1980 IRA prisoners’ hunger strike led by Brendan Hughes

The 1980 IRA prisoners’ hunger strike led by Brendan Hughes was a confrontation over the status of republican prisoners that ended in a wrenching choice between sustaining the protest and saving a fellow striker. Hughes led seven men into the fast, but when Sean McKenna approached death, he ordered that McKenna be fed. The strike stopped after fifty-three days; Hughes emerged ashamed of what he saw as a tactical failure, while the prisoners began planning another hunger strike with a different structure and leader.

Criminalisation and prison protest

The strike grew from the British government’s decision to end internment and special category status. From late 1975, paramilitary suspects were to be charged and imprisoned as ordinary criminals. For republicans, this was more than a change of classification: they regarded themselves as soldiers in a war, not criminals, and believed captured volunteers should be treated as prisoners of war. The new regime at Long Kesh placed convicted prisoners in individual cells in the H Blocks, issued them prison uniforms, and made no distinction between an IRA volunteer and a common thief.

In autumn 1976, republican prisoners refused to wear those uniforms and began the blanket protest. They sought special category status, which would effectively recognise them as prisoners of war, but the authorities refused. As prisoners and guards escalated their conflict, prisoners who initially left their cells to wash and use the toilet faced beatings and restrictions on towels. They then refused to leave their cells. When they tipped their chamber pots, urine ran beneath the doors and into the corridors; the protest developed from a refusal to wash into the dirty protest. Hughes, the prisoners’ commanding officer, advised them to smear their excrement on the walls. Naked, unwashed, and increasingly gaunt, the men made swirling patterns in their waste as maggots and the threat of disease took hold. Guards dragged prisoners out to hose them down and cleaned the cells with water and disinfectant, but a newly cleaned cell could quickly be defiled again. The extreme conditions formed the immediate setting for the hunger strike: a contest over status in which physical suffering had become one of the prisoners’ remaining means of resistance.

The government maintained its refusal to grant political status. Roy Mason had called IRA prisoners thugs and gangsters; Margaret Thatcher reiterated that there would be no political status and insisted that crime was crime. By the time she took office, several hundred men were participating in the dirty protest. The narrative also recalls an earlier use of the same bodily tactic: after their conviction at Winchester Castle, Dolours Price and Marian Price had begun refusing food in Brixton Prison, demanding repatriation to serve their sentences as political prisoners in Northern Ireland. The government forcibly fed Dolours after more than two weeks without food. That earlier episode underscores the risks surrounding hunger strikes, even as the 1980 protest unfolded under different prison conditions and ended through Hughes’s decision to call for McKenna to be fed.

The strike and its tactical flaw

In autumn 1980, Hughes announced that he intended to mount a hunger strike and invited volunteers. More than a hundred prisoners came forward. The selected team consisted of seven men, led by Hughes, who chose to take part himself rather than ask a subordinate to endure what he would not. In the last week of October, all seven began refusing food at the same time.

The simultaneous start was the strike’s central tactical error. It meant that one man would eventually approach death before the others, forcing the remaining strikers to decide whether to end the protest to save him or let him die. Hughes had not wanted the twenty-six-year-old Sean McKenna, from Newry, to join the team, but McKenna insisted. As his health deteriorated, he was confined to a wheelchair in the hospital wing. Fearful, he asked Hughes not to let him die; Hughes promised that he would not.

The prison doctor, David Ross, treated Hughes with kindness. Each morning, he brought a flask of fresh spring water, which he said was better than the prison’s tap water, and sat on the edge of Hughes’s bed to talk about fishing, mountains, rivers, and streams. These conversations accompanied Hughes’s physical decline: weeks into the fast, he was frail, with sunken cheeks, a ragged beard, and long hair. The contrast between Ross’s ordinary, humane visits and the wider institutional confrontation did not remove the stakes. McKenna’s worsening condition made the tactical dilemma unavoidable.

McKenna’s collapse and the strike’s end

Just before Christmas, McKenna began lapsing in and out of a coma. Hughes saw orderlies rush him on a stretcher through the hospital wing, with two priests standing beside Ross. He understood that McKenna would die without intervention, and that allowing it to happen would break his promise. But ordering treatment would also end the strike and surrender the leverage the prisoners had sought to build. The moment joined the political calculation to a personal obligation: Hughes had to choose between the continuing protest and the life of the young man who had trusted him.

Hughes finally shouted for McKenna to be fed. Orderlies prepared scrambled eggs, and McKenna began eating again. With that decision, the strike ended. Hughes had himself fasted for fifty-three days. He slowly recovered and regained weight, but felt deeply ashamed, believing he had botched the strike. The ending was therefore neither a simple victory nor a purely tactical conclusion: it preserved McKenna’s life, while leaving Hughes with the burden of having called off the action and the prisoners’ status dispute unresolved in the account of the event.

A new strategy

Almost immediately, the prisoners decided to organise another hunger strike. This time, the strikers would begin at intervals, with each new participant starting about a week after the previous one. Staggering the fasts was intended to prevent the collective dilemma that had forced Hughes to choose between ending the action and allowing McKenna to die. Each striker would face the decision whether to continue or stop on his own.

Hughes was still recovering and was not selected to lead the second strike. The prisoners chose Bobby Sands, the young volunteer who had coordinated the arts programme, to begin first and lead the new action. The 1980 strike thus ended with both a painful personal consequence and a change in method: Hughes’s promise to McKenna determined when the fast stopped, while its simultaneous start shaped how the prisoners would organise the next one.