Michael Gaughan commemoration
3 June, 2006
Gathering in Leigue Cemetery, Ballina at 2pm at the grave of Michael Gaughan. Following this will be a vigil at the Humbert Monument, Ballina to honour Volunteer Bobby Sands.
The Life and Times of Irish martyrs, Michael Gaughan and Bobby Sands
Michael Gaughan
(1950-74): Died after 67 days on hunger strike Parkhurst Prison, England.
Michael Gaughan, the eldest of six children, was born in Ballina, Co Mayo. After finishing his schooling, he left Ireland for England, in search of work. Whilst in England, he joined the Irish Republican Army and became an active Volunteer in a London-based ASU. During a fundraising mission, he was captured and ultimately convicted of arms possession and conspiracy to rob £530 from a London bank.
He was initially sent to Wormwood Scrubs, where he spent two years before being transferred to Albany Prison. In Albany, he requested political status. Prison officials responded to his request by placing him in a solitary punishment cell.
Eventually, he was transferred to Parkhurst prison where four of the Belfast Ten were on hungerstrike for political status. On March 31st, 1974, Michael Gaughan, along with Mayo man Frank Stagg, Pat Holme and Hugh Feeney, joined the strike.
Force-Feeding
British policy at this time was to force feed hungerstrikers in a particularly brutal manner: Six to eight guards would restrain the prisoner and drag him or her by the hair to the top of the bed, where they would stretch the prisoner's neck over the metal rail, force a block between his or her teeth and then pass a feeding tube, which extended down the throat, through a hole in the block.
The process would leave the prisoner bruised and battered. And, even on an unconscious individual, it carried the additional danger of the tube passing mistakenly into the trachea and the lungs rather than into the esophagus and stomach.
Michael Gaughan suffered this brutal procedure seventeen times in the course of his hungerstrike. The last time was on 2 June, the night before his death. On 3rd June, 1974, he died from injuries suffered when food lodged in a lung punctured by a feeding tube. He had been on hungerstrike 67 days. He was 24 years old.
Final Message
Michael Gaughan left a final message for his comrades and his country:
"I die proudly for my country and in the hope that my death will be sufficient to obtain the demands of my comrades. Let there be no bitterness on my behalf, but a determination to achieve the new Ireland for which I gladly die. My loyalty and confidence is to the IRA and let those of you who are left carry on the work and finish the fight."
Bobby Sands
Robert Gerard Sands, commonly known as Bobby Sands (9 March 1954 - 5 May 1981) was an Irish republican who died on hunger strike in the prison officially called HM Prison Maze but formerly known as Long Kesh
Family and early life
Bobby Sands was born in Rathcoole, Newtownabbey and brought up in Abbots Cross, Newtownabbey. His family moved several times due to intimidation by loyalists, although it was not always clear the Sands were Roman Catholics as their last name derived from his paternal grandfather who was a Protestant. On leaving school, he became an apprentice coach-builder, until he was forced out at gunpoint by loyalists.
IRA volunteer
In 1972, the year of the Troubles with the highest death toll, he joined the Provisional Irish Republican Army. Later that year he was interned, and remained in custody without trial until 1976.
On his release, he returned to his family who were then living in Twinbrook in west Belfast. Sands returned to IRA active service. He had been out of prison for only a year when he was arrested with four others; the five were in a car containing a handgun. His trial (in September 1977) saw him accused of organising a bombing which had happened nearby, but these and other serious charges against him were dismissed for lack of evidence. He was convicted of possession of firearms (the handgun) and sentenced to 14 years' imprisonment.
Prisoner
He served his prison term in one of the wings of what the British government regarded as HM Prison Maze but which Irish republicans continued to know as Long Kesh. Since the end of internment a series of buildings known from their floor plans as 'H-Blocks' had been built to make the prison suitable for the large number of inmates belonging to paramilitary organisations; each block contained members of the same organisation.
In prison, Sands became a writer both of journalism and poetry which was published in the Irish republican newspaper An Phoblacht. In late 1980 Sands was chosen as Officer Commanding IRA prisoners in Long Kesh.
