Some of the prisoners had engaged in violence as members of the Irish Republican Army, but others had simply marched, organized, and spoken out against the British presence in Northern Ireland. "It would be like if they took everyone who was against the war in Vietnam and had ever marched, and put them in a cage," my dad explained. In Northern Ireland, he added, "It didn't matter if you were a sniper or a librarian."
The prisoners refused to wear the uniforms of criminals, wearing only blankets. They were beaten when they left their cells to empty their chamber pots or bathe, so they refused to leave or bathe, and smeared excrement on the walls. And as of March 1, 1981, led by prisoner Bobby Sands, they refused even to eat.
A hunger strike at the Maze the previous year had ended without any deaths. But this time the prisoners were fully committed. Sands died after 66 days; he was 27. Nine more prisoners died over the course of seven months before the strike was called off.
The hunger strike renewed worldwide attention to the Troubles in Northern Ireland. In Philadelphia, my parents began working separately on boycotts. My dad came to the cause from a political background, my mom, from a cultural one.
That was the thing about the hunger strike: The IRA and its violent methods had divided the Irish American community, but the strike and the boycotts "kind of unified the spectrum," from conservative Catholics to the far left, my dad recalled. They brought in people who had been interested mainly in Irish culture - "the dancing people and the people who were learning to speak Irish," as my mom put it. The boycott committee was even added to Philadelphia's St. Patrick's Day Parade - a big deal, because political groups weren't usually allowed to march.
