A Letter from Ireland
a Chara,
Forty-five years sounds and seems like a lifetime ago. I suppose it was. In 1981, in West Belfast, I turned thirteen and was in my second year in secondary school (high school). A defining time in all our lives. I once read that the music you discover at that age stays with you.
If that is true, then the 1981 Hunger Strike and its aftermath were the soundtrack to my teenage years.
This week marks the forty-fifth anniversary of the death on Hunger Strike of Bobby Sands. I had attended the protests and the funerals. A black flag was hung outside our house, and posters in support of the prisoners were in our windows. This would be no surprise as Grandfather, Father and uncles had all been jailed for their Irish Republican beliefs. One uncle was still in jail and on the blanket protest. It was all very real, and urgent.
I remember in later years asking my mother, herself a committed Irish Republican, how she managed with a husband who was an activist and two teenage sons. She confessed, “not very well.”
That is why I am not nostalgic for those days. As you grow up and have a family, you reflect on the sacrifice of the Hunger Strikers who left behind wives and children, the weight carried by grieving mothers and fathers, and the lives they could have lived.
But I do carry with great pride and awe those who faced down Margaret Thatcher and the British Government. Bobby Sands, brutalised, naked but for a blanket, denied sun and exercise for years, and yet would write that, “Our revenge will be the laughter of our children.”
I am thankful for the opportunity to get to know and to work with those who led the prison protests—those who recognised that the opportunity to move from resistance to securing a united Ireland.
So here we are, all of these years, a generation on from conflict, and desire for freedom and unity remains. A new generation is now driving our struggle.
Thatcher is gone, her Tory party and her union lies in tatters. Unionism no longer enjoys a political majority in North of Ireland. Sinn Féin is now the largest political party across Ireland.
The North of Ireland has irreversibly changed.
In 1981, the Irish Government refused to support the Hunger Strikers and even allowed Kieran Doherty, who was elected as a member of their parliament, to die.
Today, again, an Irish government led by Micheal Martin refuses to take the opportunity to do the right thing and promote the cause of Irish Unity.
I remember with pride those days and I am thankful that we now have a peaceful and democratic pathway to Irish Unity. I greive that loss but understand that were we are today is a product of all that went before us. We have further to travel and work to do to grasp the opportunity to build a new and united Ireland, that echoes with the laughter of all our children.
Have a great weekend,
