Bobby Sands


Robert Gerard Sands was a member of the Provisional Irish Republican Army who died on hunger strike while imprisoned at HM Prison Maze in Northern Ireland. Sands helped to plan the 1976 Balmoral Furniture Company bombing in Dunmurry, which was followed by a gun battle with the Royal Ulster Constabulary. Sands was arrested while trying to escape and sentenced to 14 years for firearms possession.
He was the leader of the 1981 hunger strike in which Irish republican prisoners protested against the removal of Special Category Status. During Sands's strike, he was elected to the UK Parliament as an Anti H-Block candidate. His death and those of nine hunger strikers were followed by a surge of IRA recruitment and activity. International media coverage brought attention to the hunger strikers, and the republican movement in general, attracting both praise and criticism.

Early life

Robert Gerard Sands was born in Dunmurry in 1954 to John and Rosaleen Sands. After marrying, they relocated to the new development of Abbots Cross, Newtownabbey, County Antrim, outside North Belfast. Sands was the eldest of four children. His younger sisters, Marcella and Bernadette, were born in 1955 and 1958 respectively. He also had a younger brother, John, born in 1962.
In 1961, after experiencing harassment and intimidation from their neighbours, the family abandoned the development and moved in with friends for six months before being granted housing in the nearby Rathcoole development. Rathcoole was 30% Catholic and featured Catholic schools as well as a nominally Catholic, but religiously mixed, youth football club, an unusual circumstance in Northern Ireland, known as Stella Maris, the same as the school Sands attended and where the training was held. Sands was a member of this club and played left-back. There was another youth club in nearby Greencastle, called Star of the Sea, and many boys went there when the Stella Maris club closed.
By 1966 sectarian violence in Rathcoole, along with the rest of the Belfast metropolitan area, had considerably worsened, and the minority Catholic population there found itself under siege. Despite always having had Protestant friends, Sands suddenly found that none of them would even speak to him and he quickly learned to associate only with Catholics.
He left school in 1969 at age 15 and enrolled in Newtownabbey Technical College, beginning an apprenticeship as a coach builder at Alexander's Coach Works in 1970. He worked there for less than a year, enduring constant harassment from his Protestant co-workers, which according to several co-workers he ignored completely since he wished to learn a meaningful trade. He was eventually confronted after leaving his shift in January 1971 by a number of his co-workers wearing the armbands of the local Ulster loyalist tartan gang. He was held at gunpoint and told that Alexander's was off-limits to "Fenian scum" and never to come back if he valued his life. He later said that this event was the point at which he decided that militancy was the only solution. In late 1971 while working as a barman at the Glen Inn, Sands approached a man whom he knew to be connected to the IRA and told him he would like to join; the man told Bobby to think it over as things in Rathcoole were bad and Catholics in the area were very isolated. Later that year the man from the pub spotted Bobby playing football on a pitch near the Sands house. As an initiation he asked Sands to transport a gun from Rathcoole to Glengormley because the local IRA volunteer who was supposed to do the job had failed to show up. Bobby left the game on the spot, changed clothes and took the gun. This is when Bobby's involvement with the IRA began in earnest, according to O'Hearn:
Sands soon recruited some of his mates into a small auxiliary unit of six or seven volunteers. Bobby was their section leader. They were isolated so they worked with other volunteers from surrounding areas.

In June 1972 Sands's parents' home was attacked and damaged by a loyalist mob and they were again forced to move, this time to the West Belfast Catholic area of Twinbrook, where Sands, now thoroughly embittered, rejoined them. By 1973 almost every Catholic family had been driven out of Rathcoole by violence and intimidation, although there were some who remained.

Provisional IRA activity

Sands was arrested and charged in October 1972 with possession of four handguns found in the house where he was staying. He was convicted in April 1973, sentenced to five years imprisonment, and released in April 1976.
Upon his release, he returned to his family home in West Belfast, and resumed his active role in the Provisional IRA. Sands and Joe McDonnell planned the bombing of the Balmoral Furniture Company in Dunmurry on 14 October 1976. The showroom was destroyed but as the IRA men left the scene there was a gun battle with the Royal Ulster Constabulary. Leaving behind two wounded, Seamus Martin and Gabriel Corbett, the remaining four tried to escape by car, but were arrested. One of the revolvers used in the attack was found in the car. On 7 September 1977, the four men were sentenced to 14 years for possession of the revolver. They were not charged with explosive offences.
Immediately after his sentencing, Sands was implicated in a fight and sent to the punishment block in Crumlin Road Prison. The cells contained a bed, a mattress, a chamber pot and a water container. Books, radios and other personal items were not permitted, although a Bible and some Catholic pamphlets were provided. Sands refused to wear a prison uniform, so was kept naked in his cell for twenty-two days without access to bedding from 7.30 am to 8.30 pm each day.

