There was a huge turnout from republicans across Ireland to Leigue Cemetery, Ballina, Mayo, to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the death of Frank Stagg on hunger strike on 12 February 1976. At the same time, the Terence MacSwiney Committee based in London,...

Ciaran Quinn, Sinn Féin’s North American representative, reviews Laurence McKeown’s recently published memoir, And Flowers Grew Up Through the Concrete: A Prison Memoir 1981—1992. -oo0oo- THERE is a t-shirt in the Sinn Féin Shop in Dublin with a silhouette of the...

A well-known prison poem, ‘A Bright Star’, authorship attributed to Bobby Sands for many decades, was actually written by another blanket man, Tony ‘Scatter’ O’Hara from Derry, whose brother Patsy, an INLA Volunteer, died on the 1981 hunger strike. Back in 1980,...

‘2025 has been an important year for those who devour prison and former prisoner writings,’ says Eoghan ‘Gino’ Mac Cormaic who served fifteen years in jail, including five years on the blanket. In this feature he casts his eye over publications produced by former...

Today marks the forty-fourth anniversary of the fifth hunger striker to die, Joe McDonnell. Below we link to a documentary by Ocean FM about Joe’s death which won the Silver Award in the prestigious International New York Festivals Radio Awards in 2022. The...

ON THE EVE of the death of Bobby Sands forty-four years ago tomorrow, a huge number of former prisoners and comrades, and over a thousand republican supporters, gathered at Twinbrook, Belfast, for the unveiling of a statue in honour of Bobby and those who died in the...

Of all the northern prison chaplains throughout our most recent conflict the cleric closest to the women prisoners in Armagh was the human rights campaigner Fr Raymond Murray, who died at the age of eighty-six last month. He was a chaplain to the prison from 1967...

The funeral took place of Brendan 'Bik' McFarlane on Tuesday, 25 February. Mourners, including many former prisoners, Sinn Féin TDs and MPs and Belfast City Councillors, and others who had travelled great distances, gathered outside his home just off the Cliftonville...

The Bobby Sands Trust has extended sympathy to the family of Dafydd Elis-Thomas, former leader of Plaid Cymru and MP who became a member of the House of Lords in 1992, and who died on 7 February. His funeral will be held at Llandaf Cathedral, Cardiff on Friday...

The Bobby Sands Trust is saddened to learn of the death of our friend and comrade and fellow Trust member, Brendan ‘Bik’ McFarlane, who died in hospital earlier today (21 February). We offer our deepest condolences to Brendan’s wife Lene and their children, Thomas,...