In Brendan J. Byrne’s new documentary Bobby Sands: 66 Days, the unmistakable voice of Margaret Thatcher rings out, issuing the declaration that sounded the death knell for ten republican prisoners.
“There is no such thing as political murder, political bombing or political violence,” Thatcher insisted. “There is only criminal murder, criminal bombing, criminal violence. There will be no political status!”

Thatcher’s unyielding proclamation was part of a speech, given in Stormont, Belfast on March 5, 1981.
It was the then British Prime Minister’s response to the Irish republican prisoners who had gone on hunger strike, first in 1980 and again in 1981. They were protesting about the withdrawal of the Special Category Status, which – pre-dating Thatcher – had been afforded to paramilitary prisoners.
Bobby Sands, the 27 year old leader of the hunger strikers in Long Kesh prison, was elected as an MP during the strike. He died just four days after Thatcher’s speech, having refused food for 66 days – hence the title of the film.

Combining archive footage and expert commentary with extracts from Bobby Sands’ journals, Byrne tells the story of the 1981 Irish hunger strike, offering a unique insight into how Thatcher’s stance hugely increased support for Sinn Féin across Ireland. But Bobby Sands: 66 Days does more than that. Byrne’s film also raises thought-provoking questions about martyrdom – and, by implication at least, how these same concepts are deployed, arguably in very different ways, by modern terrorists.


DOOMED PURSUIT


Bobby Sands was just 18 when he joined the Provisional IRA in 1972. Apparently a passionate, if somewhat ineffective, participant in violent attacks, raids and bombings, by the age of 19, he had been arrested and convicted, for the possession of four hand-guns, and received a five year sentence. Released in April 1976, he planned the bombing of a furniture company in Dunmurry; there was a shoot-out with the RUC, and Sands and his four accomplices were captured. He was found guilty and given a 14 year sentence.

In prison, he and fellow IRA members were initially accorded political prisoner status, affording them certain privileges, including access to books on history and political theory. Personally, Sands was developing intellectually and politically. He read voraciously and spent his time discussing politics and tactics with his fellow inmates. As he read, he became aware of different forms of protest – including the use of the hunger strike 
as a political weapon.

There were Biblical examples. And British suffragettes had also utilised the technique in the early 20th Century. But there was also a long tradition of hunger strikes in the IRA, including by 1916 leader Thomas Ashe, who died during a hunger strike in September 1917, demanding Prisoner of War status; by the Lord Mayor of Cork, Terence MacSwiney, who died in 1920, while imprisoned in Brixton; and latterly, by Frank Stagg, who died in England’s Wakefield prion in 1976, after a 62 day fast.

However you view either the ethics or indeed the politics of actions of this kind, Sands’ eventual decision to go on hunger strike was a considered one. Brendan Byrne’s documentary is clear that Sands did not have a death wish, and that his actions were in the best sense politically motivated. Byrne’s thesis is, rather, that, in a position of powerlessness, Sands was willing to use the only tool completely under his control – his life – in what turned out to be a doomed pursuit of his personal political goals.


THE IRA AND ISIS

The depiction of Bobby Sands in the documentary is ultimately a flattering one. He was an idealist. He believed that the cause he was fighting for was worth the risk that he took with his own life. When he died, a singular figure was lost in circumstances that were desperately tragic and moving. But there is another question that arises from a documentary on this theme, being released in 2016. And it has nothing to do with the centenary of the 1916 rising.

There are those who feel that, as the most successful exponents of guerilla warfare, the IRA laid the foundations for the latter-day activities of Islamist extremists. So, given that they embarked on the ultimate political act of self-sacrifice in the name of the cause they espoused, how different were the actions of the ten hunger strikers who died in the early 1980s from those of modern Islamist suicide bombers?

