Forty years ago, on April 9th, 1981, Bobby Sands was elected MP for Fermanagh/South Tyrone with 30,493 votes. His election turned out to be the watershed of the Troubles.
There were major events both before and after that election but they didn’t alter the trajectory of the Troubles: Sands’s election did.
He had gone on hunger strike on March 1st that year, exactly five years after the British government’s policy of criminalisation took effect. Until 1976 prisoners convicted of so-called “scheduled offences” were categorised “special category”, were housed in compounds and enjoyed a range of privileges including managing their own compounds. In effect they were recognised as political prisoners.
The British government had decided to renege on those arrangements, agreed after an IRA hunger strike in 1972, when a new prison – the infamous H-Blocks of the Maze – became operational from March 1976. Henceforth all prisoners would be treated the same, wearing prison uniform and doing prison work.
The IRA refused, and for five years fought tooth and nail both inside and outside the prison for political status. They refused to wear prison clothes or to work. They wore only a prison blanket and were confined to their cells, leaving only to slop out. They had no visits or letters.
After repeated assaults by warders while slopping out the prisoners refused to leave their cells and began smearing excrement on the walls in what became the “dirty protest”.
Four years of this struggle gained no traction outside of the republican movement and prisoners’ distraught families. They decided to opt for a tactic that had been used in the War of Independence: the hunger strike. Their first attempt to pressure the British into conceding political status collapsed in recriminations in December 1980 when the hunger strike was abandoned.
Bobby Sands, “officer commanding” of IRA prisoners in the Maze in 1981, was convinced that to succeed someone had to die. Instead of a group going on hunger strike, prisoners would volunteer one at a time. After the death of one, it would be virtually impossible for any subsequent striker to give up. And so it proved.
Five days after Sands refused food, Frank Maguire, the then-MP for Fermanagh/South Tyrone, died. Unionists in Westminster moved a byelection for April 9th. After much internal argument and anxiety the republican leadership decided to nominate Sands as a candidate. By April 9th, if he survived, Sands would be 40 days into his hunger strike.
The big question for Gerry Adams and his inner circle was whether people would vote for a convicted IRA man. If they didn’t, Sinn Féin would be exposed as cheerleaders for what the British called a “small group of evil terrorists” with no public support.
Sinn Féin argued that, if elected, Sands would have to be recognised as a political figure and at best released. At worst, they said, he would remain in jail but be able to come off the hunger strike, having proved he had political support. The SDLP controversially stood aside at the last minute after tense, argumentative party executive meetings.
Reverberations
The election was a face-off between Sands and Harry West the unionist candidate. Sands's victory in an 87 per cent turnout sent reverberations through Irish politics. In the Republic's June general election two hunger strikers, Kieran Doherty and Paddy Agnew, were elected to the Dáil, denying Charles Haughey's Fianna Fáil a majority.
Unionists were shocked and dismayed at the 30,000-plus votes for Sands. It confirmed their suspicion that most Catholics supported the IRA and stiffened their resolve never to make any concessions or political accommodation. In the long term unionists never accepted Sinn Féin as a political party, but a front organisation for the IRA with guns under the table to enforce their demands.
For Sinn Féin however, the decision to nominate Sands turned out to be a masterstroke. The party had been arguing about fielding candidates in local elections, and now there was no need to test the water. There was support.
At the next ardfheis Danny Morrison famously enunciated what became known as “the Armalite and ballot box” strategy. Sinn Féin would subsequently throw itself into elections in the North, alongside the IRA campaign.
Nine other men followed Bobby Sands to their deaths. The British would not yield and polarisation in the North was extreme. Intense rioting followed every hunger striker’s death, and thousands of plastic bullets were fired.
The hunger strikes eventually petered out when relatives intervened after men fell into a coma.
When the British appointed a new secretary of state, Jim Prior, he gave a series of concessions to prisoners which amounted to the substance of political status without conceding the principle. At the funeral of unionist MP Rev Roy Bradford, shot by the IRA in November 1981, unionists jostled and kicked Prior, such was their fury at his concessions.
The legacy of bitterness continues. In 2013, pressure from within his own party, the Orange Order and IRA victims forced then-DUP leader Peter Robinson to veto a peace centre agreed with Sinn Féin at the derelict Maze prison site.
In Newry, a play park named after IRA hunger striker Raymond McCreesh in 2001 remains a bone of contention to this day, with unionists trying to have the name changed but republicans refusing. One side’s heroes are the other side’s villains.
For northern nationalists, Bobby Sands’s election transformed politics. Within two years all leading Sinn Féin figures had been elected. The SDLP went into a long, slow decline despite attempts by Irish governments to shore up the party with the New Ireland Forum and the Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1985.
Sinn Féin learned that northern nationalists liked republican politics but not republican violence. The more the violence reduced, the bigger their vote. It took 25 years, but by 2006 – with the IRA stood down – Sinn Féin was the political representative of the majority of northern nationalists.
Brian Feeney is a former SDLP councillor and co-author of Lost Lives: The Stories of the Men, Women and Children Who Died as a Result of the Northern Ireland Troubles
