Self immolative martyrdom:
Explaining the Irish Hungerstrike Tradition

These notions would have been reprised during the Gaelic literary revival beginning in the late 1800s (with foregrounding of mythic heroes like Cuchulainn). As for historical sources, the Brehon Laws evidence a not unrelated ethos: If one had been gravely offended by a neighbour, one undertook a fast and stationed oneself close to his home - in the hope that he might be shamed into repairing the injury.

After the Famine, there was an upsurge in Irish popular religiosity - so the Christian notion would have been restored to prominence in the public consciousness, of a self-sacrificing hero pouring out his life-blood in order to redeem his people’s fall from grace.

The nationalistic thinking of Padraic Pearse involved some confluence of both these currents. Pearse must have seen that the 1916 uprising which he advocated against the British power, was militarily doomed from the start. But its timing for Easter Week underlined the blood sacrifice, the re-enactment of Calvary, which would redeem the Irish nation from its apostasy...And, sure enough, the execution of the twelve 1916 leaders did rouse the spirit of the nation - culminating in the 1918 nationalist electoral victory, and the largely successful subsequent war of independence.

The next form taken by self-immolation in Ireland was the hunger-strike on the part of prisoners - their target being the British administration and, from 1923, the Irish Free State government. Thousands of prisoners had their demands met, or were released - but there were seven deaths. In 1918, Thomas Ashe died on hunger-strike, demanding political-prisoner status. In 1920, Terence MacSwiney, Lord Mayor of Cork, died on hunger-strike protesting his imprisonment (having at the end been sent the Apostolic Blessing by Pope Benedict XV). The fate of these men attracted vast crowds of sympathizers - and Ashe’s funeral was attended by 200 priests and two bishops.

So powerful had the hunger-strike become as weapon for inflaming public opinion that, two decades later, under a Fianna Fail government, a media black-out was used which concealed the deaths of two republican prisoners on hunger-strike.

In October 1981, Bobby Sands and nine other republicans from Northern Ireland’s Maze Prison died on hunger-strike demanding political status. Irish bishops in the North declined to condemn the hunger-strike - just as church leaders did not distance themselves at the time of Ashe’s and MacSwiney’s deaths. Advocates of hunger-striking, therefore, would still have been able to claim a certain redemptive significance for it.

George Sweeney is Programme Administrator for the Northern Ireland Centre for European Co-Operation, University of Ulster, Magee College, Derry