The hunger strike tradition

The hunger strike tradition made bodily endurance a form of political protest: prisoners could refuse food when they had little control over their confinement, forcing authorities and the public to confront the conditions under which they were held. In the book, that tradition connects the Price sisters’ campaign in British prisons with the 1981 strike at Long Kesh, where Bobby Sands’s election transformed a prison protest into a national political crisis. Its history is therefore not simply one of sacrifice or victory. It also concerns the political meaning assigned to suffering, and the struggle to make that meaning endure in public memory.

Political protest through the body

The hunger strike’s power rested on a stark reversal: imprisonment was meant to render prisoners powerless, but a prisoner’s refusal to eat could make the body itself a site of pressure. The tactic was legible beyond the prison walls. It asked the public to see the prisoner not only as someone subject to confinement, but as someone making a political claim through the consequences of that confinement. The book situates this claim within a wider conflict over whether republican prisoners should be treated as political actors or as ordinary criminals.

That distinction had strategic consequences. If the protest were understood as a criminal’s refusal to accept prison rules, the government could treat it as a matter of discipline. If it were understood as political resistance, the protest could challenge the government’s account of the conflict and attract support beyond the prison. The hunger strike thus depended not only on the striker’s resolve but on whether other people—officials, voters, and the public—would recognize the claim being made. The body could dramatize that claim; it could not compel agreement about its meaning.

The Price sisters in British prisons

Dolours Price and Marian Price carried the tradition into their own imprisonment after the London bombings. Both were held in Brixton Prison, where their hunger strike and the authorities’ force-feeding made the struggle over political status intensely physical. Dolours also appealed for the return of a stolen Vermeer, part of a campaign involving art thefts and kidnapping undertaken in the sisters’ cause. Their protest was not confined to a single demand or a single audience: it joined the conditions of their imprisonment to a wider effort to force a response from the British authorities.

The strike ended, and the sisters were returned to Northern Ireland. Dolours was subsequently held in Armagh jail, where she drew back from the republican movement; Marian also withdrew from it. Their protest therefore marks both the power and the limits of the tactic. It kept their treatment and demands in view, but it did not settle their relationship to the movement or make political commitment permanent. Dolours later embraced nonviolence and resigned from the IRA, while Marian’s health continued to decline. The bodily cost of protest remained part of the sisters’ story after the strike itself had ended.

Long Kesh and the 1981 strike

At Long Kesh, the hunger strike tradition formed part of a longer prison confrontation that included the blanket protest and the dirty protest. The book presents these actions as connected forms of resistance to the prisoners’ treatment, while giving the 1981 hunger strike a distinct public and electoral dimension. On 1 March 1981, Bobby Sands began refusing food. His last morsel was a prison-ration orange; as the strike began, he wrote on a scrap of toilet paper about standing on the threshold of another world. The detail makes the opening of the protest both ordinary and irreversible: a ration refused, a few words set down, and a decision whose consequences could not be confined to the cell.

The strike gathered participants in stages. A second prisoner began two weeks after Sands, a third followed a week later, and eventually ten men were on hunger strike at Long Kesh. The sequence turned an individual act into a collective confrontation, even as each prisoner’s body bore the consequences separately. The government had already resisted the demands of an earlier strike, and there was little reason to expect a more sympathetic response. This continuity gave the 1981 protest its urgency, but also placed its participants within a tradition in which the state’s refusal and the prisoners’ persistence were already familiar elements.

Election, death, and the afterlife of protest

Four days after Sands began his strike, Frank Maguire died. His death created a by-election in Fermanagh and South Tyrone, and republicans proposed that Sands run from prison. The proposal joined the prison protest to an electoral campaign: a victory could give a hunger striker the standing of an elected representative and make it harder for the government to dismiss him as merely a prisoner. This was a marked shift for a movement long suspicious of parliamentary participation, where abstentionism had treated electoral politics as a risk to revolutionary commitment.

Sands was elected, but died on 5 May 1981 before he could take his seat. The result did not resolve the strike or secure the outcome its supporters sought. Instead, his election demonstrated how a prison protest could unsettle the boundary between armed struggle and political participation. It also offered a precedent that helped inform Gerry Adams’s later electoral strategy. The contrast is central to the tradition’s significance in the book: a death could become politically consequential without making the striker’s intended demands a settled achievement.

The tradition’s later meaning remains contested. The book’s epigraph observes that wars are fought again in memory, and the hunger strike is one of the episodes through which the conflict’s competing accounts persist. For republicans, the strikers’ endurance could become a language of sacrifice and political legitimacy; for critics of the movement, the same history could raise questions about the costs of its strategy and the authority claimed in its name. Later political discipline helped contain dissent and sustain the peace process, but it also shaped which accounts of the armed struggle were allowed to dominate. The hunger strike tradition consequently belongs both to the history of prison resistance and to the continuing argument over who may interpret that resistance, and what its sacrifices are taken to mean.