Maze Prison years

In late 1980, Sands was chosen Officer Commanding of the Provisional IRA prisoners in the Maze Prison, succeeding Brendan Hughes, who was participating in the first hunger strike. Republican prisoners organised a series of protests seeking to regain their previous Special Category Status, which would free them from some ordinary prison regulations. This began with the "blanket protest" in 1976, in which the prisoners refused to wear prison uniforms and wore blankets instead. In 1978, after a number of attacks on prisoners leaving their cells to "slop out", this escalated into the "dirty protest", wherein prisoners refused to wash and smeared the walls of their cells with excrement. Sands wrote about the brutality of Maze prison guards: "The screws removed me from my cell naked and I was conveyed to the punishment block in a blacked out van. As I stepped out of the van on arrival there they grabbed me from all sides and began punching and kicking me to the ground ... they dragged me by the hair across a stretch of hard core rubble to the gate of the punishment block. The full weight of my body recoiled forward again, smashing my head against the corrugated iron covering around the gate."

Published works

While in prison, Sands had several letters and articles published in the Republican paper An Phoblacht under the pseudonym "Marcella". Other writings attributed to him are: Skylark Sing Your Lonely Song and One Day in My Life. Sands also wrote the lyrics of "Back Home in Derry" and "McIlhatton", which were both later recorded by Christy Moore, and "Sad Song for Susan", which was also later recorded. The melody of "Back Home in Derry" was borrowed from Gordon Lightfoot's 1976 song "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald". The song itself is about the penal transportation of Irishmen in the 19th century to Van Diemen's Land.

Hunger strike

The 1981 Irish hunger strike started with Sands refusing food on 1 March 1981. Sands decided that prisoners should join the strike at staggered intervals to maximise publicity, with prisoners steadily deteriorating successively over several months. The hunger strike centred on five demands:
  1. the right not to wear a prison uniform;
  2. the right not to do prison work;
  3. the right of free association with other prisoners, and to organise educational and recreational pursuits;
  4. the right to one visit, one letter, and one parcel per week;
  5. full restoration of remission lost through the protest.
The significance of the hunger strike was the prisoners' aim of being considered political prisoners as opposed to criminals. Shortly before Sands's death, The Washington Post reported that the primary aim of the hunger strike was to generate international publicity.

Member of Parliament

Shortly after the beginning of the strike, Frank Maguire, the Independent Republican Member of Parliament for Fermanagh and South Tyrone, died suddenly of a heart attack, precipitating the April 1981 by-election.
The sudden vacancy in a seat with a nationalist majority of about 5,000 was a valuable opportunity for Sands's supporters "to raise public consciousness". Pressure not to split the vote led other nationalist parties, notably the Social Democratic and Labour Party, to withdraw, and Sands was nominated on the label "Anti H-Block/Armagh Political Prisoner". After a highly polarised campaign, Sands narrowly won the seat on 9 April 1981, with 30,493 votes to 29,046 for the Ulster Unionist Party candidate Harry West. Sands became the youngest MP at the time. Sands died in prison less than a month later, without ever having taken his seat in the Commons.
Following Sands's election win the British government introduced the Representation of the People Act 1981, which prevents prisoners serving jail terms of more than one year in either the UK or the Republic of Ireland from being nominated as candidates in UK elections. The enactment of the law, as a response to the election of Sands, consequently prevented other hunger strikers from being elected to the House of Commons.

Death

Sands died on 5 May 1981 in the Maze's prison hospital after 66 days on hunger strike, aged 27. The original pathologist's report recorded the hunger strikers' causes of death as "self-imposed starvation", amended to simply "starvation" following protests by the dead strikers' families. The coroner recorded verdicts of "starvation, self-imposed". Sands was one of 22 Irish republicans who died on hunger strike.
Image: Remember the Hunger Strikers Glasnevin Cemetery Dublin.JPG|thumb| Memorial to 22 Irish Hunger Strikers Deaths Glasnevin Cemetery
Sands became a martyr to Irish republicans, and the announcement of his death prompted several days of rioting in nationalist areas of Northern Ireland. More than 100,000 people lined the route of Sands's funeral from St. Luke's Catholic Church in Twinbrook, and he was buried in the 'New Republican Plot' alongside 76 others. Their graves are maintained by the National Graves Association, Belfast.