Biting at the Grave

"This is an interesting book. You can imagine from the author’s name that he has an Irish background but he has lived and worked for many years in the United States. He started to write about the Irish hunger strikes in the early 1980s when there was deep frustration in the Irish Republican community that they weren’t getting what they wanted through the IRA terrorist campaign. A number of their volunteers who were in prison because of their involvement in terrorist crimes went on a hunger strike and some of them starved to death. I remember this extremely well because I was just beginning to get into politics at the time. The first election I ever stood in was during the hunger strike and it was an incredibly polarising time. Some people became powerfully sympathetic to the Republican movement and indeed the current strength of Sinn Fein grew out of that period of struggle. Others, especially in the Protestant community, went the other way and they backed the British Prime Minister at the time, Margaret Thatcher . In Ireland it was really impossible for many people to understand how this woman, this mother who was also the mother of the nation, could fail to understand that these men were trying in their particular way to get something across. It wasn’t the fact that she didn’t agree with them or accept what they said. Rather it was something about the way that she reacted that worsened this awful time. Much of the politics of the next 20 or 30 years was determined by that. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter I came to know a few of the people involved when I was elected to Belfast City Council. One of the Councillors, Patsy McGeown, had been a hunger striker. When he had fallen unconscious his mother took him off the hunger strike but he never fully recovered and eventually he died as a result of the physical damage which had been done to his body during the hunger strike. What O’Malley did in working at this book was that every year for about ten years he tried to make contact with the families of each of the hunger strikers who died even though initially they wouldn’t speak to him. Eventually, after about ten years, they started to speak to him and recount what had happened. What became apparent was the profound damage that was done to the families of the hunger strikers. Within the Republican community they were respected because of what their sons had done, and their sons would be part of the great pantheon of Republican volunteer martyrs, but actually the families were completely destroyed. So it wasn’t just the people who went on hunger strike who were affected; it was their families as well. For me one of the things that was really important was this understanding that the people who engaged in terrorism (and in a sense this was terrorism against themselves, not that dissimilar to suicide bombing) were creating a very potent symbol which is part of a history and mythology of Ireland. If you could not get justice you could sit on your landlord’s doorstep and starve yourself and every time he passed by he would be confronted with you getting thinner and dying because of his injustice. “…the people who engaged in terrorism…were creating a very potent symbol which is part of a history and mythology of Ireland” What I came to understand through this book was the terrible damage done to the person and the community that engages in terrorist violence. From outside you may observe the terrible things they do to other people, but what you come to understand from this book is that there is something profoundly self-destructive as well, which is not being done because it is in their best rational interests; it is something much more regressive than that. O’Malley shows extraordinary patience in going back again and again – not looking at just the surface but trying to get underneath what was going on. He then went on to similar kinds of work in South Africa and Iraq – trying to understand what was and is going on there."