Margaret Thatcher's refusal to recognise Bobby Sands's political status during his hunger strike

Margaret Thatcher's refusal to recognise Bobby Sands's political status during his hunger strike was not a personal relationship in the sense of a sustained exchange between the two; the evidence presents it as a public and governmental confrontation over how his protest would be understood. Sands’s election to Parliament gave that confrontation a new dimension, but Thatcher did not treat the result as a reason to change course. After he died on the sixty-sixth day of his strike, she called him a convicted criminal who had chosen to take his own life. Her position set the language of criminality against the political force his election and death had brought to the hunger strike.

The strike and Thatcher's position

Bobby Sands began refusing food on 1 March 1981. His last morsel was a prison ration orange, which tasted bitter. As the strike began, he wrote on a scrap of toilet paper, ‘I am standing on the threshold of another trembling world. May God have mercy on my soul.’ Two weeks later another prisoner began a hunger strike, and a third followed a week after that. Eventually ten men were on hunger strike at Long Kesh. Their staggered starts would become central to the political calculations surrounding the protest: the prospect was not only Sands’s death, but a succession of deaths over the following weeks.

Thatcher’s public language framed the strikers as men of violence who had chosen a final tactic in the face of failure. She said, ‘Faced with the failure of their discredited cause, the men of violence have chosen in recent months to play what might be their last card.’ The phrasing denied the strike the standing of a political negotiation: it presented the prisoners’ action as a tactic of a discredited movement, rather than a claim that required recognition. This was the conflict at the heart of the relation. Sands’s deteriorating body became the means by which he made a political demand visible; Thatcher’s refusal to concede political meaning made continued resistance part of the government’s response.

Election and pressure on the government

Four days after Sands began his strike, nationalist MP Frank Maguire died, creating a by-election in Fermanagh and South Tyrone. Some republicans persuaded Maguire’s brother not to run, and Sands became the candidate while still imprisoned and refusing food. His candidacy connected the hunger strike to electoral politics: it was intended to attract attention and support, but a victory would also make the government’s treatment of the protest harder to separate from the status of an elected representative.

On 10 April 1981, after forty-one days without food, Sands was elected to the British Parliament. His demands remained unmet. The election therefore produced a sharp contrast between political recognition by voters and the government’s refusal to alter its position. Sands’s new office did not end the strike or restore his health; it made the stakes of his continued confinement more visible. The book presents the result as an extraordinary opportunity for the republican movement, while showing that it did not by itself compel Thatcher to yield.

The approaching possibility of death was discussed at the highest level of government. On 25 April, Thatcher spoke with Northern Ireland secretary Humphrey Atkins. Atkins told her that Sands was clearly determined. Thatcher replied, ‘He’s only got a few days.’ Atkins said officials estimated two or three days, while admitting that they did not know. Thatcher responded that it was not a position with which anyone had much experience. The exchange registers the limits of the government’s ability to predict the outcome, but not a change in policy: the uncertainty of Sands’s condition did not become a reason to meet his demands.

Atkins also stressed that the strike was staggered. Even if Sands died and the government endured the backlash and bad publicity, another striker might die a few weeks later. He hoped the sequence could be prevented and thought there must be a weak link. Thatcher speculated that the IRA leadership might stop the strike if one prisoner died, then a second and a third, without concessions. Atkins agreed that such a prospect did not look attractive, and Thatcher concurred. Their exchange shows the confrontation being considered partly as a test of endurance: the government weighed the political costs of successive deaths against the possibility that the prisoners’ organization would eventually end the protest.

Death and the public meaning of the confrontation

Sands died on 5 May 1981, the sixty-sixth day of his hunger strike. The news made headlines around the world. One hundred thousand people watched his coffin being carried through Belfast to the cemetery, and support for the republican cause surged on both sides of the border in Ireland. Gerry Adams later recalled Sands’s death as having a greater international impact than any other event in Ireland in his lifetime. The outcome sharply contradicted the government’s hope that the strikers would break or that their organization would stop the protest before a succession of deaths took place. After Sands died, the other nine hunger strikers followed, starving to death one by one throughout the summer.

Thatcher showed no remorse over the firm line taken by her government. After Sands’s death she declared, ‘Mr Sands was a convicted criminal. He chose to take his own life. It was a choice his organisation did not allow to many of its victims.’ The statement returned to the distinction that had structured her position throughout the crisis: Sands was named as a criminal, and his death as his own choice, while the political claim carried by his election and the hunger strike remained unacknowledged. In public consequence, however, the refusal did not contain the event. Sands’s death enlarged the strike’s international reach and brought a surge of support to the cause he represented. The relation ended not in a change of government policy, but in a contest over interpretation whose consequences extended far beyond Sands himself.