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Barghouti Leads Hunger Strikers
Palestinian prisoners' leader Marwan Barghouti, who has spent fifteen years in jail under Israel's brutal regime, has spoken about the mass hunger strike currently taking place, now into its fifteenth day. Barghouti said: “Having spent the last...
Sands’ Book Now in Kurdish
Denis O’Hearn’s widely-praised biography of Bobby Sands has now been translated into Kurdish. Nothing But An Unfinished Song will be published this weekend in yet another language of one of the world’s oppressed yet risen people. STRANEK NÎVCO MAYÎ: BOBBY SANDS, IRA û...
‘I dedicate this song…’
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eIiu1xF92Qo[/youtube] Léo Ferré, the flamboyant French composer, poet and singer, who was born in 1916 and died in 1993, was a pacifist chansonnier and political rebel. His songs of protest and his music are revered to this day...
3pm, 3rd October 1981
Thirty five years ago today, at 3pm, Pat Sheehan (at that stage the longest on hunger strike and the most critically ill), his comrades, Jackie McMullan, Hugh Carville, John Pickering, Gerard Hodgins and Jim Devine, ended the epic H-Block hunger strike which had...
‘H-Block POWs’ in Reading Prison
H-Block themes and hunger striking feature in a new Oscar Wilde exhibition which opened in Reading Prison last Sunday. Artefacts on display acknowledge the Irish struggle for freedom. There are aerial drawings of the H-Blocks of Long Kesh by Rita Donagh, and two...
No Change, No Deal – Brit Confirmation
The Irish Times this week has quoted from newly released British government papers relating to the 1981 hunger strike which includes an important interview given by Sir John Blelloch to author/historian Padraig O’Malley five years after the deaths of ten Irish...
Writing on the Wall
Stuart Borthwick’s book, The Writing on the Wall: A Visual History of Northern Ireland's Troubles, was given its Belfast launch during Féile an Phobail last week. Danny Devenny, an ex-political prisoner who served time in Cage 11 with Bobby Sands, is a former graphic...
Huge Commemoration in Belfast
The 35th anniversary of the 1981 hunger strike was commemorated nationally in a huge march and rally through West Belfast last Sunday. A video report on the parade and speeches can be viewed here. Here are some photographs (courtesy Peadar Whelan) from last Sunday's...
Death of Father John Murphy
Father John Murphy, who was known affectionately to former political prisoners in the H-Blocks as ‘Silvertop’, ‘Spud’ or ‘Murph’, died last weekend and was buried on Tuesday in St Peter’s graveyard at the Rock Chapel, Stoneyford. Former republican POW Jim Gibney, who...
Thomas McElwee Remembered
On Sunday, 7th August, the day before the 35th anniversary of the death of Thomas McElwee, people, some in period costume representing 1916, gathered in Bellaghy to pay their respects to the young 23-year-old who died on hunger strike after sixty two days. After a...
