The 1980 Irish hunger strike at Long Kesh was an act of collective pressure that became, for its leader Brendan Hughes, a choice between the movement’s leverage and a promise to a dying young prisoner. Hughes ended the strike when Sean McKenna, already gravely ill, slipped into a coma. The decision saved McKenna from death, but it also ended the protest and burdened Hughes with a guilt that returned long after the prisoners had begun eating again.

Background and organization

The strike arose amid a confrontation over the status of republican prisoners. The dirty protest at Long Kesh had grown to involve several hundred men, and the IRA was also killing prison officers who were off duty. The British government nevertheless maintained its refusal to recognize political status. Margaret Thatcher took the same position as her predecessor, treating the prisoners’ actions as criminal rather than political. Against that impasse, a hunger strike offered prisoners another means of exerting pressure, at the cost of their own bodies.

In the autumn of 1980, Hughes announced that a hunger strike would begin and asked for volunteers. Accounts differ on how many prisoners offered themselves: one estimate puts the number at 170, while Hughes later recalled that it was more than ninety. A team of seven was selected, with Hughes at its head. He chose to take part himself, consistent with his practice of not asking a subordinate to do what he would not do. The men began refusing food in the last week of October. Their common start date gave the action a striking collective force, but it also created a tactical problem that would determine how it ended.

The strike and its turning point

As the weeks passed, Hughes weakened in his cell. His cheeks sank, and his long hair and ragged black beard made him appear markedly altered. The prison doctor, David Ross, treated him with kindness. Each morning Ross brought a flask of fresh spring water, saying it was better than the prison’s tap water, and sat with Hughes to talk about fishing, mountains, rivers, and streams. This daily encounter continued inside a protest defined by the prisoners’ refusal of food and their confrontation with the prison authorities.

Because all seven men had begun fasting together, one of them was bound to approach death before the others. The remaining strikers would then have to choose between ending the action to save him or continuing and allowing him to die. McKenna, a twenty-six-year-old from Newry, became that first endangered striker. Hughes had not wanted him on the team, but McKenna insisted on participating. As his health deteriorated, he was confined to a wheelchair in the hospital wing and grew increasingly frightened. He asked Hughes not to let him die, and Hughes promised that he would not.

Just before Christmas, McKenna began drifting in and out of a coma. Hughes saw orderlies rush him through the hospital wing on a stretcher, with two priests and Dr Ross nearby. The decision confronting Hughes was immediate: if he intervened, the strike would end and the prisoners would lose the leverage they had built; if he did not, McKenna might die and Hughes would break his promise. The ward’s physical reality sharpened the choice. Hughes could smell the bodies of the patients and was conscious of his own body consuming itself. He finally ordered the staff to feed McKenna. With that intervention, the strike was over.

A doctor instructed the orderlies to prepare scrambled eggs. Hughes began eating again after a fifty-three-day fast and slowly regained his strength and weight. The modest meal marked a decisive reversal: a protest sustained through weeks of refusal ended not with a settlement described in the account, but with food being prepared for the men who had refused it.

Aftermath and the next strike

Hughes felt deeply ashamed that the strike had ended in this way. The prisoners moved almost immediately toward a second hunger strike, but changed its design. Rather than having every participant begin together, they would stagger the starts, with one striker beginning and others following about a week apart. This would prevent the decision to continue from becoming a single collective choice when the first man neared death. Each striker would instead face the question of whether to go on alone.

Because Hughes was still recovering, the prisoners chose a new leader for the next action: Bobby Sands, the young volunteer who had coordinated the arts programme. He would begin first and, under the staggered arrangement, was expected to be the first to die. The change in structure registered what the first strike had revealed. Solidarity could make a protest powerful, but a simultaneous fast also bound every participant’s fate to the first body to fail.

Recollection and lasting injury

The first strike remained present for Hughes in the years that followed. He repeatedly considered whether allowing McKenna to die might have prevented the second strike and saved ten men. These questions did not produce an answer; they made the ending recur as an unsettled counterfactual. When Hughes encountered McKenna in Dundalk long after the strike, McKenna had brain damage and permanent damage to his eyesight. He blamed Hughes for having saved him rather than letting him die, turning the promise that had guided Hughes’s intervention into a source of lasting anguish.

Hughes also carried physical effects of the fast, and his eyesight later began to deteriorate. He sometimes thought about killing himself. In his later interviews, he recalled the hospital’s smell as a death smell that returned to him, and said that for years he had been unable to speak about it. The strike therefore ended in two different senses: the organized action stopped when Hughes called for food, but its bodily and psychological consequences continued. Its unresolved moral pressure lies in the choice at its center: Hughes preserved a life by ending the protest, while the consequences of that decision became part of the suffering he could not put behind him.