LATEST NEWS
The Bobby Sands Mural
The image at this site in Sevastopol Street is the most photographed mural in Belfast and is visited by hundreds of tourists every week, regardless of the season. It is maintained by the Bobby Sands Trust. Many artists have contributed to its design, including Danny...
New Pics of Bobby Sands
The Bobby Sands Trust has welcomed the discovery of pictures of Bobby Sands taking part in the first political status protest in Belfast in August 1976, just two months before his arrest. The pictures have also been published in today’s Irish News. Bobby had only been...
Nell McCafferty
News broke this morning that veteran activist and writer Nell McCafferty had died in her County Donegal nursing home. She was a founding member of the Irish Women’s Liberation Movement, a campaigning journalist and playwright. Nell was born in 1944 in the Bogside and...
Michael Gaughan’s Anniversary
Fifty years ago today, 3 June 1974, Michael Gaughan, from Ballina, County Mayo, died on hunger strike in Parkhurst Prison. Michael was one of the earliest IRA Volunteers to be imprisoned in England in the post-1969 phase of the struggle, sentenced to seven years on 23...
‘But still we resist’ – Bobby Sands
Letters and poems of Bobby Sands continue to be discovered forty-three years after his death on hunger strike on 5 May 1981. Last September the legendary British peace campaigner and poet Pat Arrowsmith died at the age of ninety-three. Among her mementoes was a...
‘The Lark’ continues to inspire
Bobby Sands’s life and sacrifice continues to inspire singers and songwriters, of which, of course, Bobby himself was one, his songs and poetry regularly being recorded four decades after his death on hunger strike on 5 May 1981. In January Anne Rynne (sister of...
Fassbender on Bobby Sands
‘This film is definitely the closest to my heart out of all the work I have done…’ So said the German-Irish actor Michael Fassbender during a fascinating and extraordinary hour-long interview with host Juan Banco at last week’s (9-20 November) LEFFEST in Portugal. In...
Surfing Into Life on a Bathboard
This is the enigmatic title of former blanket man Jake Mac Siacais’s memoir which previously was published as gaeilge. Here, guest reviewer Roy Greenslade gives his opinion on the book, part of the growing canon of prolific republican prison literature. -oo0oo- ‘I...
On The Blanket
Many republican memoirs have been published in recent years covering a variety of prison experiences, from Síle Darragh’s John Lennon Is Dead, to Jaz McCann’s 6000 Days. Eoghan ‘Gino’ Mac Cormaic, who was sentenced to life imprisonment, first published his book as...
Death of Liam McCloskey
The death has taken place of Liam McCloskey, one of the surviving hunger strikers from 1981. Liam was originally from Dungiven, County Derry. He had been arrested in an early morning raid on his home in December 1976. Also arrested at that time was Kevin Lynch, his...