The riddle of Mr Sands

by tomas Fri May 05, 2006 20:30

very interesting that when the sinn fein of 2006 commerates the death of bobby sands, that the family of bobby sands has nothing to do with sinn fein's capitalizing on the 81 hunger strike.

by tomas - shame on you sinn fein Fri May 05, 2006 20:34

Brendan McLaughlin sits jack-knifed in his wheelchair, a knot of gathered anger, and snaps the filter off another cigarette. He hasn't been able to taste tobacco, or much else, since the stroke he suffered seven years ago, so breaks the tips off before smoking them . . . 40 a day . . . right down to his kippercoloured fingers.
Photographs and republican paraphernalia wainscot the walls of his council bungalow . . . photographs of volunteer graves, pictures of famous IRA men, a bodhran made in Portlaoise jail. But it's a pencil sketch of the 10 men who carried their protest right to the end that draws his eye.
"You see them boys up there?" he says. "They died for nothing."
He's angry about a lot of things . . .
Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness ("scum bastards"), the peace process ("a sell-out") and the Brits ("no business being here . . . never had, never will").
"They're all getting ready to sit in Stormont, " he says, "when there's still a war to fight."
Paralysed down one side, he's no longer capable of prosecuting that war, but it goes on in the theatre of his head.
"I haven't changed, " he says. To him, it's a badge of honour. "See the rest of them . . . all them other boys you're talking to . . . they have changed.
They're supporting what's going on.
McGuinness and Adams . . . accepting the 26 counties! Accepting the six!
They're sitting in Dail Eireann. Now they're sitting up in Stormont.
"The next thing they're going to do is go on the police board and you know what that means. They're following the same lines as Michael Collins and Eamon de Valera. It's Irish history repeating itself, that's what it is. What did Michael Collins do? He turned the gun on his own men in Dublin. De Valera . . . what did he do? He got into power and done the same thing in the '40s. IRA men killed. The same thing will happen when they go on this police board. You can take it from me."
His two teenage boys come in and out at regular intervals. He's separated from their mother, who lives just a few doors away.
"We still get on okay. I'm easy-going.
I try not to get down, " he says, anxious not to sound like an ornery old man trapped not only in a wheelchair but in a perpetual past.
To him, the Troubles were part of a long continuum that started eight centuries ago and will only end once the last British soldier has left and Ireland is unified. Ten or 15 years ago just about every republican he knew believed this. Now, all he sees is compromise and fudge. "Money, big jobs, big houses . . . that's all it's about, " he says.
In 1981, he was 29 and well into a 12year sentence for possession of a pistol when he was chosen to replace Francis Hughes, the second man to die, on the hunger strike. But less than a week into his fast he was rushed to hospital suffering from a perforated ulcer and internal bleeding.
The aim of the hunger strike was to crank up the moral pressure on the British government by way of a series of drawn-out, highly publicised deaths. A sick hunger striker was a liability. The doctors said that a combination of gangrene, blood loss and oxygen starvation to the brain would have killed McLaughlin within 48 agonising hours. The IRA took him off the protest.
"I'd have gone the whole way, " he says. "I'd have done it. They [the prison authorities] were putting the food in the cell every day, hoping I'd have a nibble. I was too f**king hard for that. I'd no fear of death. I've been around too many corners in my time."
Would he have gone on hunger strike had he foreseen where the republican movement would be 25 years on? "Probably not, no. It's sad that 10 men died. And for what? See, I knew the best of them boys. Joe McDonnell was in the cell next to me. I knew Bobby Sands as well. I think they'd turn in their graves, them 10 there, with the way things are now."
His voice rises an octave. "Hit them in England, that's what I say. Forget about this country. I said that over 30 years ago. Hit them in their own country, where it hurts."
Some of his old comrades, who ask about him and still think fondly of him, say that it's being largely housebound and cut off from the mainstream of republican thinking, that has him still thinking about the conflict in abstract terms.
"No, it's just that they've changedf and I haven't, " he adds, flashing a proud smile, then twists a cigarette in the bottom of the ashtray and lights another.

by erse - (iosaf) Fri May 05, 2006 23:24

By thinking you work your Freedom.

Oliver Sheppard RHA (1865-1941) taught at the College of Art in Dublin, whose students today were on the front of the newspapers in Ireland - protesting. He cast his bronze of Cu Chullain in the winter of 1911 to 1912, only in 1936 was it placed by the Irish state acting through the last Irish Free State minister for Post & Telegraphs in the GPO, Dublin as a memorial to the 1916 rebellion.
Cu Chullain the Ulsterman. whom they only approached when the raven started eating him

The Citizen by Richard Hamilton (1924 -2005) was painted as oil on canvass as a dyptich on two panels with dimensions of 200 x 100.9cm and 200x100cm, between 1981 and 1983. The dyptich formed part of a three series reflection on the conflict in the north of Ireland and was supposed to stylise a "dirty protester" in Long Kesh / The Maze as a Christian Martyr . The other two of the three paintings by Hamilton are The Subject 1988-9 shows an Orangeman, a member of the order dedicated to defend Unionism in Northern Ireland. The State 1993 shows a British soldier undertaking solitary patrol on a street. Many dismissed them as naive. Though Hamilton had earned respect for his treatment of Irish subjects since the 1940's with attempts to illustrate James Joyce's "Ulysses". The Citizen was first displayed alongside an installation of drawings of Long Kesh its prisoners and those worke there by Rita Donnagh his partner, in an "art endevour" which was welcomed to the wrath of Thatcher in London with a grant from the GLC under Ken Livingstone. The Citizen was then purchased by the Tate Gallery London in 1985, but due to display space limitations did not hang before the public until 2000 and the opening of the second Tate Gallery.

It was 9 years after Mr Sand's death.

I'm not "waffling" by posting these 3 illustrations, Nor am I really offering any analysis, I just thought that this category "history and heritage" was the best place to drop these pebbles in the nation's consciousness, in nations' consciousness, the riddle of Mr Sands is as much a British riddle as any other.

If you wish to fight the British state today and its continued lobby to have "Bobby Sands street" in Tehran changed back to "Winston Churchill Street" (where indeed there embassy is located) you can do the electronic petition thing here :- http://www.labournet.net/events/0402/sands1.html http://www.irlandinit-hd.de/sub_misc/bsands.htm

Or if you really wanted to be p-o-l-i-t-i-c-a-l you could suggest to both the Iranian and British governments that they rename all their streets, avenues squares and malls - either "murderer" or "martyr" and number them the sensible yankee way.

Bobby Sands poetry touched me years after I had first felt the politicisation his slow death caused.
I like many readers / collective members was only a kid. Many of our readers weren't even alive. Some of our other readers could fit it all into a narrative. pit pat But I was just a kid. & I didn't know how to paint, I didn't know what was happening, but I like many of you, stored it up in my "curious cerebral net" & decided I'd ask questions about it later.

= Ask questions!

May Bobby Sands. & all the others who died in the Irish / British conflicts
Rest in Peace.

Richard Hamilton (1924 - 2005) painted "the Citizen" between 1981 and 1983

Oliver Sheppard RHA (1865 - 1941) cast this bronze in the winter of 1911 to 1912. (not 1916)