Biting at the Grave: The Irish Hunger Strikes and the Politics of Despair

Looks at the lives and motivations of Bobby Sands and the other 1981 IRA hunger strikers, and their families, and examines the effects of the ten deaths on the situation in Northern Ireland

In 1981 the conflict in Ireland's northern counties was marked by the hunger strikes of IRA prisoners pursuing status as political prisoners. Ten men died in the strikes; one, Bobby Sands, an unseated member of Parliament, in death assumed heroic dimensions at home and abroad. Pinpointing how the hunger strikes "exposed the contradiction at the core of the Catholic nationalist psyche," O'Malley, an Irish citizen and author of Uncivil Wars: Northern Ireland Today, assembles strands of elitism, nationalism and the peculiar sanction of the dead into a powerful and passionate chronicle of a people's yearning. This masterly survey of Ireland's multifaceted political history is given human scale in poignant interviews with the strikers' survivors.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.

It would seem impossible for O'Malley to match the depth and insight of his first book on Northern Ireland, Uncivil Wars ( LJ 10/1/83), but he's done it in this book on the 1981 hunger strike in the Maze prison. He balances the stories of the hunger strike, the strikers, their families, leaders, goals, and strategies against the larger picture of the bitter politics of Northern Ireland. It is this context that is the strength of this work, and the book complements the more detailed study of the strikers' positions outlined in David Beresford's Ten Men Dead ( LJ 4/1/89). O'Malley's analysis of the power of myth and tradition enslaving the politics of the whole island, dooming it to tragic repetitions of violence, exposes the very core of the conflict. Highly recommended.
- Richard B. Finnegan, Stonehill Coll., North Easton, Mass.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.