategy that followed remain inseparable, but the book keeps their consequences visible in more than one register.