Political status protests
Republican prisoners had organised a series of protests seeking to regain their previous status of political prisoners and not be subject to ordinary prison regulations. This started with the "blanket protest" in 1976, when the prisoners refused to wear uniform and were allowed only blankets instead. The "dirty protest" of 1978 saw prisoners living in squalor by smearing excrement on the walls. There had been an earlier hunger strike in Autumn 1980, which had ended when the British government appeared to concede the prisoners' demands. When that strike was over, the government had reverted to its previous hardline stance.
Hunger strike
The Second Hunger Strike started with Sands refusing food on 1 March 1981. Sands decided that other prisoners should join the strike at staggered intervals in order to maximise publicity with prisoners steadily deteriorating and dying successively over several months.
Election
Shortly after the beginning of the strike, Frank Maguire, the Independent Republican MP for Fermanagh & South Tyrone died of a heart attack suddenly and precipitated a by-election.
The sudden vacancy in a seat with a small Roman Catholic majority was a valuable opportunity for Sands' supporters to unite the nationalist community behind their campaign. Pressure not to split the vote led other nationalist parties, notably the Social Democratic and Labour Party, to withdraw and Sands was nominated on an "Anti H-Block /Armagh Political Prisoner" ticket. After a highly polarised campaign, Sands narrowly won the seat on 9 April 1981, with 30,492 votes to 29,046 for the Ulster Unionist Party candidate Harry West, incidentally also becoming the youngest MP at the time.
Following Sands' success the Government rushed through Parliament the Representation of the People Act 1981 which prevents convicted prisoners serving jail terms of more than ten years, or unlawfully at large when they should be serving such a sentence, from being nominated as candidates in elections.
Death
Three weeks later, Bobby Sands MP died from starvation in the prison hospital after 66 days of hunger-striking. He was 27 years old. The announcement of his death prompted several days of riots in nationalist areas of the North. Over 100,000 people lined the route of his funeral. Sands was a Member of the Westminster Parliament for twenty-five days, though he never took his seat or oath.
Political impact
Nine other IRA and INLA men who were involved in the 1981 Irish Hunger Strike also died after Bobby Sands. Bobby Sands and the other nine men are martyrs who stood firm against the intransigence of the British Government.
Commemorations in other countries
In Europe
- In Milan, 5,000 students burned the Union Jack and shouted "Freedom for Ulster" during a march.
- In Ghent students invaded the British Consulate.
- In Paris, thousands of Marxists marched behind huge portraits of Sands, to chants of 'The IRA will conquer.'
- The town of Le Mans has named a street after Sands, as has the St Denis département of Paris.
- In Oslo, demonstrators threw a balloon filled with tomato sauce at Elizabeth II, the Queen of the United Kingdom.
- In the Soviet Union, Pravda described it as 'another tragic page in the grim chronicle of oppression, discrimination, terror and violence' in Ireland.
- In or around 1982, leading Hungarian punk band Kretens wrote a song titled "Bobby Sands" commemorating Sands' hunger strike. A recurring track in the band's set in the eighties, as of 2006 the song is still played at their gigs.
In America
- The Longshoremen's Union in New York announced a twenty-four-hour boycott of British ships.
- Over 1,000 people gathered in New York's St. Patrick's Cathedral to hear Cardinal Cook offer a Mass of reconciliation for Ireland. Irish bars in the city were closed for two hours in mourning.
- In Hartford, Connecticut a monument was dedicated to Bobby Sands and the other hunger strikers in 1997. The monument stands in a traffic circle known as "Bobby Sands Circle", at the bottom of Maple Avenue near Goodwin Park
- The New Jersey State legislature voted 34-29 for a resolution honouring his 'courage and commitment.'
- In 2001 a memorial to Sands and the other hunger strikers was unveiled in Havana, Cuba.
In Asia and Oceania
- In Tehran, Iran revolutionaries sympathizing with Sands renamed the street on which the British embassy was located on from Winston Churchill street to Bobby Sands street. This name still exists today although efforts are being made by the British government to have it changed.
- The Hindustan Times said Margaret Thatcher had allowed a fellow Member of Parliament to die of starvation, an incident which had never before occurred 'in a civilized country.'
- In India, Opposition members of the Upper House stood for a minute's silence in tribute.
- The Hong Kong Standard said it was 'sad that successive British governments have failed to end the last of Europe's religious wars.'
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