Fenian Exile is a Blog of Radio Rebel Gael: The 5th of May (from the Pensive Quill)

Wednesday, May 07, 2008

The 5th of May (from the Pensive Quill)

Go raibh maith agat, a TJ.

Aontaim leat a chara. Agus tá fáilte romhat.

The 5th of May is a solemn occasion in the republican calendar. Few republicans young or old would fail to instantly recognise it as the dateon which the leader of the H Blocks IRA, Bobby Sands, lost his life aftera 66 day hunger strike against the degenerate policies of a malign andmurderous British government. Those 66 days came back-to-back on a thousand plus days spent naked, locked in a cell as punishment forrefusing to wear prison uniform because to do so would have legitimised British state terror and criminalised republican opposition to it.

In the protest blocks brutality, every bit as much as boredom, was the tireless adversary endlessly gnawing away at the will to resist. The boredom Bobby Sands fought through prolific writing, and while he couldnever hope to halt it he also used his pen to highlight the brutality.

Apart from being, in the words of the late Denis Faul, the greatest prisonreformer of the last century, he was also one of the great bulwarks against censorship, flouting it with a pen refill and cigarette papers which he had to conceal inside a body cavity to foil the censors.

The lengths to which punitive vindictive thugs at all levels of the British penal administration exercised their minds in the search for new ways to inflict deprivation, has long forced me to ponder on what Hanna Arendt termed "the banality of evil."

Shortly before he died Bobby wrote:

There is a certain screw here who has taken it upon himself to harass me to the very end and in a very vindictive childish manner. It does not worry me, the harassment, but his attitude aggravates me occasionally. It is one thing to torture, but quite a different thing to exact enjoyment from it, that's his type.

That somebody as non-banal and prodigious in mind as this gifted and talented IRA leader should die surrounded by so many uniformed morons whose sole intellectual challenge consisted of agonising over whether to kick or punch a naked prisoner, is probably one of the greatest indictments of the British penal establishment in the last century.

Throughout the years of the blanket protest Bobby Sands played a pivotal role in leading the resistance. His day to day struggle on the blanket is finely documented in the biography by Denis O' Hearn. Also meticulously covered in that book is the death agony he underwent. One of the characters in "Gil Courtermanche" characters in Gil Courtermanche brill Kigali, philosophically mused that "dying was simply one of the things you did one day." Death on hunger strike was much less simple. Dying was not something to be done one day. In the case of Bobby Sands, the dying lasted for over two months. The narrative detailing the pain-wracked and prolonged dying does not make for pleasant reading.

Every year at this time those of us who were on the blanket protest, regardless of what political perspective we may hold today, reflect on the tremendous courage of Bobby and those who followed him to certain death.

This was not a death that came like a thief in the night, creeping up on the unsuspecting but one that was seen from a distance and met with an unwavering eye. Margaret Thatcher who displayed a venom all of her own when it came to republican prisoners challenging her writ admitted tohaving admiration for his courage.

Over the past three years there has been much public controversy about the hunger strike generated by the former republican prisoner Richard O'Rawe in his book Blanketmen. In spite of this, regardless of how the hunger strike was managed by the republican leadership, the fact that it evercame about was the direct consequence of an intransigent British government determined to criminalise a political armed struggle brought into being by its own criminal behaviour in the North. Had that government granted at the start of the hunger strike what it conceded at its end it is certain that the strike would never have taken place.

Today I took my children to a local park. On the way we stopped at amonument to all republican hunger strikers who died in the struggle against the British. My wife photographed us there. As they later laughed and played in the park, the words of Bobby Sands that our revenge wouldbe the laughter of our children played back and forth though my mind. 27 years ago it was all so different. Then there was nothing but suppressed tears and a hatred so burning there seemed nothing capable of dousing it. Time may have dulled the hatred but has done nothing to diminish the awesomeness of Bobby Sands epic victory over malevolence.