‘Seeds of peace process were sown’ during hunger strikes

THE seeds of the peace process were sown in the H-Blocks in 1981, a Republican hunger striker has claimed at the launch in Cork of Sinn Féin’s national hunger strike commemoration.

Belfast-born Pat Sheehan was 20 in 1978 when he was convicted of causing an explosion and sentenced to 15 years in prison.

On August 10, 1981, he became the 17th Republican prisoner to join the hunger strikes at the Maze Prison, by which time nine prisoners had died.

Mr Sheehan fasted until October 3, when the hunger strike was called off, surviving for 55 days without food, longer than any other hunger striker, and close to death.

He suffered no long-term ill-health.

In 2010, he succeeded Gerry Adams as MLA for Belfast West, when Adams stood down to contest the 2011 Irish general election.

A senior member of Sinn Féin, Mr Sheehan spoke with The Echo outside Cork City Hall as the party launched its hunger-strike commemoration in front of the statues of Cork’s martyred lord mayors, Tomás Mac Curtain and Terence MacSwiney.

Drawing a line from the hunger strikers of 1981 to Thomas Ashe and Terence MacSwiney, Mr Sheehan said the roots of the peace process dated back four decades to the Maze.

“It was from people like that that we drew our inspiration, and they inspired people like Bobby Sands, not to give in, not to bend the knee to British oppression in Ireland, to actually give their lives,” he said.

“I do believe that the seeds of the peace process were sown in 1981. If you recall at that time, Sinn Féin, indeed Republicans, didn’t contest elections in the North, but when the sitting MP in Fermanagh and South Tyrone [Frank Maguire] died suddenly, after a debate within our own movement it was agreed to stand Bobby Sands as a candidate.

“Maggie Thatcher at the time said ‘Prisoners have no support, and the IRA has no support,’ yet over 30,000 people in Fermanagh and south Tyrone came out and elected Bobby as a member of the Westminster parliament, and in the process blew Thatcher’s assertion completely out of the water,” Mr Sheehan said.

“What that did was it convinced other Republicans who had been sceptical about engaging in the electoral process that if you were successful, it could help the struggle.”

Sinn Féin’s national hunger strike commemoration was planned for 2020, to coincide with the centenary of MacSwiney’s death on hunger strike in Brixton Prison, but the Covid-19 pandemic intervened.

One of the commemoration’s key events will be a march on Sunday, August 27, at Cork’s Kennedy Quay and departing at 2.30pm across the city to the National Monument on the Grand Parade.

The commemoration will celebrate the legacy of Irish hunger strikers, from Thomas Ashe, who died in 1917, through to Micheal Devine, who was the last of the 1981 hunger strikers to die.

Donnchadh Ó Laoghaire, Sinn Féin TD for Cork South Central, said the commemoration would also remember five Cork men who died on hunger strike: MacSwiney and Joe Murphy, who died on the same day in 1920, Donnchadh de Barra and Michael Fitzgerald, and Andy O’Sullivan, who died in 1923 during the Civil War.

The keynote speaker at the Cork commemoration on August 27 will be Fermoy-born Sinn Féin vice president Michelle O’Neill.