The 1980 IRA hunger strike made the dispute over republican prisoners’ status a contest conducted through the body: refusing food was a political demand, but it also placed the strikers’ lives and their leadership under immediate pressure. Brendan Hughes led the strike. Its most revealing crisis came when Seán McKenna began to lapse and Hughes, confronted with the possibility of losing him, called for him to be fed. The episode exposed a painful gap between the principle of resistance and the responsibility to keep a comrade alive.

Background: Criminalisation and Prison Protest

The strike followed the end of internment and a change in how the British government treated paramilitary prisoners. From late 1975, suspects were to be charged and imprisoned as ordinary criminals rather than detained as political prisoners. For the republican movement, this was not merely a change in classification: it challenged the claim that IRA volunteers were soldiers in a war. Convicted prisoners were confined in individual cells in the H Blocks at Long Kesh, issued prison uniforms, and treated under the same regime as ordinary offenders.

The prisoners’ rejection of that status had already taken material form. In autumn 1976, republicans began the blanket protest, refusing prison clothes and wrapping themselves in blankets. Their demand for special category status, which would treat them as prisoners of war, was refused. The protest escalated as relations with guards worsened: beatings and restrictions on towels made leaving cells more dangerous, and prisoners eventually refused to leave even to wash or use the toilet. The resulting dirty protest turned the cells themselves into a site of confrontation. By the time the hunger strike began, the argument over political status had been sustained through clothing, confinement, and the conditions of daily life; now it would be carried by refusing food.

The Strike and Its Leadership

The 1980 strike began in the autumn, with Hughes at its head. The account records that seven men had embarked on it, while retrospective accounts give different numbers for the wider response: Peter Taylor put the number at 170, whereas Hughes said in his Boston College oral history that it was over ninety. These figures are not presented as a settled count of the men who began the strike. They point instead to uncertainty about how many had answered or stood ready to answer the call, an uncertainty that becomes important when the event is remembered through different accounts.

The contrast between a wider show of willingness and the seven men who had embarked on the strike makes the leadership question concrete. A hunger strike could express collective resolve, but its consequences unfolded in individual bodies, at different rates and with different risks. Hughes was not only a figurehead: the record identifies him as the person who led the men, and it places him at the centre of a decision made when one striker’s condition became critical.

McKenna’s Crisis

As the strike continued, McKenna grew increasingly fearful, and his condition worsened. He began to lapse. Hughes saw two priests standing with Dr Ross; the account then records Hughes finally calling for McKenna to be fed. A doctor instructed orderlies, and the intervention made the abstract stakes of the protest immediate: preserving the strike’s collective position could mean allowing a comrade to approach death, while intervening meant breaking the fast he had undertaken.

Hughes felt deeply ashamed afterward. That response complicates any simple portrayal of the strike as an unbroken display of discipline. His call to feed McKenna was a decision made in a moment of danger, but the shame that followed shows that it did not leave the political or moral conflict behind. The same leader responsible for sustaining the protest had to face the limits of what he could ask another prisoner to endure. McKenna’s failing eyesight and lapses, recorded in later accounts, make the bodily cost more than a general symbol: the strike threatened particular capacities and lives, while leadership required choices about when that threat had gone too far.

Stakes and Afterlife

The hunger strike arose from a prison struggle over whether republican prisoners would be recognised as political actors or processed as criminals. The earlier blanket and dirty protests had made the conflict visible in the H Blocks’ clothes, cells, and routines. The fast intensified that confrontation by making the prisoners’ own survival part of its stakes. In this setting, a demand for political recognition could not be separated from the danger imposed on those making it, or from the responsibility borne by those leading them.

The strike is also preserved through accounts that do not supply a single, uncontested number for those who responded. Hughes’s oral history and Taylor’s account differ, while the episode of McKenna’s deterioration and Hughes’s reaction gives the event a more intimate measure than a headcount. The book’s broader concern with the conflict’s second life in memory applies here: the strike is recalled not only as a clash between prisoners and government policy, but as a test inside the republican movement, where solidarity, strategy, and the duty to protect one another could come into painful conflict.