Ten Men Dead:
Wakelee-Lynch, Joe
THE BATTLE OF LONG KESH TEN MEN DEAD The Story of the 1981 Irish Hunger Strike David Beresford Atlantic Monthly Press, $18.95, 334 pp. Joe Wakelee-Lynch I am standing on the thresh-old of...
...May God have mercy on my soul...
...Whether the strike was successful continues to be a matter of debate...
...And they say the lonely journey of the ten boosted IRA recruitment to this day...
...It is we who are on top of the situation and we who are the stronger...
...He crossed that mortal threshold sixty-six days later...
...But some say the strike brought the issue of Northern Ireland into a harsh and revealing light...
...By chronicling the "battle of Long Kesh," he nonetheless answers the questions by inference: the IRA was waging a war...
...That HH was the vision and prayer of Bobby Sands, an Irish Republican Army prisoner, when he began his hunger strike to the death in Belfast's Long Kesh prison in March 1981...
...Beresford puts in human terms the conduct of an often frightful and inhumane struggle...
...David Beresford's Ten Men Dead chronicles this war-within-a-war: the battle of wills between the IRA and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher...
...Hunger strikes are known to have taken place according to ancient codes of justice up to the seventeenth century...
...Their rationale was simple...
...Fasting on" one's offender was conducted by sitting on a person's doorstep, refusing to eat, and shaming him or her into addressing one's grievance...
...He is currently editing a collection of essays, Contemporary British Women Writers: Narrative Strategies, and writing on Anita Brookner, Muriel Spark, Elizabeth Taylor, and Ivy Compton-Burnett...
...He makes the incomprehensible comprehensible...
...Beresford doesn't engage in the debate over the ethics of the hunger strike but paints the picture of a war waged even from the prison cells...
...But the moral clarity reckoned on by the fasters was clouded by their use of fasting as a weapon in a political-military campaign...
...His latest book is Iron Destinies, Lost Opportunities (Harper & Row...
...the hunger strike of 1981 was no more and no less than a weapon in the battle...
...They would shame Maggie Thatcher before the eyes of the world and, in so doing, bring worldwide scrutiny to the broader political issues of the fate of Ulster's six counties and the Irish struggle...
...The target of the Long Kesh hunger strike was the 1975 British withdrawal of special inmate status for IRA political prisoners...
...Joe Wakelee-Lynch I am standing on the thresh-old of another trembling world...
...to measure the strike against a strict Gandhian standard is to compare apples with oranges...
...W]e are fighting a war and by choice we have placed ourselves in the front line...
...Irish history is replete with legendary examples of the hunger strike...
...CHARLES R. MORRIS is a partner in an investment banking firm...
...But the hunger strike held a particular and hallowed place specifically in Republican history...
...The willingness to suffer for a cause was the core of Gandhi's message and King's nonviolence...
...Four months into the hunger strike, Brendan McFarlane, the IRA commander inside Long Kesh, wrote in the weary, but determined voice of a battle commander: We took a decision and committed ourselves to hunger-strike action...
...Yet I feel the part we have played in forwarding the liberation struggle has been great...
...At first the prisoners resisted with the "blanket protest": they refused to wear the prison garb of criminals, covering their bodies with only the blankets in their cells...
...By fasting, and perhaps dying, they would dramatize their conditions and bring public consciousness to bear on their status as political prisoners...
...And nine other IRA members-Hughes, McCreesh, O'Hara, Lynch, McDonnell, Hurson, Doherty, McElwee, and Devine-soon followed...
...Our losses have been heavy- that I realize only too well...
...I still feel we should maintain this position and fight on in current fashion...
...And it was fasting that had been a factor in Britain's 1972 decision to grant special status to IRA prisoners in the first place...
...PAUL CONNOLLY is the MacArthur Professor of Humanities and director of the Institute for Writing and Thinking at Bard College.king at Bard College...
...that is, he makes understandable how ten men could face their own deaths, brought on by voluntary fasting, even while watching their comrades waste and wither away.ROBERT E. HOSMER, JR., teaches in the department of English language and literature at Smith College...
...MacSwiney's insight into the power of suffering as a means of effecting political change is shared by many reformers and revolutionaries of the twentieth century...
...Third-world revolutionaries in various parts of the globe have calculated that the ability to withstand the greater suffering and losses would give them the margin of victory in wars of national liberation...
...It was a war of symbols as well as guns and gelignite...
...It was Terence MacSwiney, an important IRA leader of the 1920s who died after a seventy-four-day fast, who prophetically uttered what is today an IRA credo: "It is not those who can inflict the most, but those that can suffer the most who will conquer...
...DAVID CASTRONOVO is professor of English at Pace University of New York, and author of several books of criticism including Edmund Wilson (Fredrick Ungar...
...But by 1981 the IRA prisoners convinced the IRA command that only the ultimate prison protest, the hunger strike, could force the British to reinstate political prisoner status...
...Thatcher refused to give in, and the IRA lost ten men of iron determination...
...Then the protest escalated to the "dirty protest": prisoners refused to clean out their chamber pots, pouring their urine under the cell doors, and slopping their excrement across the walls...
...London had declared that IRA prisoners were no different from other criminals and that bombings and assassinations were no different from larceny, theft, or assault...
...JOE WAKELEE-LYNCH, formerly assistant editor and book review editor o/Sojourners, is a free-lance writer in Washington, D.C...
...To these observers, the fasts were hardly nonviolent and the deaths of the prisoners were not simply the responsibility of the Thatcher government...
...Britain was trying both to delegitimize the resistance of the IRA and to erode its support...
...When the prisoners in Long Kesh prison began their strike, they counted on the power of the deed...
...In the eyes of many observers, the IRA's appropriating Gandhian tactics counted for little since the strikers had planned and carried out acts of ruthless and unrepented violence...
...Therefore we maintain...
Vol. 116 • October 1989 • No. 17
