What were the IRA hunger strikes?

In the early 1980s, imprisoned IRA members went on a prolonged hunger strike, leading to the death of ten men. This is their story.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of I
Heart Radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark.
There's Charles w Chuck Bryan over there, and this is
Stuff you should Know, just the two of us doing
it together. We're hanging out. We're going to get to

(00:24):
the bottom of some stuff that's right and uh, you know,
the Grabster helped us out with this one a little
while ago. And it almost feels now like I was
purposefully sitting on it because of the the turnout of
the recent elections across the pond there. Okay, I'm not

(00:45):
familiar with what happened. Well, the shin fain Uh is
now in place as the largest party INO in the
Northern Ireland Assembly elections, and this means that like this
is probably the best chance they've had in a long
time for reuniting Ireland. Oh wow, that'd be something. Wow,

(01:08):
you really did save it for just the right right moment, Chuck.
You know, it's just a couple of weeks ago and
I read a bunch of articles on it on the
likelihood and it seems um it seems like a hard
road still, but they definitely is. It's something they're interested
in I think that party that is, and polls are
very split. Yeah, I'm I'm interested to see how it

(01:30):
turns out. But that is pretty interesting that they're they're
finally in a position to do that, because that means
they've come a very long way in the last what
fifty or so years um. For those of you who
aren't familiar, shin Fan is considered the political wing of
the Irish Republican Army. And the reason we're talking about
either one of those is because we're talking about hunger strikes,

(01:52):
specifically a set of hunger strikes that took place at
the beginning of the twentieth century and then towards the
end of the twentieth century, and they are very much
associated with the I r A. In fact, if you
ask most people who are familiar with hunger strikes, they
will probably bring up the I ra A. It's like
that closely associated with them. Yeah, and you know, we

(02:12):
should just say we're we're gonna do our best to
get this right, but this is one of those that is,
you know, it's so fraught with emotion um on both sides.
So we just want to tell all of our friends
in Northern Ireland and all of our friends in the
Irish Republic that we were doing our best here, just

(02:33):
two Americans trying to understand a very deeply, long rooted,
oftentimes hostile situation. And for those of you, like Morrissey
with Irish blood but English heart, um, we will hopefully
not tick you off either. We're doing our best here,
just a couple of Yankee American Joe's doing what we can.

(02:54):
That's right. And we had a great time, by the
way in Dublin, and our only regret was not being
able to go and do a live show in Northern Ireland,
which I couldn't squeeze it in, but we'd love to
check it out one day, agreed. So you said that, like,
this is a very emotionally fraught subject, and that is
a gross understatement really, because um, what we're gonna focus

(03:15):
on are called the troubles, which started at the end
of the sixties and beginning of the seventies, but um,
really it goes back even further than that, and uh,
you can kind of place the beginning of hostilities in
sixteen o nine when the Protestant English came into Catholic
Ireland and said, hey, we're gonna take some of this land,

(03:37):
and we're going to take some of your land rights
away from those of you with documented land rights, and
we're going to set up some English enclaves and we're
just going to basically show up and and sit here
for a while. And that didn't sit very well with um,
the ethnic Irish or Gaelic people who lived in the area.

(03:58):
So that was one part of it. And I also
hit on another part two, Chuck, that we've got Protestant
and Catholic basically versus each other. Now, yeah, and you know,
I think Ed makes a good point that it's it's
not strictly about religion, but when you're over there and
you're talking Catholic and Protestant, it's so intertwined in the
fabric of kind of everything that goes on, including the politics,

(04:19):
that it's really, you know, there's no way you can
separate it. But it wasn't necessarily uh an Irish or
a well, I guess Irish Catholic, English Scottish Protestant battle,
but it is the seeds are there. So in particular
in the North of Ireland around Ulster, a bunch of
Protestant English and Scottish people kind of settled there over

(04:43):
the years and Um formed what's basically known or what
was known as the plantation of ulster Um. And so
over time you've got this largely Gaelic population inhabiting the
central and south part of Ireland and then a mixed
Catholic Gaelic and um English and Scottish Protestant kind of

(05:06):
group coexisting for better for worse in the northern part
of the country. And it's remarkable that it lasted like
this for you know, several centuries before it finally came
to a head at the beginning of the twentieth century. Yeah,
and as far as you know, how those people in
Northern Ireland that were that were kind of you know,

(05:29):
mixed in together felt about things then and how they
feel about things now, you know, Ed makes some kind
of sweeping statements that it's it's just kind of hard
to do, especially when you look at like modern day
polls on reunification and stuff like that. Those seeds run
deep and people are still kind of divided on it,
so you can't necessarily just say that, you know, these

(05:49):
days the people in Northern Ireland favor Protestantism and want
to be a part of the UK it's it's a
mixed bag, right, Yeah, I would guess to be akin
to UM, you know, people wanting to their state to secede,
or the United States to break into five different countries
or something like that, although UM probably with much much

