While
sorrowful it is a deep honour to speak here today.
To the organisers I would like to convey my appreciation
for their having bestowed that honour upon me. It
is also to the credit of the organisers and a measure
of their integrity that they have not reduced this
venerable event to a political rally. Their willingness
to offer this platform to people who do not share
their political outlook is admirable. It is clear
that the sacrifice of the hunger strikers is the
primary motivating spirit that guides them. The
dark spectre of political opportunism may have stalked
Casement Park two weeks ago but it is banished from
here today as we gather to pay true homage to our
fallen comrades rather than use their imagery and
exploit their memory to add wind to the sails of
political careers.
Today
there are more than enough people claiming to be
close friends of Bobby Sands. It is the price an
icon of radical struggle pays. Some see only the
celebrity dimension that is often generated by the
life, works, or death of an incorruptible activist
and tend to downplay the intense agony undergone
by them and their families. While the hunger strikers
never sought fame, perhaps the definition of a celebrity
is apt for Bobby Sands in the current context if
we accept the definition of a celebrity as someone
who is known by many people he is glad he does not
know.
I
recall once acquiring a certain cynicism upon learning
of a book about the late guerrilla fighter Che Guevara.
Its title was My Friend Che. These things never
fail to strike me as exploitative. Consequently,
I was surprised to find in yesterday's Guardian
that I too had joined the illustrious society of
close friends of Bobby Sands. It was an honest mistake
by the journalist who wrote the story. At the risk
of depleting the membership of the society of friends,
I was not one of Bobby's bosom buddies. I didn't
know him well enough to acquire that status. Yet
I am mindful of his own comment to Monsignor Denis
Faul shortly before he died that man has no greater
love than he who would lay down his life for his
friends. On that basis we could all claim to be
friends of Bobby and the other hunger strikers.
They literally gave their lives for us and the republican
philosophy that animated us.
I
take great pride from the fact that Bobby Sands,
Frank Hughes, Patsy O'Hara and the other volunteers
who died were comrades and that I was on the blanket
protest with them. We were young men, who along
with young women in Armagh prison, pitted our one
weapon, endurance, against the vile might of a state
that had massacred an unarmed civilian population
on the streets of Derry and would not baulk at the
thought of putting us to the sword. Blocks apart
we were united, as all blanket men were, in our
opposition to a British lie and the reassertion
of a republican truth. They, not we, were the criminals.
Yes, the H-Blocks were filled with criminal types.
They all belonged to the Northern Ireland Prison
Service who regularly beat republican political
prisoners and inflicted a regime of deprivation
upon us in a futile attempt to break the spirit.
The
British in 1981 demonstrated to the world the essence
of their malign character. They give in at the end
but they exacted a terrible price for it. Had they
have delivered in March 1981 what they eventually
conceded in October of the same year, there would
have been no dead hunger strikers. But the vindictiveness
of Britain is well known to Irish republicans. One
lesson to be learned from that terrible time is
all the force of British violence could not defeat
the moral power of a peaceful republican protest.
The
H-Block hunger strike carried out by the volunteers
of the IRA and INLA was a defining moment in Irish
republican history. It resonated globally and has
led us here today to honour the memory of Raymond
McCreesh, Kieran Doherty and the eight men who never
again were to wear their own clothes but who broke
the will of the British to persist in their demand
that republicanism walk the face of this earth wearing
the criminal mark of Cain. Kevin Lynch and his comrades
ensured that never again would Britain be able to
succeed in characterising resistance to its rule
as the work of common criminals.
There
are some today who tell us that had Martin Hurson,
Joe McDonnell and the hunger strikers survived they
would most likely support the corrupt peace process
and back the Provisional leadership in its stewardship
of that process. Perhaps. But how can we tell? The
simple truth is that we cannot. To designate positions
and perspectives to people who gave no license for
such designation is every bit as dishonest as the
attempts by the British to assign criminal motivation
to the same people. It is to take a liberty where
none was granted. It is theft. It is to steal a
sacrifice and put it in a place other than its rightful
one.
We
can say absolutely nothing about where the hunger
strikers would stand today. If we were of such a
mind we could lie with statistics. We could infer
that because some former hunger strikers stand ready
to embrace the PSNI then those that died would,
had they survived, do likewise. But which ones?
Who amongst us would dare pick one of the ten dead
men and insult him by saying with any certainty
'yes - he would bust his gut today to support British
peelers?'
To
proclaim that the republican dead would endorse
Sinn Fein the Peelers Party is not to tell any truth
about men such as Michael Devine and Tom McElwee.
It is to provide cover for those who cannot walk
erect, head held high to the partitionist destination
that they have now chosen. They want to take the
hunger strikers with them, to lean on them, use
them as a crutch. We don't demand that they have
the courage of the ten dead men. That comes to few.
We simply ask that they have the honesty of the
fallen. They would be better thought of. Perhaps,
in a world governed by organised lying, methodical
lying, where there are those who lie like the rest
of us breathe, honesty is as rare as the courage
of the hunger strikers. A fitting epitaph to be
engraved on the headstones of those who would use
the memory of the hunger strikers for their own
scrofulous ends would be 'here they are, lying still.'
The meaning would be clear to all.
Yet
there are some things we can say with absolute certainty
about the men who died on hunger strike within the
corridors of steel and concrete that were the H-Blocks
of Long Kesh. And the expression of that certainty
in no way exploits the sacrifices made but on the
contrary honours each and every life and death experienced
by our ten comrades. As has been said, to the living
we owe respect, to the dead we owe only truth. When
the men lost their lives they died in opposition
to a reformed Stormont; they died in opposition
to acceptance of the unionist veto dressed up in
the language of the consent principle; they died
in opposition to Leinster House; they died in opposition
to a British police force enforcing the law of the
British state in any part of Ireland. Whatever tradition
inherits their legacy or lays claim to their suffering
it is an absurdity to claim that such a tradition
could be made up of all the component parts the
hunger strikers died opposing.
