Ricky O'Rawe

Ricky O’Rawe was a former IRA prisoner, a leading spokesman during the 1981 hunger strike, and one of the Belfast Project’s interviewees. His account of a secret British offer—and of the message he said came back from Gerry Adams rejecting it—challenged the established explanation for why the strike continued. O’Rawe’s story moved from confidential oral testimony into public controversy, while his eventual destruction of his own recordings gave the conflict over memory a private, irreversible ending.

Prisoner, spokesman, and interviewer’s subject

O’Rawe came from a family already connected to republican politics: his father had been an IRA member in the 1940s. O’Rawe joined the Provisional IRA as a teenager, grew up singing rebel songs, and was interned on the Maidstone alongside Gerry Adams. He later shared a prison cell with Brendan Hughes and became a close friend of Bobby Sands. His experience of the movement included internal punishment as well as political commitment: after carrying out a freelance robbery to raise money for drink, he was shot in the legs by his IRA superiors. He later considered the penalty justified.

During the 1981 hunger strike, O’Rawe served as the prisoners’ lead spokesman. That position placed him inside negotiations, but it did not give him access to the IRA Army Council’s deliberations. The distinction matters to his later account: he described what he said he and another negotiator had received and communicated, then developed an interpretation of the leadership’s motives over years of private reflection. He was not a participant in the leadership discussions he came to question.

When Anthony McIntyre approached him about the Belfast Project, O’Rawe initially hesitated. He had been carrying a painful secret for two decades and feared that speaking might bring it out. The project’s method offered a way to speak under an agreement that testimony would remain sealed until after participants’ deaths. McIntyre, himself a former IRA prisoner, interviewed O’Rawe at his house over a series of evening visits. The first conversations kept to less contentious ground, including O’Rawe’s family, his early republican life, internment, and punishment. The interviews began before the events he had sworn not to discuss came fully into view.

The account of the hunger strike

O’Rawe repeatedly told McIntyre that he would not discuss the hunger strike, and for the first eight interviews he held to that boundary. At their final interview, however, he told the story he had intended to keep private. In the summer of 1981, after Bobby Sands and three other hunger strikers had died, O’Rawe was involved in negotiations from inside the prison. According to his account, the prisoners received a secret offer from Margaret Thatcher’s government that would have granted most of their demands. It was not a complete capitulation, but it included the right to wear their own clothes, one of the prisoners’ principal requirements, along with other concessions.

O’Rawe said that he and another negotiator sent word to the Provisional IRA leadership outside the prison that they were inclined to accept the offer and end the strike. The reply, which he attributed specifically to Adams, was that the offer was insufficient and the prisoners should continue. Six more men died before the strike ended. The public account had placed responsibility for persevering on the prisoners themselves. O’Rawe had not previously challenged that version, in part because he deferred to what he regarded as carefully maintained republican myths. Privately, he felt guilty that he had not argued more forcefully for accepting the offer.

His interpretation was more consequential than the allegation about a single message. Over time, O’Rawe came to suspect that Adams had recognised the political opportunity created by the strike and prolonged it to build support for Sinn Féin. Bobby Sands’s election campaign had drawn popular backing for republicanism through electoral politics; after Sands died on 5 May 1981, as many as 100,000 people took to the streets. O’Rawe was not privy to the Army Council’s decision, and presented his conclusion as a theory formed afterward, rather than direct knowledge of its deliberations. In his reading, the strike marked a turning point toward electoral politics, with a terrible human cost.

Publication and dispute

O’Rawe wanted his account to reach the public rather than remain available only to future researchers. Ed Moloney, who directed the Belfast Project, warned him that publishing an allegation that Adams had knowingly sacrificed six hunger strikers to advance Sinn Féin’s electoral prospects could expose him to severe retaliation. O’Rawe nevertheless published Blanketmen in 2005. The book portrayed Adams as both a strategic visionary and an operator whose conduct could be slippery; its account did not simply dismiss the political consequences of his leadership.

The publication provoked a sharp dispute. Adams did not answer O’Rawe directly, while allies and proxies attacked the book. Bik McFarlane, who had worked closely with O’Rawe during the hunger strike, initially called it fictitious and denied that the British had made an offer. Several years later, McFarlane acknowledged that a secret offer had existed, while maintaining that the hunger strikers themselves had rejected it and chosen to continue. The disagreement therefore concerned not only whether an offer existed, but who rejected it and where responsibility for the continuation of the strike lay.

The attacks did not silence O’Rawe. He publicly debated people who questioned his account and planned a second book about the strike and its aftermath. His willingness to contest republican orthodoxy also won him support: Dolours Price praised Blanketmen for making a missing piece of the history accessible. The episode showed how a disputed personal recollection could become a public challenge to an organised political narrative, without thereby resolving every question about what happened.

The archive and what remained

O’Rawe’s testimony had first been recorded under the Belfast Project’s promise of confidentiality. In later years, Boston College began offering participants the return of their interviews, after the university had been burned by its handling of the archive and sought to relinquish responsibility for the recordings. O’Rawe accepted a box containing his recordings and transcripts of conversations with McIntyre from more than a decade earlier. What had been collected for eventual historical study had become vulnerable to legal demands and political use; the project’s promise that the interviews would remain sealed had not secured them from court orders.

O’Rawe took the returned CDs and transcripts to the study in his house. He lit a fire, opened a bottle of Bordeaux, and watched photographs of old friends and comrades—many by then dead—catch the firelight. Among them were a copy of Patrick Pearse’s 1916 Proclamation and a photograph of Brendan Hughes. O’Rawe put his testimony into the flames and watched it burn. The act did not erase the account he had already made public, but it ended the physical life of his own recorded testimony.

That ending gathers the tensions of O’Rawe’s story into one scene: the wish to tell a suppressed account, the danger and consequence of making it public, and the fragility of the records meant to preserve it. The Belfast Project had imagined testimony waiting like wine in a cellar until time made it safe to study. O’Rawe’s recordings instead passed through institutional custody, returned to their speaker, and were deliberately destroyed. His public challenge survived in print; the private record did not.