On this day (15 March, 1981), forty years ago, Bellaghy IRA Volunteer Francis Hughes joins Bobby Sands on hunger strike in the H-Blocks of Long Kesh. His biography, published in An Phoblacht/Republican News in 1981, can be read here. Many tributes have been paid to...

A programme of events to commemorate the fortieth anniversary of the 1981 hunger strike can be downloaded from the link below. On this day, 1st March, 1981, Bobby Sands began his hunger strike, to be joined by more comrades in the months to follow. It was an...

The Bobby Sands Trust extends sympathy to the family and large family circle of Mrs Alice McElwee following her death in Bellaghy just short of her ninety-sixth birthday. Alice was the mother of IRA Volunteer Thomas McElwee who died on 8 August, 1981, after sixty-two...

Raymond McCartney and Mary Doyle were two of many republican prisoners who went on hunger strike in the autumn of 1980 demanding the return of political status which the British Government had arbitrarily withdrawn. In this video they outline events from forty years...

The death has occurred of writer, playwright, and pacifist Eugene McCabe (90). Eugene’s trilogy of plays on the differing traditions in the conflict was titled Victims and was filmed by RTÉ. About it he said: “The overall theme is, of course, the futility of violence....

Today is the 39th anniversary of the death of Micky Devine, the tenth and last man to die on the 1981 hunger strike. Below are a number of links to events held throughout this year (mostly online as a result of the Corona Virus pandemic) to commemorate the hunger...

Today marks the thirty-ninth anniversary of the death on hunger strike of IRA Volunteer, Bobby Sands MP. Regardless of the passage of time the 1981 hunger strike in which ten young men laid down their lives over seven-months increases in historical significance and in...

Well-known republican activist Belfast’s Lily Fitzsimons has died after a long illness. Lily was born in North Belfast in 1937 and lived in the city throughout her life, moving to the west of the city after she married. She joined with the women of Andersonstown and...

The death has occurred of leading republican Francie Brolly, a civil rights activist, a former prisoner, singer and songwriter, and for seven years until 2010 Sinn Féin MLA for East Derry. Only last August Francie, along with his wife Anne, attended the relaunch of...