Irish republican hunger strike

Irish republican hunger strike is a form of political protest in which prisoners refuse food to press demands, making bodily suffering and the risk of death central to a contest with their captors. In the episodes traced here, the tactic draws force from a long Irish history of fasting and republican martyrdom, but it also exposes a hard strategic dilemma: a striker may gain attention and political leverage while losing the life on which that leverage depends.

Historical Roots and Political Meaning

Fasting as a means of dissent was described as an Irish practice reaching back to the Middle Ages. In a play about a seventh-century poet who starves at a royal palace gate, W. B. Yeats presented the practice as a way of making a wrong public: the injured person’s hunger was expected to summon a lasting outcry from ordinary people. The political force of the act lay not only in deprivation, but in turning the threshold of authority into a witness to the grievance.

That tradition acquired a defining modern republican example in 1920. Terence MacSwiney, an Irish republican poet and politician imprisoned in Brixton Prison on sedition charges, refused food for seventy-four days in a demand for release. The British government did not release him; he died. His coffin, dressed in IRA uniform, drew tens of thousands of people past it before burial, while thousands more protested in cities around the world. His death caused an international outcry and helped give shape to a republican ideal of self-sacrifice in which suffering could prevail where force could not. The account’s moral difficulty is inseparable from that ideal: MacSwiney chose to refuse food, yet by making his survival conditional on his captors meeting his demands, he appeared to place responsibility for the outcome on them.

The analogy with the Great Famine in Ireland, 1845–1849, sharpened the political charge. The famine was remembered as a catastrophe in which people starved while food was exported from Irish harbours to England, and in which British responsibility was understood by many as more than neglect. Against that history, a republican hunger strike could turn hunger from an instrument associated with British rule into a means of resistance directed back at the British state. The body became, in Dolours Price’s formulation, a weapon available even to a movement that was outnumbered and outgunned.

The Price Sisters at Brixton

Dolours Price and Marian Price began refusing food before entering Brixton Prison after their convictions. They accepted water alone and intended to continue until death if necessary. Hugh Feeney and Gerry Kelly, held in other prisons, joined them. Their demand was repatriation so that they could serve their sentences as political prisoners in jails in Northern Ireland. Prison numbers replaced their names as institutional identities: Dolours was Prisoner No. 286185. The prospect of a long sentence did not mean the sisters accepted the prison’s terms for what that sentence meant.

The sisters understood the strike as a contest of wills, not simply a test of endurance. Prison officers first left food trays in their cells to tempt them and later stopped bringing food; a Polish nurse continued to offer orange juice each morning, which Dolours refused. As the sisters lost weight, Dolours joked in a family letter about losing her chubby cheeks and her puppy fat, while also recognizing that the contest would turn on which side yielded first. Their youth and gender became part of the public story. Newspapers and radio followed their deteriorating condition in daily updates, calling them the bomb girls; Feeney and Kelly received far less attention and were not given a corresponding label.

The prospect of two young Irishwomen dying in the prison where MacSwiney had died gave the protest particular symbolic force. The sisters’ letters presented their possible deaths as a continuation of republican sacrifice and as a rebuke to an empire that, in their view, had failed to learn from the past. But the government faced a competing calculation: officials feared that a striker’s death could bring major retaliatory violence, yet did not accept the demand for political status. On 3 December, after the strike had lasted two and a half weeks, medical staff restrained Dolours in a chair bolted to the floor and force-fed her through a tube. The physical intervention made plain that the confrontation was not only over whether the prisoners would eat, but over who would control their bodies and the terms on which they might live.

The 1980 Strike and Its Strategic Reversal

In autumn 1980, Brendan Hughes announced a new strike and asked for volunteers. More than a hundred prisoners came forward; seven were selected, with Hughes among them. The men began refusing food in the last week of October. Hughes took part because he believed a leader should not ask a subordinate to do what he would not do himself. As his strength ebbed, the prison doctor, David Ross, brought him fresh spring water and talked with him about fishing, mountains and rivers.

Starting all seven men together created a tactical problem. One would reach the brink of death first, forcing the others to choose between ending the protest to save him and continuing at the risk of his death. One of the younger strikers, twenty-six-year-old Seán McKenna, had insisted on joining despite Hughes’s reluctance. As McKenna grew gravely ill, he pleaded with Hughes not to let him die, and Hughes promised that he would not. Just before Christmas, McKenna began slipping in and out of a coma. Hughes saw him rushed through the hospital wing, where priests and Ross were present. Faced with his promise and the prospect of the young prisoner’s death, Hughes called for McKenna to be fed. The order ended the strike.

After fifty-three days without food, Hughes began eating scrambled eggs and slowly recovered his weight. He felt ashamed that the strike had been mishandled. The prisoners’ response was to change the method: rather than have all the strikers begin together, they would stagger their starts, leaving each person to decide individually whether to continue toward death. As Hughes recovered, Bobby Sands was selected to lead the next strike and to be the first to refuse food. The failed collective timing thus helped produce a different strategy, one that made each striker’s decision, rather than a single shared crisis, the immediate test.

Sands, Martyrdom, and the Cost of Victory

On 1 March 1981, Sands began his strike. His last morsel was a prison-ration orange. The protest widened in stages: another man joined after two weeks, a third a week later, and eventually ten men were refusing food at Long Kesh. Margaret Thatcher’s government maintained that the prisoners would not receive political status. As in the Price sisters’ confrontation with the British government, the dispute set the prisoners’ claim to political recognition against the state’s refusal to concede it.

Sands died on the sixty-sixth day of his strike, on 5 May. His death made headlines around the world and was followed by a crowd of one hundred thousand in Belfast watching his coffin being carried to the cemetery. Support for the republican cause rose sharply on both sides of the border in Ireland. Thatcher continued to describe Sands as a convicted criminal who had chosen to take his own life, a position that rejected the strikers’ framing of their deaths as the consequence of political demands denied by their captors. Nine other strikers died one by one during that summer.

Dolours Price had been released on medical grounds two weeks before Sands died; officials said she was in imminent danger of sudden collapse and death. The juxtaposition of her release and his death haunted her for years. The Price sisters had twice made the damage inflicted on their own bodies a source of leverage, while Sands’s death brought a different kind of political gain through martyrdom and international attention. The episodes resist a simple measure of success: a strike could force public attention or contribute to a changed political balance, but the consequences included permanent bodily harm, death, and the burden carried by those who survived. Its power depended on the state being held responsible for refusing the demand, even as the immediate physical cost was borne by the striker.