Any of you here this evening could have been a Bobby Sands. People are not born heroes: the hunger strikers were ordinary men who, in extraordinary situations, brought the struggle to a moral platform which became a battle between naked men and the entire might of the British state.
Caoimhghín Ó Caoláin TD spoke of the sacrifice of the H Block men who, at enormous human cost had beaten Margaret Thatcher's criminalisation policy. He paid tribute to that small handfull of TDs who had come out in support of their fellow deputy, Kieran Doherty, as he approached death. Ó Caoláin was Kieran Doherty's director of elections.
The intransigence of Thatcher, who let these men die is mirrored today in those very same elements still existing within some sections of the British Establishment which hold up the development of the peace process, he said.
Seamus Healy recently elected TD in a by-election in South Tipperary, a republican, he said, from the Connolly tradition, pointed out that the hunger strike had ``moved every person who believed in fairness and justice'' to support the hunger strikers. He recalled the tremendous support the H-Block struggle had among trade unionists, evidenced in marches, work stoppages and motions of support, in every part of the country.
Ella O'Dywer talked of how the political culture of revisionism had ostracised, suppressed and even tried to ignore the momentous events of the hunger strike.
``The hunger strikers were, and are, icons of selflessness in a squalid world of political corruption,'' she said. She spoke of how the hunger strike had punctured the politics of revisionism and politicised a generation of young people - her own generation.
That evening, several hundred people lined either side of O'Connell Street opposite the GPO, with black flags, in a candlelit vigil to mark the start of the hunger strike. As they stood in silence, people remembered the days when hundreds assembled outside of the GPO, night after night, to hear the terrible announcement of the deaths of each of the hunger strikers.
Many people had then stood, in front of the GPO, carrying the poster of the day, ``Mrs Thatcher wanted for Murder''. They were days of inexpressible tragedy, when every face wore a glaze covering peoples' feelings of powerlessness and frustrated anger, that what claimed to be a government of the Republic had let yet another brave young man die. They were hard times, which people, many of them very young, commemorated last Thursday evening outside the GPO.
Then to the Irish Film Centre, where the Dublin 1981 Committee had organised a showing of Sonia Gillespie's documentary, ``I gCillín an Bháis'', with a discussion, led by Brian Campbell, on how the history of revolution can be written and recorded.
The documentary told the history, in the words of people who made it, people like McKeown himself, Jackie McMullan, Leo Green.
Unfortunately the snow prevented Sonia Gillespie being a part of the discussion which Brian Campbell and Mícheál McDonnacha, both ex-editors of this newspaper, led, raising questions of how art, and in particular film, records history.
As Laurence McKeown stepped up to the podium on Friday evening, hundreds of people, many of them young people who were not even born at the time of the hunger strike, rose spontaneously to acclaim the hunger strikers. The meeting filled one huge auditorium, then another, and even still there were people who could not get in. The 1981 Committee, which organised the event, estimated that there were well in excess of 1,000 who came, from all over the country, to attend this historic events.
Laurence McKeown: Margaret McAuley, a sister of Mickey Devine, the last man to die on the hunger strike; Damien Kiberd, editor of the Sunday Business Post; Patricia McKenna, Green Party MEP; and Gerry Adams spoke. The meeting was chaired by Ita Ní Cionnaith.
``It was a total shock. He told me not to tell a soul. On the visits we would sit, hold hands, talk. `How are you?' always, always he kept asking me. We brought his two children up on a visit. He took them on his knee and told them how much he loved them. As we left, I looked back. Tears ran down his face. I'll, never forget.
Gerry Adams then spoke. ``War,'' he said ``is very different to a hunger strike. With war you can plan it and execute it. On hunger strike you are on your own, you can't be ordered or instructed.
``It is important to know where we have come from, if we are to know where we are going. After partition, nationalist people were abandoned. In the late `60s, the period of the Civil Rights marches, the state could not absorb their demands. It led, in 1972-'73, to a popular uprising. The government fell. There was an Intifada on the streets, which the state set about to crush, through their pacification programme.
``One leg of this strategy was to criminalise the struggle, to make the struggle out to be a criminal conspiracy, and the government here colluded in that lie. Ending political status was part of that lie.
``Bobby Sands was ruthless in the way he constructed the hunger strike. He was prepared to die. He knew that he would and that he could. But he didn't want to die.
``Any of you here this evening could have been a Bobby Sands. People are not born heroes: the hunger strikers were ordinary men who, in extraordinary situations, brought the struggle to a moral platform which became a battle between naked men and the entire might of the British state.
``How can you understand it? You can't. Except the immediate outcome, which was that the British policy of criminalisation was smashed, not because the British accepted it, but because the people here knew they weren't criminals.
Ita Ní Cionnaith, in introducing Damien Kiberd, recalled how RTE had refused to interview Owen Carron or any one of those involved in the victorious campaign for Bobby Sands' election, but instead interviewed Ken McGuinness, the defeated candidate, a practice that became a habit in the following years.
Damien Kiberd took people back to the years of censorship and the huge damage that was done by Section 31. He recalled the days when the press was clamouring to talk to Bobby Sands on his election, and how no one had been permitted access.
He took us back to the years following the hunger strike, the years of the Anglo Irish Agreement, when ``Mrs Thatcher was sowing the seeds of the compromise that she and her ministers would have to make. He spoke of the enormous expenditure of funds, some �18 million, to employ 60 people in the British Embassy in Washington to promote British government propaganda.
But was it just censorship, and self-censorship, which meant that RTE ignored the hunger strike right up to Bobby Sand's election. Was it a lack of courage in the media or a deep-seated animosity to what the hungers strike was about? He asked. Their animosity, he said, meant that the government and media consistently underestimated the strength of support for the hunger strikers, and the anger of the people.
Patricia McKenna spoke briefly to end a meeting that had long run out of time. In a few sentences she spoke of the terrible disservice that censorship had done to politics in this country, but that despite the efforts of the British and Dublin government to prevent it, the name of Bobby Sands has gone around the world as an example of those who gave up their lives to change things.
The Dublin 1981 Committee's benefit gig in the Cobblestone Pub in Smithfield proved to be a great success, with a good mix of young and old republicans remembering 1981 while enjoying the music of artists ranging from up-and-coming star Damian Dempsey to legendary Dubliner Barney McKenna. The evening began with a series of reels played by Noirin Leach agus a Cairde. Johnny Collins delivered an emotional rendition of originally composed poetry and song. Then came the highlight of the night, when to the delight of the crowd Barney McKenna came out of retirement and, accompanied by Tony McMahon, played a moving set. They rounded off the evening by playing a lament, originally written after the death of Eoghan Roe O'Neill, in honour of Bobby Sands.
Dublin's weekend commemorating the beginning of the 1981 hunger strikes ended with a walking tour of Glasnevin Cemetery, led by Noel Hughes, who gave visitors a thorough grounding in Irish history along the way. Among the many graves visited were those of Jeremiah O'Donovan Rossa, Charles Stewart Parnell, Austin Stack, Joe Clarke, Volunteer Tom Smith, and hunger striker Thomas Ashe. In addition, the Republican plot and the monument erected in memory of the republicans who have died on hunger strike in the 2Oth century were visited. The tour was conducted with a good mix of humour and historical insight and is much recommended.