ABSTRACT
Bobby Sands's hunger strike and death wove together a number of the most heroic and tragic strands of Irish history and contemporary Northern Ireland. The Forum for a New Ireland was not a British policy initiative on Northern Ireland, but it fits into the same category as the response to the hunger strikes. The connection with Speaker O'Neill was not, of course, the only effort of the Irish government to enlist the aid of the United States. The Irish American groups illustrate the enduring influence of the transnational linkage between people with a primordial bond of ethnicity. Human rights have been, and remain, the area of greatest vulnerability for the United Kingdom. Police and prison practices and judicial procedures in Ulster have been scrutinized by numerous organizations. The positions of the political parties in Northern Ireland were changing, at a glacial pace to be sure, and included the receptivity of Sinn Fein and the Official Unionist Party to negotiations.
