A
British official once said of the 1981 hunger strike
that it had gripped Northern nationalists by the
umbilical cord. For him the event had pulled them
right back into some vortex of primordial irrationality
where myth reigned and reason was at best an obstructive
nuisance. He was right in so far as he fingered
a psychological impulse so potent that the human
body becomes the site of an emotional volcano that
erupts and physically rampages its way through the
veins, up and down, back and forth, guided by neither
rhyme nor reason, crisscrossing in search of an
outlet.
Twenty
five years on and the capacity of that hunger strike
to rouse palpable anger and unadulterated animosity
is as tangible today as it was then. The past week
in particular has been as poignant as it was focussed.
As much as I try to reason about the events that
we were part of, film footage showing IRA and
INLA funerals from a quarter of a century ago sends
my brain into shutdown mode and sets my heart pumping
out surge after surge of bright red hatred for the
British of the time.
Hatred
is the most destructive of emotions and it is with
it that many of us who came through the violence
and deprivation of the blanket protest wrestle each
time we dwell on the era. The gravity of it at any
one point is determined by the imagery. Visiting
the graves of the three Belfast volunteers who succumbed
in 1981 always lends itself to sadness, but one
that is calm. When we leave and make our way across
the cemetery in the direction of the Falls Road,
other things come up in conversation and the sombreness
of the graveside begins to lighten. For intensity
there is nothing to compare with the molten rage
that incinerates the mind courtesy of actually watching
the funerals. Perhaps it is the knowledge that only
days before those being laid to rest were still
alive, if just about, and but for the malevolence
of a British prime minister would have remained
so. A coffin in motion carrying the motionless dead
causes a vengeful thirst which for as long as it
lasts can only be quenched by revenge.
Each
funeral cortege is like a scorching needle thrust
into the mind. The thoughts of the immense suffering
those being buried went through in the years and
not just the months before they died simply fills
me with a raging anger at the callousness of Thatcher's
British government. No human being should suffer
pain where avoidable but if Thatcher were on fire
the first thought would be to dial 999 and ask for
a petrol tanker. On further reflection the second
thought would be to ask for two.
There
is a lot of discussion today - much of it self-serving
- about what position the dead hunger strikers would
have adopted had they survived. It is a futile exercise
and advances little apart from calculated efforts
to channel the legitimacy that flows from the emaciated
bodies of the ten dead men into the service of some
current position. In a bid to have them function
as stanchions of the peace process at least one
revisionist commentator has sought to statistically
infer that around 80% of those who died in the H-Blocks
would be supportive of the Adams leadership. Apart
from the dubious methodology involved, it ignores
the fact that three of the dead were INLA volunteers.
Perhaps they would by now have endorsed the Provisionals
but who believes it? Maybe the seven IRA hunger
strikers, possibly believing that the criminality
they shunned had permeated the Provisionals so thoroughly
that belonging to the group was no longer an option.
Highly unlikely. Futile speculation, all of it.
Truth is, we simply cannot tell.
There
are some things that can be said and which remain
speculation-free. When the men died all ten did
so in opposition to a partitionist outcome, an internal
solution, a re-enacted Stormont, a British police
force in the North, the hegemony of the consent
principle/unionist veto, a Good Friday type agreement
with its power sharing executive coupled to cross
border bodies. The era in which the hunger strikers
protested and died was possessed of a logic which
viewed these 'achievements' as the substance of
a humiliating defeat. That they might have changed
their minds had they lived is a real possibility.
But we cannot know. Laurence McKeown who thankfully
survived the hunger strikes after going without
food for 73 days told an RTE interviewer that while
he supports the outcome that looms today he would
not have physically fought for it. It is a sentiment
many of us who did fight would agree with. If it
is not worth fighting for it is certainly not worth
dying for.
Sitting
with my five year old daughter in Monaghan on Saturday
watching a DVD of the hunger strikers' funerals,
I strove to suppress the lump in my throat. As each
photo of the ten men appeared she would ask 'who
is that?' Every coffin would prompt the question,
'who is inside that.' I do not want to pass on to
my daughter any of my prejudices or intense aversions.
She must be free to make up her own mind. I will
always refrain from speculating to her on who would
stand where today. But I am determined that she
will learn about ten men who defied the British
state's campaign of violence in Ireland and who
with their own blood wrote a powerful alternative
narrative to the false one scripted by the British.
The witness they bore so honestly in their time
would be corrupted were we to falsify it to suit
a new era. Shameless revisionists can try as they
might but the integrity of the H-Block protests
and hunger strike deaths remains incorruptible and
beyond opportunistic interpretation.
