Bloody Sunday 1972 was not an aberration. It was an integral part of the colonial mindset and policy of the British toward Ireland and nothing about partition and the creation of N. Ireland changed that reality. Both Unionist and Nationalist interests forgot that at their peril. It was what explained Bloody Sunday and Direct Rule which followed. It explained the contempt in which the UK government held its Human Rights obligations to its citizens both willing and unwilling, but most of all those who dared challenge its ‘god given’ right to ownership of the territory and its people, large swathes of whom had democratically voted themselves out from under its thumb screws in the 1918 election but were cheated when N. Ireland was created.
Nothing demonstrates the contempt and inhumanity in which successive UK governments treated those who challenged their Imperialism than the abuse and punishment meted out by government demand, to the political prisoners held in Her Majesty’s prisons. Nothing should erase the memory of the suffering of those, including two sisters, Dolours and Marion Price, who resisted that treatment in successive hunger strikes. The period between loss of political status in 1976 and the end of the 1980 – 1981 Hunger Strikes was one of the most traumatic episodes of sustained cruelty meted out by the British state. The mass campaign to defend the rights of prisoners was led by the National H-Block / Armagh Committee which mobilised and organised a 32- county wide campaign. Revisionism and the weight of grief and loss conspired to bury the significance of this campaign unequalled until the Water Rates campaign in the Republic.
Vincent Doherty, Fergus O’Hare and Bernadette McAliskey were members of the National Committee and discuss this non-violent civil resistance national campaign which resulting in the election of three prisoners including Bobby Sands in Fermanagh South Tyrone and changed the political course of Sinn Fein and others and yet was airbrushed from the historical narratives of the struggle for Truth and Justice.
Here they reflect on the building of a mass movement in support of the prisoners, the foray into electoral politics and legacy of the hunger strikes period.
Speakers
Vincent Doherty is a political activist based in Dublin and originally from Derry City. He joined the NHBSC after its founding in Belfast in 1980. He stood as a candidate in the Dublin North Central constituency in 1981 on a support the prisoners manifesto but failed to get elected.
Fergus O’Hare is a political activist based in Belfast. He was elected to Belfast City Council as a member of People’s Democracy in 1981 defeating the sitting candidate Gerry Fitt who had held the seat for 23 years. This reflected growing support for the protesting prisoners and dismay at Fitt’s support for the British Government position. He was a prominent member of the National H Blocks Committee.
Bernadette McAliskey is a former MP, PD member and the most prominent member of the NHBAC. At the height of the prisoners campaign both Bernadette and her husband Michael were targeted in an assassination attempt by the Ulster Defence Association. They were the latest in a list of H block activists to be shot and the only two to survive.
Chair: Jim Doherty: 
Jim is a activist based in Derry City and a member of the Bloody Sunday March Committee.
Link to the video record of the event.