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...

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...

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...

‘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...

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...

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...

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...

Irish-American writer Tim O’Grady reviews the recently published book by An Fhuiseog, The Comrades, tributes to the hunger strikers by former prisoners, which is on sale through republican outlets in Dublin and Belfast. -oo0oo- IT IS DIFFICULT to approach this book as...

Members of the Bobby Sands Trust were saddened to  hear today of the death of Tony MacMahon (82), one of the best-known figures in traditional Irish music and a friend of the republican POWs, during earlier, grim times. In his time in RTÉ Tony, from Ennis, County...

In 1981 Jim Gibney, a member of Sinn Féin and of the National H-Block/Armagh Committee, liaised with the hunger strikers in the H-Block prison hospital. He tells of that period in the book, The Comrades Three months after the hunger strike ended Jim was arrested,...