Download or read book Ten Men Dead written by David Beresford and published by Atlantic Monthly Press. This book was released on 1997 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1981 ten men starved themselves to death inside the walls of Long Kesh prison in Belfast. While a stunned world watched and distraught family members kept bedside vigils, one "soldier" after another slowly went to his death in an attempt to make Margaret Thatcher's government recognize them as political prisoners rather than common criminals. Drawing extensively on secret IRA documents and letters from the prisoners smuggled out at the time, David Beresford tells the gripping story of these strikers and their devotion to the cause. An intensely human story, Ten Men Dead offers a searing portrait of strife-torn Ireland, of the IRA, and the passions -- on both sides -- that Republicanism arouses.
Download or read book Biting at the Grave written by Padraig O'Malley and published by Beacon Press. This book was released on 1991-10-31 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In an eloquent and haunting book, O'Malley makes the fanaticism of [the hunger strikers] and their supporters, the obdurate and morally discredited tactics of the British Government and the hopeless combat of the Protestant and Roman Catholic factions in the Northern Ireland struggle explicable, and exposes the politics behind it."--The New York Times Book Review
Download or read book Hunger Strike written by Thomas Hennessey and published by Irish Academic Press. This book was released on 2013-11-11 with total page 496 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: xx
Download or read book Blanketmen written by Richard O'Rawe and published by . This book was released on 2016-05 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An inside account of the H-Blocks hunger strike of the early 1980s.
Download or read book The Irish Hunger Strike written by Tom Collins and published by . This book was released on 1986 with total page 626 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Terence MacSwiney written by Dave Hannigan and published by The O'Brien Press. This book was released on 2012-11-15 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At the end of his court-martial on August 16th, 1920, Terence MacSwiney, the Lord Mayor of Cork, greeted his sentence of two years in jail by declaring: 'I have decided the term of my imprisonment...I shall be free, alive or dead, within a month.' Four days earlier, British troops had stormed the City Hall in Cork and arrested MacSwiney on charges of possessing an RIC cipher and documents likely to cause disaffection to his Majesty. He immediately began a hunger strike that sparked riots on the streets of Barcelona, caused workers to down tools on the New York waterfront, and prompted mass demonstrations from Buenos Aires to Boston. Enthralled by MacSwiney breaking all previous records for a prisoner going without food, the international press afforded the case so much coverage that Ireland's War of Independence was suddenly parachuted onto the world stage, and King George V was considering over-ruling Prime Minister Lloyd George and enduring a constitutional crisis. As his wife, brothers and sisters kept daily vigil around his bed in Brixton Prison, watching his strength ebb away hour by hour, MacSwiney's fast had Michael Collins preparing reprisal assassinations, Ho Chi Minh waxing lyrical about the Corkman's bravery, and rumours abounding that he was being secretly fed via the communion wafer being given to him each day by his chaplain. Using newly-released archive material, Dave Hannigan has pieced together a gripping, dramatic, and poignant account of one man's courageous stand against the might of an empire.
Download or read book The 1981 Irish Hunger Strike written by Michael C. Mentel and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2024-02-01 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The hunger strike of 1981 is regarded as one of the most tragic events in Irish history. Ten men died over a period of 217 days in the H-Blocks of Long Kesh (Maze) prison while exercising the most extreme form of civil disobedience available to them. The Troubles that gave rise to the hunger strike had roots in the centuries of socio-economic subjugation and religious persecution in Ireland. In 1971, the British government began internment without trial for persons suspected of belonging to paramilitary organizations. Eventually, the British government granted Special Category Status to these prisoners before later stripping it from the prisons by 1976, leading to a five-year prisoner protest that culminated in the 1981 hunger strike. This book critically examines declassified British government documents that detail how the government's policies led to the 1981 hunger strike, how Margaret Thatcher exacerbated the strike by refusing steps to end it, and how the hunger strike eventually led to peace in the north. Analysis also illustrates how the 1981 hunger strike, and the ten men who died on it, forced a revolutionary change in the political and governmental structure of the north and paved a road to peace that concluded with the signing of the 1998 Good Friday Agreement.
Download or read book Bobby Sands written by Denis O'Hearn and published by . This book was released on 2016-03-10 with total page 464 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the best-selling biography of the IRA resistance fighter and hunger-striker, Bobby Sands. In this updated, new edition, Denis O'Hearn draws from a wealth of interviews with friends, comrades, fellow prisoners and prison wardens, to provide a faithful and shocking insight into life in Northern Ireland's H-Block prisons, an exploration of the motivations and thoughts of the Republican strikers and the story of one of the world's most radical, inspirational figures.Following his journey from its very beginnings - an ordinary boy from a working-class background in Belfast to a highly politicised, articulate revolutionary whose death in HM Prison Maze sent reverberations around the world, Bobby Sands: Nothing But An Unfinished Song captures the atmosphere of the time and the vibrancy of the man: a militant anti-imperialist who held on to his humanity despite living through a bitter, ugly struggle.
