It is an honour to be here today speaking at this year’s annual Kevin Lynch commemoration. I would like to start by thanking Kevin’s family, Sheena McTaggart and the organising committee for the invite to do so.
Kevin’s family and friends have ensured that he is remembered, not just by a photograph on the wall of their living room or a memorial stone above his place of rest.
They have ensured that the name Kevin Lynch has been woven into the natural fabric of the town he loved and dreamed about returning to while he languished in a filthy H Block cell and endured mental and physical suffering at the hands of hate-filled screws.
This commemoration brings Republicans to his beloved Dungiven every year and his name not only lives on in the band which proudly bares his name but also in the form of the local Kevin Lynch Hurling team.
For Kevin surely did love Hurling. He loved it as he loved his parents, as he loved his brothers and sisters, as he loved Dungiven with the majestic Benbradagh towering over it and the River Roe flowing around it. As he loved the Dungiven people, as he loved Ireland and the Irish people. His people.
It has now been forty four years since those long months of hunger strike back in 1981. A time when a dark shadow hung over the H Blocks, even while the skies were blue and cloud free, and the sun shone down on the tarmac outside the concrete pillars of our cell windows.
A shadow of despair had settled upon us and hung like a heavy weight upon our shoulders as we watched brave men leaving our wings to go to the hospital block. One after the other they left. The days turned into weeks and then in hushed tones we heard their names being passed from cell to cell. And we knew without being told that we would never see them again.
It had been decided in March that year, following the death of the sitting MP Frank Maguire, that Bobby should stand the Fermanagh/South Tyrone bye-election in the hope that Thatcher couldn’t allow a sitting MP to die on hunger strike. This raised our hopes that no one would have to die after all. But Thatcher was an evil vindictive bitch and during the early hours of the 5th May, whispered voices broke the still of the night. Fuair Roibeárd bas. (Bobby died)
And so it continued throughout the weeks and months to come.
The 12th May, Fuair Frank bas.
The 21st May, Fuair Raymond agus Patsy bas.
The 8th July Fuair Joe bas
The 13th July Fuair Martin bas
The 1st August Fuair Kevin bas
The 2nd August Fuair Kieran bas
The 8th August Fuair Tomas MĂłr bas
The 20th August Fuair Micky bas.
On the same day that Micky Devine died, Owen Carron won the bye-election for Bobby’s Fermanagh/South Tyrone seat.
It mattered little to us. As far as we were concerned it was a pyrrhic victory. Ten brave men had died on hunger strike and there seemed to be no end in sight. The Movement was opposed to elections back then and Bobby had only stood as a tactic so it mattered little.
It had been the same with the men who had stood in the General Election down South, back in June.
Kieran Doherty was elected as an Anti H-Block TD for Cavan/Monaghan while Paddy Agnew was elected in Louth, denying Charlie Haughey the chance to form a government. Those victories had given us renewed hope, but that hope soon faded as our comrades continued to die.
What we didn’t know then was that three days after Micky Devine’s death and Carron’s election victory was that Sinn FĂ©in had announced that it would contest all future elections in the North.
This decision had been made without having been put to the Republican Movement as a whole as that year's Ard Fheis wouldn’t happen until the end of October.
When it was eventually held Danny Morrison, who was then editor of An Phoblacht, gave a speech in which he addressed the issue of the party taking part in future elections:
Who here really believes we can win the war through the ballot box? But will anyone here object if, with a ballot paper in one hand and the Armalite in the other, we take power in Ireland?
It was only in recent years did I get to see the edition of An Phoblacht in which Sinn FĂ©in had announced that it would be standing in all future elections in the North when a friend sent me photographs of it.
My stomach churned and anger welled up inside me as I saw that Adams, as well as McGuinness, Ted Howell Morrison and the rest of his inner circle, had been pushing through electoralism while the family, comrades and friends of INLA Volunteer Michael Devine were grieving his passing.
In a comm to Gerry Adams, dated 26.7.’81, reproduced on page 334 of Ten Men Dead, Bik McFarlane inquired about ‘examining the possibility of contesting elections and actually making full use of seats gained by participating in the Dáil’.
He continued:
Such an idea presents problems within the Movement. How great would the opposition be and what would be the consequences of pursuing a course which did not enjoy a sizeable degree of support?
Adams and his inner circle made certain that there would be no problems by announcing their electoral intentions at the time they did. A time when Republicans were focused on the hunger strike. A time when ten brave men had died. A time of grief.
Kevin was one of those brave men. Barbabus as we called him. He was a terrible singer. But so too was I. So were many of us. There were great singers, indeed there were. The likes of Bobby Sands and Bik and others. Our songs and the stories, the Gaelic of which most were fluent speakers, or had enough of to be able to understand it, the dark humour of the likes of the double act called Hector and Teapot.
Those were our strengths, even during worst periods of an already hellish protest, like the wing shifts and forced washes and the brutality that came with them. These were what kept us defiant as we rose to our cell doors and sang and shouted at the screws in our native tongue, Ar teanga féin. Tiochaidh Ar La!
But what sustained us the most was a dream. A vision of the future. Of a better life in an Ireland free from British tyranny and the corruption of the political elite on both sides of the British border which divided our country. An Ireland in which our children were equal and happy and never knowing the sectarian hatred which was commonplace at that time. That dream was of a 32 County Socialist Republic.
Forty-four years later that dream has been well and truly shattered. Well and truly shattered by what we’ve watched unfold before our very eyes over the course of that time. The 32 County Socialist Republic is no longer mentioned, it is now an ‘Agreed Ireland’. John Hume’s ‘Agreed Ireland’. For it was he who coined that phrase back in the 1970s and 80s when he was telling us that the only way to achieve a United Ireland was through peaceful means and politics.
