Bobby Sands MP: ‘They can’t break our spirit’  http://www.greenleft.org.au/node/47508

On May 5, 1981, Bobby Sands, Honourable Member of the British Parliament for Fermanagh-South Tyrone in Ireland’s north, died. The 27-year-old republican prisoner died after 66 days on hunger strike in the H-blocks of the British-run concentration camp called Long Kesh prison. Nine other men died on hunger strike, as the British government of Margaret Thatcher refused to grant their demand to be granted the status of “political prisoners”. Sands was born in March 1954 to a working-class Catholic family in Newtownabbey, an area dominated by Protestant “loyalists” (supporters of British rule). 

Sands was a victim of sectarian violence. His family was forced to flee their home due to violent attacks. He was stabbed and forced at gun point to leave his job.Like many of his generation, he joined the Irish Republican Army aged 17 to defend his community from the violence of loyalist thugs and the British army.The Northern Ireland statelet into which Sands was born was set up in 1921 when Britain was forced to accept an independent Irish stated based on 26 of Ireland’s 32 counties. 

To ensure the six counties remained loyal to the union with Britain, the Protestant majority were granted privileges in jobs, housing, education and services. Catholics reduced to second class citizens.It was governed by “a Protestant parliament for a Protestant state”, in the words of the first prime minister of Northern Ireland, James Craig.In the late 1960s, inspired by the civil rights movement in the United States, a civil rights struggle broke out in the six counties demanding the extension of voting rights to all Catholic adults and an end to discrimination. Loyalist gangs and the Royal Ulster Constabulary unleashed a wave of violence against defenceless Catholic and Irish nationalist communities, with thousands driven from their homes.