Download or read book Writings From Prison written by Bobby Sands Trust and published by Mercier Press Ltd. This book was released on 1998-01-01 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book the author chronicles the abuse by the British state of emergency laws: harassment and intimidation of civilians; injuries and deaths caused by rubber and plastic bullets; collusion between British security forces, British intelligence and loyalist paramilitaries; unjust killings and murders by the security forces; excessive punishments and degrading strip-searches in prisons – abuses ignored by all but a handful of individuals and civil rights organisations.
Download or read book Political Self Sacrifice written by K. M. Fierke and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2013 with total page 301 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines a variety of different forms of political self-sacrifice, including hunger strikes, self-burning, and non-violent martyrdom.
Download or read book Prison Poems written by Bobby Sands and published by . This book was released on 1981 with total page 90 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Last Weapons written by Kevin Grant and published by University of California Press. This book was released on 2019-06-18 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Last Weapons explains how the use of hunger strikes and fasts in political protest became a global phenomenon. Exploring the proliferation of hunger as a form of protest between the late-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, Kevin Grant traces this radical tactic as it spread through trans-imperial networks among revolutionaries and civil-rights activists from Russia to Britain to Ireland to India and beyond. He shows how the significance of hunger strikes and fasts refracted across political and cultural boundaries, and how prisoners experienced and understood their own starvation, which was then poorly explained by medical research. Prison staff and political officials struggled to manage this challenge not only to their authority, but to society’s faith in the justice of liberal governance. Whether starving for the vote or national liberation, prisoners embodied proof of their own assertions that the rule of law enforced injustices that required redress and reform. Drawing upon deep archival research, the author offers a highly original examination of the role of hunger in contesting an imperial world, a tactic that still resonates today.
Download or read book Smashing H block written by F. Stuart Ross and published by Liverpool University Press. This book was released on 2011-01-01 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The period from 1976 to 1982 is widely regarded as a crucial turning point in the Irish Troubles. As time has passed the historic prison hunger strikes of 1980 and 1981 have taken on near mythic resonance, somewhat distorting the broader picture of the Irish republican struggle against criminalization. Focusing on the popular movement outside the prisons, Smashing H-Block gives us a gripping, thorough account of this fateful time and reveals how these years of protest reshaped and revitalized modern Irish republicanism. Drawing on extensive archival research and the widest range of sources available, F. Stuart Ross paints a compelling portrait of the last great wave of activism and mobilization with the nationalist population. He argues that the protests outside of the infamous H-Blocks of Maze Prison challenged republican orthodoxy, while, more broadly, he examines the importance of popular grassroots movements in effecting political and social change.
Download or read book Hunger Strike written by Thomas Hennessey and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This authoriative new history by historian Thomas Hennessey based on recently declassified British government documents, argues that it was amost impossible for the British government to grant the demands of the Republican prisoners, regardless of the impact the hunger strikes had in boosting support for Sinn Fein. The concession of the '5 demands' would have amounted to POW status for Republican prisones and would have fatally undermined the British position that it was fighting terrorism. Controversially, Hennessey concludes that the long-term consequence for the Republican Movement was an irreversible change of strategy, effectively sowing the seeds of the end of the armed struggle as far back as 1981. Thatcher's personal role in the hunger strikes is forensically analysed.
Download or read book Refusal to Eat written by Nayan Shah and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2022-01-04 with total page 383 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this enormously ambitious but concise book, Nayan Shah observes how hunger striking stretches and recasts to turn a personal agony into a collective social agony in conflicts and contexts all around the world, laying out a remarkable number of case studies over the last century and more. From suffragettes in Britain and the US in the early twentieth century to Irish political prisoners, Bengali prisoners, and detainees at post-9/11 Guantánamo Bay; from Japanese Americans in US internment camps to conscientious objectors in the 1960s; from South Africans fighting apartheid to asylum seekers in Australia and Papua New Guinea, Shah shows the importance of context for each case and the interventions the protesters faced. The power that hunger striking unleashes is volatile, unmooring all previous resolves, certainties, and structures and forcing supporters and opponents alike to respond in new ways. .
Download or read book Bobby Sands and the Tragedy of Northern Ireland written by John M. Feehan and published by Mercier Press Ltd. This book was released on 2024-04-26 with total page 142 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bobby Sands captured the imagination of the world when, despite predictions, he was elected a Member of Parliament to the British House of Commons while still on hunger-strike in the Northern Ireland concentration camp of Long Kesh. When he later died after sixty-six gruelling days of hunger he commanded more television, radio and newspaper coverage than the papal visits or royal weddings. What was the secret of this young man who set himself against the might of an empire and who became a microcosm of the whole Northern question and a moral catalyst for the Southern Irish conscience? In calm restrained language John M. Feehan records the life of Bobby Sands with whom he had little sympathy in the beginning - though this was to change. At the same time, he gives us an illumination and crystal-clear account of the terrifying statelet of Northern Ireland today and of the fierce guerilla warfare that is rapidly turning Northern Ireland into Britain's Vietnam.
Download or read book Hunger Strike written by Danny Morrison and published by Brandon Books. This book was released on 2006 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of essays by well-known novelists and poets reflecting on the 1980's hungerstrikers in Northern Ireland.
