The last months of Bobby Sands' life, as seen from afar and up close
CBC Archives | Posted: May 5, 2019 12:30 PM | Last Updated: May 5, 2021
High-profile hunger strike drew worldwide media attention in the spring of 1981
In the spring of 1981, a hunger strike involving an IRA prisoner became a story that caught the world's attention.
Forty years ago, Bobby Sands led a protest effort with the aim of having himself and other members of the Irish Republican Army treated as political prisoners, rather than imprisoned criminals.
His story was just one chapter in the long and bloody history of the Troubles, a conflict that claimed thousands of lives over a three-decade period.
But the Sands story was one that the world was watching and one that CBC covered closely, on radio and television, over the 66 days that it unfolded.
Sands, a long-haired, former apprentice bus builder and IRA member, had twice faced imprisonment in Northern Ireland during the Troubles. The second time, he was handed a 14-year sentence for a gun possession charge.
He was just a few years into that sentence when he began his hunger strike at the Maze prison in Belfast on March 1, 1981. At that point, he'd spent nearly his entire adult life behind bars.
The start date came just over a week before his 27th birthday — the last he would ever see and a fate he understood.
"To be honest I think I'm going to die," Sands wrote in a note to IRA leadership, which was published in Ten Men Dead, South African journalist David Beresford's 1987 account of the hunger strike.
By the end of that first month, three other hunger strikers had joined Sands in refusing food.
Among other developments in March, Sands agreed to put his name forward on a ballot for a parliamentary byelection in Fermanagh and South Tyrone.
A 'propaganda coup'
And on April 10, the imprisoned Sands would, improbably, win that seat in the British House of Commons — one that he would never sit in, but which paid promotional dividends to his cause.
"Bobby Sands' victory today is being called the greatest propaganda coup for the IRA and the republican cause in Northern Ireland in years," the CBC's Mark Phillips reported to viewers on The National.
Phillips further reported that the British government made it clear that Sands' victory at the polls would not "afford him any special treatment."
Anger and unrest
By late April, the reports from Northern Ireland didn't change much — the hunger strike continued, protests continued and the efforts by outsiders to halt the hunger strike continued as well.
But time was running out for Sands, who was then well into the eighth week of his hunger strike. His body was weakening and he was losing his eyesight.
"The violence sparked by Sands' protest continued in Belfast and Londonderry amid last-ditch attempts to find a compromise that might save his life," news anchor Knowlton Nash told viewers on The National on April 23, 1981.
The National illustrated those tensions by airing images of vehicles that had been set ablaze — familiar visuals to those who had followed the ongoing Troubles — and of firefighters dealing separately with damage to a home caused by a firebomb that had been aimed at British soldiers.
"The level of violence may have subsided today, but the anger has not," said Phillips, standing in front of a burning vehicle, adding that things were expected to get worse if Sands were to die.
'He is absolutely determined'
The following night, The National led its broadcast with an interview with Patrick Buckley — a priest who had visited Sands inside his cell at the Maze prison.
He didn't see reason to hope for Sands to pull back from what he had started.
"If Bobby Sands doesn't die, I would be very surprised and shocked ... because he is absolutely determined," Buckley told The National's Michael Vaughan.
Furthermore, Buckley said Sands "was absolutely convinced in his heart that he was doing what Christ said it was good for a man to do when he laid down his life for his friends."
Canadian protest
Sands' hunger strike even spurred protests abroad, including in downtown Toronto, where supporters gathered outside a British Airways office on April 25, 1981.
They were joined by counter-protesters who waved the Union Jack, carried placards — and in one case, a mock noose that can be seen in Tibbles' report above — and denounced Sands and his supporters.
"The two groups hurled insults at each other, while police kept them apart," the CBC's Kevin Tibbles told viewers of the local Toronto newscast that night.
The Toronto Star reported that 12 police officers were on hand to keep things under control. The paper said no arrests were made.
'A day we hoped would never come'
Sands died on May 5, 1981, nearly 10 weeks after the hunger strike had commenced.
The CBC's Barbara Frum spoke to Bernadette Devlin McAliskey, an organizer who worked in support of Sands and other IRA hunger strikers, about his death.
"This is not a day that the people of Ireland or I, personally, have been looking forward to, or expecting for a long time. It is a day we hoped would never come," she told Frum on CBC Radio's As It Happens.
The news of his death led The National that night, with Phillips reporting from Belfast, where rioters had tangled with British soldiers in the hours following Sands' death.
Phillips reported that Sands' body was released from the Maze prison and brought to the home of his parents, "as preparations were being made for a full military IRA funeral."
In London, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher said her government was "on the side of protecting the law-abiding and innocent citizen and shall continue in our efforts to stamp out terrorism."
Thatcher called Sands "a convicted criminal" who "chose to take his life, which is a choice his organization did not allow to many of their victims."
'This sort of situation has to stop'
The funeral held for Sands in Belfast two days later was attended by thousands of people, a scale of which had rarely been seen.
"It's certainly the biggest gathering that I've ever seen in Northern Ireland, covering the Troubles, since they began, in fact," said Jim Dougal, a journalist with the public broadcaster RTÉ in the Republic of Ireland, when speaking to As It Happens that day.
The CBC's Patrick Brown was also present at the funeral. He spoke to CBC Radio's Sunday Morning about the end to the hunger striker's personal story, as well as the reaction among Irish Catholics to his death.
"Quite a lot of people that have been opposed to the Troubles over the past 12 years and not have been supporters of the IRA were rather revolted by the idea that a young man ... would starve himself to death in support of this cause and would be allowed to do so," Brown told Sunday Morning, a few days after the funeral.
Brown said many of the political moderates who walked behind Sands' hearse and IRA honour guard did so "saying that surely this sort of situation has to stop and demonstrating their support for a united Ireland."
But three other hunger strikers would die that same month. Another six would follow in July and August of 1981.
The hunger strike would eventually be called off in October of that year.