ABSTRACT
On 3 October 1981 the inmates of the Maze prison ended their hunger strike, which had cost the lives of ten IRA and INLA members. In a statement written by Richard O’Rawe, the Provisional IRA’s Public Relations Officer (PRO), the inmates called off their protest with the following words: ‘There were several reasons given by our comrades for going on hunger strike. One was because we had no choice and no other means of securing a principled solution to the four year protest. Another, and of fundamental importance, was to advance the Irish people’s right to liberty.’ In an earlier part of the statement the British government was blamed for the ‘murder’ of their ten comrades, while the authorities and politicians of the Republic of Ireland were accused of being ‘accessories to the legalised murder’ of these men. Blame was also laid at the door of the SDLP as well as the Catholic Church, which was harshly criticised for having ‘pressurised’ the inmates’ families into calling off their strike and for failing to back up the republicans’ demands, thereby adopting an ‘extremely immoral stance’. The criticism of their ‘hypocrisy’ and lack of ‘moral fibre’ was completed with the following diagnosis: ‘The logical conclusion of this analysis is that nationalist pacifism in the Northern Ireland contexts dooms the nationalist population to subserviency, perpetuates partition, and thwarts the quest for a just and lasting peace in Ireland.’1
