Irish republican martyrdom

Irish republican martyrdom is a political tradition that turns bodily suffering into a public argument about power, responsibility, and allegiance. In the book, hunger strikes make that argument especially stark: a prisoner refuses food, while the state that holds the prisoner must decide whether to concede, allow death, or intervene. The resulting sacrifice can galvanize public support and reshape political memory, but its consequences are not simple victories. The survivors may be left to reckon with the deaths that follow and with the possibility that their own resistance helped make them possible.

Origins in Sacrifice and Public Witness

The book traces this tradition to Terence MacSwiney, an Irish republican poet and politician imprisoned in Brixton Prison on sedition charges. In 1920, he refused food for seventy-four days, demanding release; the British government did not release him, and he died. His death provoked international outrage. Before his burial in an Irish Republican Army uniform, tens of thousands filed past his coffin, while thousands more rallied in cities around the world. The hunger strike was thus not only an individual act of refusal: the prisoner's body, death, and funeral became a public scene in which the state’s conduct could be judged.

MacSwiney articulated a doctrine of political endurance in which victory belonged not necessarily to the side inflicting the most harm, but to those willing to suffer most. His death also exposes the fraught question of agency. In one strict sense, he chose not to eat; yet he had made clear that he would eat again only if his captors met his demands. Responsibility for his survival or death therefore appeared to shift onto the authorities. The inscription on his coffin, which accused the foreigner of murdering him in Brixton Prison, gave that interpretation a blunt, commemorative form. The tradition joined personal choice to an accusation against power, making the prisoner's death a witness against the state.

The Price Sisters and the Body as a Weapon

When Dolours Price and Marian Price began their hunger strike in British prisons, MacSwiney's example offered both precedent and political language. Dolours believed prison was where an Irish Republican Army volunteer's allegiance to the cause was truly tested. She presented the sisters’ possible deaths as continuous with the deaths of volunteers on the streets of Belfast, and took pride in the prospect that they might be the first women to die in this way. She also understood their action as a reversal: if hunger had been used against Ireland during the Irish Great Famine, hunger could now be turned against the British. In her formulation, the body itself was the ultimate weapon.

The prison routine made the refusal tangible. Officers initially left food on trays to tempt the sisters, then stopped bringing it; a Polish nurse continued to bring a jug of orange juice each morning. Dolours insisted on water alone. Outside prison, a holiday advertisement listing a lavish meal announced that Dolours was dying, setting festive abundance against the sisters’ starvation. The contrast recalled histories in which food existed while people went hungry, and made the strike legible as a political challenge rather than a private medical crisis.

The British government feared that a death could provoke widespread retaliatory violence, but resisted granting the sisters’ demand for repatriation. Instead, officials force-fed them. On 3 December, after about two and a half weeks of striking, medical staff restrained Dolours in a chair bolted to the floor, tied her with bedsheets, forced open her mouth, and passed a rubber tube through a wooden device into her throat. The procedure exposed the contradiction at the heart of the contest: the state sought to prevent death without yielding to the prisoners’ demand, while the physical intervention itself could be seen as coercive violence. Medical records noted that the sisters sometimes fainted; when they resisted, they were gagged and a radio was turned up to cover their screams. The practice became a public-relations crisis as people in Britain regarded force-feeding as torture.

The sisters’ resolve and physical decline gave them an iconic stature, while complicating the government’s position. Roy Jenkins considered repatriation not wholly unreasonable, but feared that conceding under pressure would validate the tactic and encourage others to use it. He later recalled the possibility of the deaths of these charismatic young women as carrying incalculable consequences. Their parents, Albert and Chrissie Price, did not urge them to abandon the strike; Albert instead defended the possibility that even a short life could contribute something to the world. In this setting, martyrdom was not only an image imposed after death. It was a possibility openly contemplated by the prisoners, their family, and the government, each assigning it a different political meaning.

Survival, Consequence, and the 1981 Strike

Dolours Price did not die in prison. In 1974, the force-feeding of the Price sisters ended after the World Medical Association declared the practice unethical. The policy changed in the United Kingdom: Roy Jenkins announced that hunger strikers in British prisons would no longer be force-fed. That change was a consequence of the sisters’ struggle, but the book also draws a grim line from it to the later deaths of ten hunger strikers. Once the prohibition on force-feeding was in place, the state could no longer keep a striker alive by the method used against the Prices.

In 1981, Dolours was in a secure hospital ward in Belfast, weakened by hunger and weighing seventy-six pounds, when she expected Bobby Sands might arrive. She hoped to offer him a final salute. He never came: Sands died on the sixty-sixth day of his strike on 5 May. His death made international headlines and drew one hundred thousand people into Belfast to accompany his coffin to the cemetery. Support for the republican cause surged on both sides of the border. Margaret Thatcher maintained that Sands was a convicted criminal who had chosen to take his own life, while the public scale of the funeral and the political response demonstrated how contested that description was.

Price had been released on medical grounds two weeks before Sands died, with the remaining years of her sentence remitted because she was considered in imminent danger of collapse and death. The juxtaposition haunted her: he died as she was set free. The book presents an asymmetry between their outcomes, not a simple division between failure and success. Sands died and, in the account given, achieved through martyrdom more than he might have achieved in life; Price survived, but later wept over the timing of her release and wondered whether the policy change produced by her own strike had helped make the ten deaths of 1981 possible. The tradition could therefore confer political force while leaving the survivor with an unresolved sense of responsibility.

Memory, Silence, and the Afterlife of Martyrdom

The book places individual hunger strikes within a wider struggle over who may tell the history of the conflict. Its epigraph observes that wars are fought first on the battlefield and then in memory. After the Good Friday Agreement, Northern Ireland had no formal process for deciding how to commemorate or understand the conflict. Gerry Adams continued to deny having been in the Irish Republican Army, while Martin McGuinness later acknowledged his membership in the context of an inquiry into Bloody Sunday, where he received immunity from prosecution. Seamus Heaney's poem title, Whatever You Say, Say Nothing, captures the continuing pressure of silence and guarded speech. In this setting, the meaning of martyrdom is not settled by the funeral: it remains vulnerable to denial, selective remembrance, and political reinterpretation.

The contest also concerns control over republican memory itself. During the Belfast Project interviews, former combatants who spoke to outsiders risked being branded informers, while Sinn Féin's leadership discredited critics as dissidents or opponents of the peace process. The account describes the party as preserving a monopoly over the memory of republican armed struggle. Martyrdom belongs to this contested history because its public meaning depends on what can be said about the sacrifice, who is entitled to interpret it, and what later political settlements are made to signify.

Nor does the end of large-scale violence make those meanings merely historical. Central Belfast could appear cosmopolitan, and former combatants offered visitors tours of Troubles-era flashpoints, translating murals of battles, martyrs, and gunmen into a tourist itinerary. Yet more than ninety per cent of children still attended segregated primary schools, and the city’s peace walls remained marked by sectarian slurs. A report argued that the continued cohesion of republican and loyalist paramilitary groups had helped manage the transition from extreme violence to political progress by allowing their hierarchies to restrain members. To critics such as Brendan Hughes, Dolours Price, Marian Price, and Anthony McIntyre, the same discipline could appear cruel and intolerant; in the report's analysis, it could also help prevent renewed conflict. Irish republican martyrdom thus persists not as a single settled lesson, but as a struggle over sacrifice, political authority, and the memory through which violence is carried into the peace.