It
is important that we continue to reassert what we
believe to be the truth. We live in a world where
many are more afraid of being isolated than they
are of being wrong. Consequently, they take the
easy option and are content to be wrong. Recently,
former blanket man Richard O'Rawe, who I am pleased
to say is standing with us here today, displayed
enormous courage and went against the Provisional
narrative of the hunger strike. To his credit being
wrong was more repulsive to him than being isolated.
He did the right thing, faced down the isolation
and published the book Blanketmen. In it
he levelled the charge that the lives of six of
the hunger strikers could have been saved were it
not for some elements in the republican leadership
machinating and manipulating events to further their
own ambitions. Despite the assaults on his character
and integrity, Richard O'Rawe, wearing the tenacity
that made him one of the Blanket men, persisted
with his conviction. He withstood the whispers,
the graffiti sprayers, the ostracism, the labelling
of him as some sort of deviant who traded in his
human decency for profit. What nonsense. Richard
O'Rawe simply opted to bear witness. Given his knowledge
of events he feels it is the least he could do.
What else but to establish truth were the blanket
protest and hunger strikes waged?
The key questions asked by Richard O'Rawe remain
unanswered. What did the offer made by the British
through the Mountain climber constitute? Where are
the comms relating to the Mountain climber? There
has been a deathly silence on the part of some Provisional
leaders in relation to these matters. There is only
one place for a republican to be silent; in the
barracks. But even some prominent Provisionals managed
to fail in this respect.
There
is independent evidence to support the claims made
by Richard O'Rawe in his book. That evidence has
been made available to a small number of key leaders
within the Irish Republican Socialist Movement who
feel obligated to explore the claims out of respect
to their fallen comrades and their grieving families.
It has prompted that movement to publicly state
that it wants the matter further investigated.
Richard
O'Rawe has faced accusations that his actions amount
to launching a blasphemous assault on the most sacred
cow within modern republicanism. The truth is that
those making the accusations see in the hunger strikers
a cash cow rather than a sacred one. And they are
determined that it will graze in no field but their
own. Blankets were being sold at the Casement Park
political rally so that a corpulent crowd could
march up the Falls Road and provoke the sarcasm
of the press who lambasted it as resembling a Friar
Tuck convention more than it did the austere era
of the blanket protest and hunger strikes. The contrast
between the easy corpulence of today and the hard
emaciation of twenty five years ago was no more
stark than it was on the Falls Road at that political
rally. In a sense the imagery mirrored perfectly
the ethical decay that has come to beset republicanism.
The screws at least gave out the blankets for free.
Our
dead hunger strikers are sacred to us. They occupy
hallowed ground within our minds. The commercialisation
of their memory is a travesty. It is a crime against
republican sensitivity and our own natural intellect.
But
nothing else can be expected. Experience is a good
teacher and we know only too well what happens when
republicanism falls prey to the Stick virus. It
becomes ravished and mutates beyond all recognition.
Cast our memories back to 1981, our most intense
ideological and emotional year as Irish republicans.
The people who today wish to transform the hunger
strike into a profit making industry do not with
their politics remotely resemble the republican
spirit of that year. But they very much look like
the Workers Party of 1981.
Cathal
Goulding, the one time Official IRA/Stick chief
of staff, knew exactly how to strangle republicanism.
The trick was to corrode it from within. Republicanism
can withstand inordinate amounts of pressure from
without. But it is always vulnerable to the false
messiah, the leader who thinks we exist as playthings
in his little dance of deceit. Such leaders prevail
only where they go unchallenged.
Today
the energy and sacrifice of the hunger strikers
is in the service of a political project which at
the time of their deaths they opposed. There is
no need to go into the detail of a political analysis
to see where things have needed up. Small human
stories allow us to instinctively and intuitively
grasp what is going down better than any amount
of political treatises. Who would have thought that
when Brendan Hughes lay in a bed in a prison hospital
leading the 1980 hunger strike, fellow blanket men
would two decades later visit him in the Royal Victoria
hospital where he lay on a hospital trolley because
there were no available beds? The British Health
minister at the time was a member of the Provisional
Movement.
It
is in these little vignettes that we are able to
see the collapse of the Provisional project, how
little it actually achieved. And now it demands
that Paisley be prime minister and that their own
volunteers hand themselves over to a Diplock judge
so that they may be jailed without political status
for their role in the leadership-ordered kidnapping
of Bobby Tohill.
During
the Blanket protest one of our favourite acts of
defiance was staged when the governor came around
to impose punishment on us for refusing to wear
the prison garb or do prison work. We would scream
in his face 'up the Ra.' Imagine had we shouted
'up Paisley; jail the Ra.' The governor would have
recommended our immediate release as the quickest
possible way to secure the defeat of the republican
resistance.
In 1981 the British inflicted a terrible crime on
Irish people. They scarred us deeply and its pain
pulsates as we reflect on the lives and deaths of
the H-Block volunteers on the 25th anniversary of
that momentous occasion. As we leave here today
we would do well to remember the words of two Czech
novelists. Vaclev Havel urged people to speak truth
to power. Milan Kundera said that 'the struggle
of man against power is the struggle of memory against
forgetting.' Let us memorise and never forget those
who gave their everything; Allow the awesome power
of republican memory to triumph over those who wish
to forget what they inflicted and those who conveniently
want us to forget what it was all about.
As
republicans who refused to wear the badge of criminality
we will not commit the crime of forgetting. Always
and everywhere, remember the hunger strikers.
