May 5th 1981: Bobby Sands dies
On this day in 1981, the Irish republican activist Bobby Sands died in a Northern Ireland jail after a hunger strike. Sands, born in Belfast in 1954, joined the Republican Movement aged eighteen, and faced intimidation from loyalists in his community. He was a militant member of the movement during the Irish Troubles, and spent three years in prison for possessing firearms. In 1976, Sands was again arrested in connection to the bombing of a furniture company, and whilst the charges were flimsy and the evidence slim, Sands was sentenced to fourteen years in prison. It was while he was in prison that Sands became a famous figure in Ireland and in Britain, for his defiance of the prison system and confrontation of authorities. On March 1st 1981, Sands led nine other Provisional IRA prisoners - who considered themselves prisoners of war - on a hunger strike, demanding prison reforms like the right to wear their own clothes, and right to refuse prison work. Sands refused to end his strike until they gave into his requests, and during the first seventeen days of the strike lost sixteen pounds. His actions made him a nationalist hero and, while he was still on hunger strike, Sands was elected as a Sinn Fein Member of Parliament for Fermanagh and South Tyrone. Sands’s health rapidly deteriorated, and just a few days after slipping into a coma, he died on May 5th 1981 aged twenty-seven; Bobby Sands had refused to eat for sixty-six days. He was not the last to die from hunger strike, and several other nationalists also died in similar conditions. His death prompted widespread rioting and over 100,000 people attended his funeral. While a controversial figure, Sands remains a hero to many Irish republicans, and his stoic determination has inspired countless political dissidents around the world.
“They have nothing in their whole imperial arsenal that can break the spirit of one Irishman who doesn’t want to be broken“
