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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781504023924 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | The Permanent Press (ORD) |
| Publication date: | 11/24/2015 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 160 |
| File size: | 331 KB |
About the Author
John Feehan joined the Irish Army and reached the rank of captain before resigning in 1945. He had four children. He founded the successful Cork-based publishing house Mercier Press in 1944 and served as its managing director. In 1946 he published This TremendousLover by Dom Eugene Boylan, which sold over a million copies. At the Frankfurt Book Fair he secured the translation rights of German books on philosophy and religion that sold well. In the 1960s he launched a successful range of paperbacks on Irish literature, culture, religion, and history.
Read an Excerpt
Bobby Sands
And the Tragedy of Northern Ireland
By John Feehan
The Permanent Press
Copyright © 1983 John FeehanAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-5040-2392-4
CHAPTER 1
The Background
This is not a natural state of any kind at all. It is an artificial product created to destroy political rights and to maintain one group of people in power. By its very essence it denies every principle of democracy.
RICHARD CROSSMAN MP Labour Cabinet Minister
The man was a publican and a Roman Catholic and was therefore liable to assassination.
NORTHERN IRELAND ATTORNEY-GENERAL, later LORD CHIEF JUSTICE BABBINGTON
Day after day, week after week, month after month the nation that gave Magna Carta and Habeas Corpus and Due Process to the world imprisons hundreds of innocent citizens of Northern Ireland without warrant, charge or trial, often on the evidence of the rankest hearsay and deception. We read the reports of torture with horror as they describe the efforts of British intelligence to learn the secrets of the IRA by methods no civilised people can countenance.
SENATOR EDWARD KENNEDY
On Thursday 7 May 1981 the people of Belfast witnessed one of the largest funerals ever seen in Ireland since the death of Parnell. It was the funeral of a young Member of Parliament, Bobby Sands — labelled a criminal by Margaret Thatcher — a young poet who died after sixty-six days of a painful hunger-strike and eight years of imprisonment.
A hundred thousand people walked in silence behind the draped coffin and almost as many more lined the route. Old men and young, dazed women and bewildered children cried openly as the coffin holding his ravaged body slowly passed them by. He had died when all earth was bursting into life, when summer was softly creeping over his own Belfast hills, when the larks were soaring high in the sky bringing the music of hope to the weary, war-torn people of this stricken, smouldering city.
Earlier at the Requiem Mass in St Luke's church there was an unpleasant moment when a rule requiring the removal of the Irish flag from the coffin was enforced. It was hard for the onlookers to understand this regulation since they full well knew that had the flag been a Union Jack it would have been permitted. Indeed many would have left the church in disgust were it not for the fact that they did not wish to offend the family. This critical attitude of the crowd was not helped either by the knowledge that, apart from the Funeral Mass, all public Masses for the repose of the soul of Bobby Sands were prohibited. Several priests wanted to concelebrate Mass that day but permission was again refused.
At two o'clock in the afternoon, the tricolour was once more put on the coffin and the funeral set out on the four mile journey to Milltown Cemetery. It was led by a lone piper playing one of the Nationalist songs which begin with the words:
But I'll wear no convict's uniform
Nor meekly serve my time
That Britain's might call Ireland's fight
Eight hundred years of crime.
At Suffolk, the police directed the cortège into the Nationalist Lenadoon estate to avoid going through the small Unionist enclave at Woodburn. Near the Busy Bee Shopping Centre there was a halt and the coffin was temporarily removed from the hearse and rested gently on steel trestles by the open roadway. Then from the midst of the throng there emerged four armed Nationalist paramilitaries who with military precison fired three rifle volleys over the coffin. They then reversed their rifles, bowed their heads and observed a minute's silence before disappearing into the crowd.
When the funeral reached the gates of Milltown Cemetery which holds the graves of hundreds of men, women and children killed by the army, police or Unionists, the sombre crowd burst into spontaneous fervent prayer. A guard of honour accompanied the coffin to the graveside. There the sad, haunting melody of the Last Post rose in spiral sound to echo through the surrounding hills. The family stood by the graveside bowed and tearstained. The perfume from the masses of flowers mingled with that of the rich, fragrant earth as Owen Carron, Bobby Sands' election agent, delivered the graveside oration.
