Blanketmen: An Untold Story of the H-block Hunger Strike

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Fantastic piece of work with reflections from inside Long Kesh during the hunger strike of 1981 a great testament to the valour of the blanketmen and those endured the no wash protest and ultimately the hunger strike a very moving emotional and inspirational volume. The prisoners responded by refusing to leave their cells, and as a result the prison officers were unable to clear them. The narration is often confusing because of unannounced time leaps and inconsistent usage of people's names and nicknames. A very interesting and valuable first hand account, sadly made difficult to listen to due to the bizarre narration. A major obstacle to this criminalisation policy was the fact that almost 2,000 prisoners, recognised by the British government as political prisoners, were still held in British prisons, which directly contradicted the British government’s propaganda claims.

The campaign itself came under attack from British and pro-British elements and campaign leaders John Turnley, Miriam Daly, Noel Little and Ronnie Bunting were murdered and Bernadette and Michael McAliskey were wounded. He said: “Having spent the whole of Sunday in the prison, I was shocked at the inhuman conditions prevailing in H-Blocks 3,4 and 5 where over 300 prisoners were incarcerated.The lies, threats and intimidation that were afforded him in the immediate aftermath of this book coming out shows how much truth there actually is in this book and how the Hunger Strikers were actually pawns in a game being played by both the British and Irish Republicans not only at the time but still now in 2010 seeing they are the biggest money maker for Provisional Sinn Fein, and Gerry Adams in person seeing as he is the only one in charge of the Bobby Sands Trust, not even the Sands family are afforded any say in what the Trust does, claims or any money they might make. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average.

That peaceful and disciplined campaign, organised by the National H-Block/Armagh Committee, attracted on a single issue scores of thousands of people and united people of different political persuasions. O'Rawe is critical of IRA leadership as well as himself, and the deaths from the hunger strike and his role in them clearly still haunt him. A vivid and emotional first hand account of life in the H-Blocks on the blanket protest and during the hunger strikes.On Thursday afternoon of December 18th, as the condition of hunger-striker Sean McKenna rapidly deteriorated, the British minister in charge of the Six Counties, Direct Ruler Humphrey Atkins, suddenly and without public explanation postponed a statement he had been due to make to the British parliament and ensured that it was delivered to the seven hunger strikers in the prison hospital along with a 34-page document entitled Regimes in Northern Ireland Prisons, Prisoners day to day life with special emphasis on Maze. The nearest approach to it that I have seen was the spectacle of hundreds of homeless people living in sewer pipes in the slums of Calcutta. This resulted in the blanket protest escalating into the dirty protest, as the prisoners were unable to " slop out" (i. Five years later we are still able to declare that that criminalisation policy, which we have resisted and suffered, has failed. The majority of protesting prisoners, both men and women, were in their late teens or 20s and over 80% were imprisoned solely on the strength of forced confessions.