Bobby Sands

Bobby Sands was an Irish republican fighter and member of the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) who died at the hands of the British colonial occupying forces on May 5, 1981, in the H-blocks of the Maze (formerly Long Kesh) prison in the north of Ireland, after 66 days on hunger strike, fighting for his right to be treated as a political prisoner.

In 1972, on the back of hunger strikes by republican fighters, that right had already been won, but was reneged on by the British in 1976.

Gerry Adams, then President of Sinn Fein, said in a 2010 interview with the Hudson Union Society, “In 1976 the British government embarked on a process of criminalization, Ulsterization and the primary of the police. They wanted to present the Republican struggle as a criminal conspiracy; portraying them as gangsters getting rich on crime.”

In this context, in 1977, Sands was imprisoned for the second time and led the famous hunger strike.

The hunger strikers had 5 demands: the right not to wear a prison uniform; the right not to do prison work; the right of free association with other prisoners; the right to organise their own educational and recreational facilities; the right to one visit, one letter and one parcel per week.

It was fighting for those principles and rights that first Sands and then nine others died.

The demands were eventually won after the strike ended in October 1981.

Bobby Sands was a poet and song writer having written hundreds of poems and songs, many composed on the walls of his cell which were erased by prison officers during wing shifts. Some were also caught being smuggled out during visits. Below are excerpts from 4 of his poems.

Roddie McCorley

Oh! I am Rodai of Duneane
And those of no property bear my name.
Those kingly freemen who sweat and toil
And yet who never gain nor reign.
I love these wretched gentle souls
They! condemned to death from birth,
I stand by Tone and I stand by truth
And the wretched of this earth!

McCorley was an Irish nationalist who participated in the 1798 Irish Rebellion led by Wolf Tone and was executed by the British in 1800.

Modern Times

And little girls without attire,
Run screaming, napalmed, through the night afire.
And while fat dictators sit upon their thrones,
Young children bury their parents’ bones,
And secret police in the dead of night,
Electrocute the naked woman out of sight.
In the gutter lies the black man, dead,
And where the oil flows blackest, the street runs red.

The Crime of Castlereagh

They came and came their job the same
In relays N'er they stopped.
'Just sign the line!' They shrieked each time
And beat me 'till I dropped.
They tortured me quite viciously
They threw me through the air.
It got so bad it seemed I had
Been beat beyond repair.

The days expired and no one tired,
Except of course the prey,
And knew they well that time would tell
Each dirty trick they laid on thick
For no one heard or saw,
Who dares to say in Castlereagh
The 'police' would break the law!

This poem, along with Diplock Court and The Torture Mill – H-Bloc, make up Sands’ Trilogy which is often compared to Oscar Wilde’s The Ballad of Reading Gaol.

The Rhythm of Time

There’s an inner thing in every man,
Do you know this thing my friend?
It has withstood the blows of a million years,
And will do so to the end.
It lit fires when fires were not,
And burnt the mind of man,
Tempering leadened hearts to steel,
From the time that time began.
It died in Rome by lion and sword,
And in defiant cruel array,
When the deathly word was ‘Spartacus’
Along the Appian Way.
It marched with Wat the Tyler’s poor,
And frightened lord and king,
And it was emblazoned in their deathly stare,
As e’er a living thing.
It burst forth through pitiful Paris streets,
And stormed the old Bastille,
And marched upon the serpent’s head,
And crushed it ‘neath its heel.
It died in blood on Buffalo Plains,
And starved by moons of rain,
Its heart was buried in Wounded Knee,
But it will come to rise again.
It lights the dark of this prison cell,
It thunders forth its might,
It is ‘the undauntable thought’, my friend,
That thought that says ‘I’m right!’

Jim Gibney, in the Irish Republican News, writes, “He wrote on cigarette paper entombed in his prison cell with the filling of a biro pen he kept hidden on his body.”

“He was naked but for a blanket, locked in a cell 24 hours a day for five years. He spread his excrement on the cell walls and threw his urine out the cell door.”

These actions were necessitated by the unspeakable cruelty of the British authorities, who refused any alternative clothing to those who would not wear a prison uniform. They also refused even the dignity of the normal prison procedure of “slopping out”, instead the prison guards would kick the slop buckets across the cell floor, soaking and contaminating the single mattress allowed the prisoners.

Norma Jenckes, in her blog Back in the Bucket, tells of the speech she gave at the Commemoration of the 40th anniversary of the death of Bobby Sands, held on May 8, 2021, at the Galway Bay Irish Pub in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. She writes that the title of her speech was Warrior Bard - a term borrowed from Tom Moore’s Irish song The Minstel Boy. “The term Warrior Bard is the combination of the poet and soldier and runs deep in Irish history. The Bards were a definite class in Celtic Druidic Ireland. They were trained as Bards, and they were trained in their oral tradition.”

Jenckes continues, “Bobby Sands replicated that oral tradition and brought it back as the central aspect of their struggle in the cold cells of Long Kesh. The knowledge of the Irish language was a valuable tool for communication since the guards did not know Irish.”

“Bobby found and embodied that moral superiority that shines in every line he wrote in such an extraordinary crucible of pain, suffering and daily humiliation. What a writing workshop he dared to hold and to produce lines that we see now are monuments to the indomitable nature of the creative spirit when it is harnessed to the engine of human freedom.”

On his album Right On, Christy Moore sings two Bobby Sands’ songs: McIlhatton and Back Home in Derry. The air for Back Home in Derry is taken from Gordon Lightfoot’s The Wreck of Edmund Fitzgerald. When later asked about that Lightfoot responded, “Well, I always thought that was an old Irish tune.”

“This film (Hunger) is definitely the closest to my heart out of all the work I have done…” said the German Irish actor Michael Fassbender, who played Sands in the film, in an interview with Juan Banco at the Lisboa Film Festival in Portugal.

The Bobby Sands Circle in Hartford, Connecticut, is the only Sands’ memorial in the U.S. A white stone cross in the Celtic style has stood in its small traffic circle since May 5, 1997. At the dedication ceremony Geraldine, Bobby’s wife, made her first public speaking engagement since her husband’s death.

The Bobby Sands Mural is a world-famous portrait of the IRA leader. It is painted on the walls of the Sinn Fein Political Party Press Office at the corner of Sevastopol Street and Falls Road, Belfast.

Churchill Street, in Tehran, where the British embassy was based, was renamed Bobby Sands Street after his death. In Madrid, the Spanish people changed the name from the Margaret Thatcher Square to the Bobby Sands Plaza.

In his interview, Gerry Adams said, “…Sands learned Gaelic in jail, learned to play the guitar, was a good singer, played soccer and hurling…”

Sands was elected to the UK Parliament as a Sinn Fein MP for Fermanagh and South Tyrone while on hunger strike in prison, showing the great support he had. He died on May 5, 1981, aged 27. Over 100,000 people turned out for his funeral.

Of his early life Bobby himself later wrote: “I was only a working-class boy from a Nationalist ghetto, but it is repression that creates the revolutionary spirit of freedom. I shall not settle until I achieve liberation of my country, until Ireland becomes a sovereign, independent socialist republic.”