'It is hard to describe the sadness and sorrow in our hearts today,' he said, 'as we stand at the grave of Volunteer Bobby Sands, cruelly murdered by the British government in the H-Block of Long Kesh ... Bobby has gone to join the ranks of Ireland's patriotic dead. I have no doubt that his name will mark a watershed in Irish history and will be a turning point in the struggle for Irish freedom ... Indeed Bobby is a hero and I would like first of all to express on behalf of the Republican Movement our sincere sympathy with his family and to pay tribute to them for standing by him courageously to the end. Someone once said it is hard to be a hero's mother and nobody knows that better than Mrs Sands who watched her son being daily crucified and tortured for sixty-six long days and eventually killed. Mrs Sands epitomises the Irish mothers who in every generation watched their children go out to fight and die for freedom. Despite the vilifications and slanders of some guttersnipe media and despite the hypocrisy of high churchmen and establishment politicians who condemned him, Bobby Sands will be remembered by freedom loving people throughout the world ... His determination and resolve were remarkable and his commitment and dedication total and without compromise. Always in evidence was his sincerity and compassion ... even his enemies agreed there was no hatred in him ... Bobby Sands, as representative of the blanket-men and women, died rather than be branded as a criminal ... The callous intransigence of the British government has made the hunger-strike a symbol of the struggle for freedom ... Bobby Sands is a symbol of hope for the unemployed, for the poor, for the homeless, for those divided by partition and for those trying to unite our people ... Bobby Sands has not died in vain ... He symbolises the true Irish nation which never has surrendered and never will. Let us picture him lying all alone in his cell, his body tortured and twisted in pain, surrounded by his enemies and isolated from his comrades and nothing to fight with but his will and determination ... The big British murder machine assisted by those in high places in church and state tried to break his spirit ... They tried to compromise him and his supporters but they failed.'
In a voice filled with emotion Owen Carron concluded:
'Finally, I salute you Bobby Sands. Yours has been a tough, lonely battle but you have been victorious. Your courage and bravery have been an inspiration to us all and today we take strength from your example. Your sacrifice will not be in vain ...'
The coffin was lowered into the grave. Bobby's father, brother and little son threw in the ritual spadeful of earth. 'Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust.' The tricolour was folded and, together with his gloves and beret, presented to his sorrowing mother. Slowly the people left the cemetery and went home with only their memories of yet another victim of war. In their lives the sadness of death was forever replacing the joy of living.
In the quiet evening silence of Milltown graveyard it seemed as if the Republican Movement had reached its Calvary with no Resurrection in sight, that Bobby Sands had lost and the overwhelming power of the British empire had won yet another victory.
But had it? Slowly at first, as if an initial shock had to be surmounted, the protests began. They quickly gathered momentum and in the weeks that followed this tragic day there was scarcely a country in the world that did not in some way commemorate the death of this young Irishman. Although the British propaganda machine got to work with full force, for once it was helpless before the onrush of worldwide sympathy.
In the United States over ten thousand people marched in protest to the British consulates in New York, San Francisco, Boston and Chicago. The state of Rhode Island proclaimed a day of national mourning and the New York state passed a resolution of sympathy and condemned the British. American dockers blacked all British ships on the day of the funeral. A group of influential American senators, including Ted Kennedy, sent an urgent letter to Margaret Thatcher protesting at the 'inflexible posture which must lead inevitably to more senseless violence and death.' 'Surely,' they said, 'the leaders of Great Britain have an urgent responsibility to end this tragic and unnecessary conflict.' But Thatcher, seemingly anxious to prove her manhood, refused.
In Portugal the parliament observed a minute's silence, and in the city of Le Mans, France, a new street was named Bobby Sands Street. There were widespread protests in France, Switzerland, West Germany, Belgium, Holland, Norway, Greece, Italy and almost every other European country. In Brisbane, Australia, demonstrators poured mock blood on a British flag and took it to the local offices of the British High Commissioner. But perhaps the most touching message of all came from Lech Walesa who sent his deepest sympathy on behalf of the whole Solidarity movement in Poland.
At home a day of national mourning was observed, despite the official disapproval of the Fianna Fáil government, and in many cities and towns in Ireland shops and businesses closed and thousands of marchers walked in silent protest. This official attitude contrasted strangly with that of previous Fianna Fáil governments. In February 1940 when two IRA men, Peter Barnes and James McCormack, were executed in England for the Coventry bombings, the then Fianna Fáil government declared a day of national mourning and flags were flown at half-mast on all public buildings. And when IRA man Tom Williams was sentenced to death in Belfast in 1942 the same Fianna Fáil government conducted a massive and widespread campaign for his reprieve. This drastic change of attitude is frequently quoted by Nationalists to show that at the time of Bobby Sands' death Fianna Fáil had abandoned its early ideals.
The Fine Gael party had, however, not changed in its cooperative attitude towards Britain. Strict instructions were issued by party headquarters to all their urban and county councillors not to vote for any motion of sympathy when such a motion came before the council. But quite a number of them ignored this rather insensitive direction.