At the same time Adams and McGuinness were telling us that the only way to achieve Irish freedom was through war and the cutting edge of the IRA. Adams even referred to the likes of Hume as unscrupulous politicians and so called peacemakers in a letter from prison back in 1976.
As we moved through the 1980s, while brave men and women were fighting and dying for the dream on the streets and in the countryside, Adams was moving in the shadows with Father Alex Reid.
He had the Movement where he wanted it, on the electoral path and now he needed to get a way to end the war without the knowledge of those brave men and women who were fighting it.
Father Reid approached Haughey on behalf of Adams hoping to get a meeting but wily Charlie was too worried about being caught talking to Adams so he got John Hume to act as a go-between.
Soon Adams was secretly meeting the person he had referred to as an unscrupulous politician and so called peacemaker and thus began the Hume/Adams Talks.
We are all now aware of how that turned out. Adams and McGuinness became the unscrupulous politicians and so called peacemakers, or rather self-proclaimed peacemakers.
They began using the same language as Hume had been in the 1970s and 80s that the only way to achieve a United Ireland was through peaceful means and politics. They even appropriated his terminology about an ‘Agreed Ireland.’
The fact that those two so called leaders were reduced to doing and aping what they had attacked Hume and the SDLP for doing during the war is proof that their leadership was bloody disastrous in terms of wasted lives. They were selling betrayal and eventual capitulation as a peace process and attacking critics of anything they did as, ‘dissidents who were opposed to their peace process.’
We watch on even this week as Adams tries to convince anyone, foolish enough or in fact stupid enough to believe him, that he was an outsider and not an IRA leader. That he was someone who
wanted peace and that it wasn’t easy to convince the IRA to end the war, but in the end he was able to use his influence with them to get them to do so. Adams was never capable of telling the truth, even to the hunger strikers and the IRA volunteers who trusted him.
As well we know the more support the Sinn FĂ©iners gained at the ballot box the further away from Republicanism they drifted. Gone were the days when the British Royals were seen as the most repugnant aspect of British imperialism.
The Sinn FĂ©iners were now hailing them as friends of their peace process, apologising for the killing of the paedophile Mountbatten. Attending the coronation of the former Colonel-In-Chief of the murderous Parachute regiment, Charles Windsor. Standing in sombre silence during British war commemorations.
To paraphrase Bobby Sands, they had become systemised, institutionalised, decent law-abiding robots.
The dream which kept us going throughout the blanket protest, the dream that was in the hearts and minds of the ten hunger strikers who died during the Spring and Summer of 1981 and the dream that brave men and women died outside those walls fighting for was well and truly shattered. It had become a nightmare which would have simply been unthinkable back then.
If that wasn't bad enough the Sinn FĂ©iners began telling us that the sacrifices of the 10 hunger strikers set the movement on the path of electorism which eventually brought about the GFA.
In May 2023 a plague was unveiled in Rhode Island, New York. A plaque supposedly remembering the 10 hunger strikers. But in actual fact it was selling a lie. The inscription read:
The death of these ten men, and the international response to it, caused The British to change this policy and also created the conditions for the armed struggle to evolve into participation in Electoral Politics, leading eventually to the Good Friday Agreement of 1998.
The lie was carved in stone. It was the ultimate betrayal of these brave men's ideals. The ideals for which they gave their lives. Who in their right mind would die for that? Who would die a lingering death on hunger strike for that?
There was no mention of the 32 County Socialist Republic they had dreamed of and had fought for. Not even a mention of a United Ireland.
Pat Sheehan, a former hunger striker, was one of those who spoke at the unveiling but his presence was more about giving credence to the lie. Martin Galvin, who had spent years attacking the GFA as a sellout, also spoke, having eventually sold out himself.
John Crawley said of the plaque:
As a lifelong republican activist, I find few concepts more disheartening than the implication that the ten IRA/INLA hunger strikers who died in the H-Blocks in 1981 paved the way for the Good Friday Agreement.
As for myself, I look back at that time, now knowing more of what had gone on, and I am of the firm belief that as far as Adams, McGuinness, Ted Howell, Danny Morrison and the others who made up that inner-circle, were concerned, that the words on that plaque are in actual fact what their intentions had been, most definitely after Bobby had won the Fermanagh/South Tyrone bye-election.
They had seen in it something with which they could create the conditions for the move to electoral politics.
To conclude, I would like to read this poem written by the poet Francis Ledwidge for his friend and fellow poet Thomas McDonagh, who had been one of the seven leaders of the 1916 Easter Rising and who was executed by the British at the age of thirty-eight.
Thomas Ledwidge, who was born into a poor family in Slane County Meath, fought for the British during WW1 and died just over a year after his friend in 1917 at the Battle of Ypres (E-Pra) in Belgium.
Thomas McDonagh
He shall not hear the bittern cry
In the wild sky, where he is lain,
Nor voices of the sweeter birds,
Above the wailing of the rain.
Nor shall he know when loud March blows
Thro' slanting snows her fanfare shrill,
Blowing to flame the golden cup
Of many an upset daffodil.
But when the Dark Cow leaves the moor
And pastures poor with greedy weeds
Perhaps he'll hear her low at morn
Lifting her horn in pleasant meads.
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Thomas Dixie Elliot is a Derry artist and a former H Block Blanketman. Follow Dixie Elliot on Twitter @IsMise_Dixie |
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