Inescapably, there is in common the idea of martyrdom: of the individual or the self being sacrificed in the pursuit of a political and military objective. But, looking at the picture painted by Byrne, there are key differences too.
The documentary shows that Sands repeatedly refuted the idea of martyrdom; though he was aware of the growing media attention and his potential place in history, Byrne argues that he had no interest in either narcissism or vanity. Instead, he was driven by “an old fashioned, almost Victorian sense of duty.”

There are other differences too. Suicide bombing and self-immolation are immediate and explosive political actions. In contrast, a hunger strike offers time for contemplation, in theory on both sides, providing audiences – meaning the public – with a lengthy, visceral and emotional spectacle of suffering, around which their views can be shaped or refined. The only immediate suffering being imposed is on the hunger strikers themselves (and, of course, those who know and love or support them). The time it takes – in Bobby Sands’ case 66 days – allows at least the possibility of transformation or negotiation, whether in time to save the hunger striker or not.

This is very different from the actions of modern suicide bombers, including members of al-Qaeda and ISIS, who specifically set out not only to harm and kill innocent people, but who offer no option of an alternative ending and no space for negotiation.

Byrne’s documentary highlights other distinctions. The IRA campaign had specific demands and a focused goal. In contrast, the self-destructive acts of modern suicide bombers are accompanied by vague, all-consuming demands for the destruction of any way of life other than that of the Islamist caliphate ISIS has declared.
There are, however, times when the lineage between the IRA and ISIS seems uncomfortably close. The Provisionals did carry out a very significant number of atrocities in which civilians were killed. Their bombing campaign began in 1972, and generally – unlike ISIS – warnings were issued in advance. But not always adequately. And sometimes not at all.

On Bloody Friday, 21 July 1972, 22 bombs were detonated in Belfast by the Provisional IRA, killing nine people and injuring 130. And it went on from there. Six Protestant civilians were killed in Coleraine, on June 12, 1973. 12 civilians were killed and 30 injured in the La Mon restaurant bombing, in the townland of Gransha, near Belfast, on 17 February, 1978. Three policemen and three civilians were killed and 90 were injured by a car bomb placed outside Harrod’s department store in London, on 17 December, 1983. And in Eniskillen, in Co. Fermanagh, 11 civilians were killed and 63 injured by an IRA bomb, on Remembrance Day, 8 November, 1987.

Those five incidents are just a few among the many grisly events in a campaign that killed thousands in the North of Ireland. And yet you can still see a thread of difference which might just immunise the IRA from accusations that they – more than the Bader-Meinhoff group in Germany or the ETA in the Basque region or any other group – created the template for modern Islamist terrorism.


EVIL GENIE


With their random acts of violence and terror, ISIS-inspired terrorists aim is to be as destructive as possible – and to hell with the consequences. This, on the face of it at least, is very different to the philosophy of hunger strikers like Bobby Sands and Terence MacSwiney. The latter famously declared “It is not those who can inflict the most but who can suffer the most who will win.” It is a different mind-set.
Unlike Bobby Sands, modern suicide bombers crave to be considered martyrs – both for the cultural infamy it brings and the belief in a divine reward.

In August 2015, a Pakistani man, who had been arrested for an attempted suicide bombing, spoke to India TV. “Only those are innocent, who are taking part in the Jihad in Miranshah,” he said. “We have no repentance, no sorrow for killing. If our leader orders us to kill two people and hundreds are killed in this process, even then we will do.” And there was more. “72 virgins are waiting for me in heaven,” he boasted, a self-serving interpretation of Islamic scripture which is also invoked by militant groups like ISIS.

It is said that one of the great tragedies of history is that it is destined to repeat itself. But when it comes to terrorism and suicidal protest, the tragedy is instead that, over the past thirty years, it has taken on a meaning more appalling and destructive than we – or the IRA – could ever have imagined.

The question that lingers, even after Brendan J. Byrne’s fine and nuanced exculpation, is this: do members of the IRA, and of Sinn Féin, ever wake up in a cold sweat realising that they were the ones who allowed the genie out of the bottle; and that ISIS are merely following in their wake, encouraging an evil genie to do his worst?