The reaction of the world press was instant, and a lot of it highly critical of the British. Perhaps because of this the London press closed ranks and blazed into an emotive hysteria. The Daily Telegraph said: 'No kind of glory attends the suicide of Robert Sands. Courage he had, but it was the courage of the ruthless and corrupted sort which holds human life in contempt.' The London Times said: 'The British government bears no responsibility whatever for Mr Sands' death. He committed suicide ... he was not being oppressed or ill-treated. Indeed the opposite was true.' The Daily Mail used the occasion to give its valued opinions on Catholics: '... it is one of the alarming characteristics of all too many Catholics these days that they seem ready to excuse terrorism or terrorists where those involved are fellow Catholics.' The Sun wrote under the heading SANDS LEGACY OF EVIL: 'It was Bobby Sands who stood for tyranny ... his hope was that from the grave his twisted sacrifice would impel other men into twisted acts of bloody revenge.' But a real gem came from the Daily Express: 'Why then do young men like Robert Sands commit suicide for such a cause? Because they follow darkness, believing it to be a romantic dream. Hatred is their goal. Falsehood is their goal.' The Daily Mirror was more restrained: 'Sands died in the Maze in more senses than one. It is not only the name of a prison. It is a description of Irish politics. Britain has been trapped in that maze for too long. Its task now is to find the way which will lead it out altogether.'
Reaction of the foreign press was somewhat different. The New York Daily News said: 'He was a rare one, a young man who thought enough of the place where he lives to want to die for it.' Spain's El Païs condemned Britain's implacable toughness. West Germany's Allegemeine Zeitung said that 'The death of Bobby Sands turned attention to the weak point of British democracy.' In France Le Monde said: 'His memory and recognition of the meaning of his sacrifice are heavy with an emotion that several times this century has aroused the passions of the world against Britain.' The Hindustan Times said that Thatcher 'had allowed a member of the House of Commons, a colleague in fact, to die of starvation. Never had such an incident occurred in a civilised country.'
At home the reaction was intriguing. The Unionist Belfast Telegraph said: 'It is difficult for any Irish Nationalist to accept that the British government may be in the right ...' The Irish Times carried a special supplement on Bobby Sands and concluded: 'Governments ... must know when to temper the rules of law with understanding, sympathy, mercy ... the British government could not rise to this.' The Irish Press said: 'Belfast narrowed his options as a boy, gunmen chased him from his home and from his job ... In jail Britain narrowed his options to two: live as a criminal or die for an ideal. His choice will be long remembered ... Mrs Thatcher is institutionalising brutality in her prison in the H-Block and guaranteeing, not merely risking, massive violence and bloodshed on the streets of Northern Ireland.'
This extraordinary world press coverage, of which this is but a tiny section, was supplemented, and one might say, reinforced by an equally massive radio and television coverage and indeed it is now generally believed that more people saw the funeral of Bobby Sands on their screens than saw the year's most publicised event, the royal wedding.
No matter how one looks at it, or what one's politics are, one is compelled to ask the question: Do responsible statesmen, parliaments, newspapers, journalists, television presenters in every country in the world sympathetically and favourably comment upon convicted 'criminals' such as Mrs Thatcher described Bobby Sands? Is there any single case in the entire history of the world where the death of a 'criminal' was accorded such international admiration and sympathy?
His friend and comrade Danny Morrison paid a last moving tribute after the British refused him permission to say farewell:
My dear friend and comrade, although it has happened I still can't believe it. I would have liked to have said goodbye and shook that rare strong hand once more, but that was denied me. You are at peace now, out of the hell blocks that murdered you, out of the clutches of the screws and of British rule, like the lark, free and at peace. Now we need your prayers, your courage and determination, that beautiful unvanquished spirit that brought you through those tribulations. Watch over us.
To understand the world into which Bobby Sands was born we must take a brief look at the conditions which existed in the six counties of Ulster, commonly referred to as Northern Ireland, since its establishment after the Treaty. Human beings are moulded and developed not only by parental and home influences but also by the influences of the political, social and economic milieu surrounding them. This milieu had a decisive impact on the short life of Bobby Sands.
The Six County State had its origins in the seventeenth century when, after the defeat of the native Irish chieftains, the British occupation forces evicted hundreds of thousands of Irish Catholics from their lands and homes and replaced them with English and Scottish Protestants. The present Unionists in the North are the descendants of these settlers. But they have long since ceased to be an ethnic group. There were many other parts of Ireland where the British dispossessed the Irish and gave their land to foreigners, but the largest concentration was in the northern part of the country where they were numerically strong enough to form a pressure group of almost coercive power. Those of the dispossessed Irish who remained at home and did not emigrate became the hewers of wood and drawers of water, menial servants in their own country, subservient to their dispossessors. The present Nationalists are descended from these dispossessed Irish.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Bobby Sands by John Feehan. Copyright © 1983 John Feehan. Excerpted by permission of The Permanent Press.
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