(06:13):
more emotional opinions about that. And then throw religion in there,
exactly just that little light thing. So, like I said, this,
this kind of precarious living situations living arrangement came to
a head UM all the way in nineteen twelve when
Irish nationalists kind of movement UM began. I think they

(06:34):
started before that, but in nineteen twelves they started really
pushing for Home rule, which is Irish um governing Ireland.
It's pretty much as simple as that, UM. And that
created the Home Rule crisis, and it was a crisis
as far as the British were concerned, because all of
a sudden, they're Irish people were saying, hey, we we

(06:55):
basically want you out and we want to rule Ireland.
So let's just end the four centuries of occupation, shall we.
The way you put it there just sounds very nice. Yeah,
I'm sure that's how they put in. Uh. This was
sort of put off a bit by World War One.
Obviously that kind of disrupted a lot of things. But eventually,
in nineteen sixteen, the Nationalists did revolt and it was

(07:19):
called the Easter Rising of nineteen sixteen. And this was
a bloody affair. It was I mean, I think there
were more than a dozen leaders executed, many thousands of
people in prison. It was just a it was a
brutal conflict. Uh, And that was just you know, that
kind of kick things off in nineteen sixteen. It continued

(07:40):
again in nineteen nineteen with what we know now is
the well, I guess what was called this then too,
the Anglo Irish War. And there were a lot of
sort of governmental policies going on during this time. The
Government of Ireland Act of nineteen twenty officially, as far
as they were concerned, created two Ireland's Northern Ireland and

(08:01):
what they called Southern Ireland that we're all still under
the rule of the UK and Great Britain. But Southern
Ireland was like, no, we're not. What is Southern Ireland
where the Irish Republic like, don't even call a Southern Ireland. Um.
So that actually kind of got translated into a treaty
UM that ended the Anglo Irish War. It was the

(08:24):
treaty that basically recognized Ireland as two separate nations. You've
got Ireland itself, which is again the central and southern
part of the country, and then you have Northern Ireland,
which is part of the United Kingdom. It's a totally
different country, um, at least geo politically speaking, it's a
totally different country. And again there's a big distinction between

(08:46):
Ireland and Northern Ireland and the population makeup because those Protestant,
Catholic and Scottish people that settled in the northern part
of Ireland over the centuries had um descendants. In those
descendants stayed um loyal to the Crown, they stayed Protestant,
and at times they they were more powerful than their

(09:07):
Catholic neighbors. So in the late sixties, by the time
the late sixties roll around and you've got to Ireland's
you have a Protestant elite, small minority of Protestants ruling
Northern Ireland, much to the chagrin of the Catholic Um
Gaelic people who lived there. Uh. And that kind of
set up there set the stage I guess for the

(09:29):
troubles that followed, yeah, and the troubles uh, and then
he said began in the late sixties. They carried through
till about nine more than I mean, the numbers kind
of very depending on you know, what you're looking at,
but at least thirty five hundred people died, fifty percent
of which were civilians. And these were you know, it

(09:51):
was a mess. There were paramilitary groups on both sides,
there were British military taking part, there were street battles,
there were bombings. I mean, this is the kind of
stuff that in the like when you and I were
growing up in the seventies and eighties, you know, this
was all over the news at the time, and it
was I had no idea. I didn't understand it at

(10:12):
all at the time, and it took you know, me
listening to a lot of you two and then trying
to educate myself over what was going on over the years.
But I don't think I fully really understood it until
like the past few days, when I really dug in
absolutely same here man. So one of the things that
kicked off those troubles you just described, um, was the

(10:32):
the Gaelic Catholics protesting the unfair rule as they saw
of the Protestant minority. And the problem is these protests
were kind of suppressed brutally by the Protestant government and
with the aid of the British military, British um police,
I believe, and that's that turned quickly into rioting and

(10:56):
then eventually, like you said, the paramilitary groups assembling and
basically guerrilla warfare breaking out in Northern Ireland. So imagine like,
you know, going to work one day and you're Catholic
and your co workers Protestant, and the next day you
guys are fighting each other on the street, um for

(11:17):
control of of your both of your country. Yeah, it's
it's it's nuts to think about it as an American
because like we can't fathom something like that, you know,
to Gen xers growing up in the in the Cold
War Reagan era, right, I mean, we're pretty far removed
from the Civil War here in the United States. This
is like civil war that took place in the early

(11:37):
seventies or started in the early seventies and continued for
almost thirty years. Yeah, and previous you know, we should
back up a little bit, I guess and talk about
the origins of the ira Uh. This had to do
with the Easter Rising that we talked about of nineteen sixteen.
It was initiated by what was called the Irish Volunteers
UH in nineteen sixteen, and by the twenties they were

(11:58):
known as the i RA, a UH Irish Republican Army,
and they fought a civil war in the early nineteen twenties.
In the nine nineteen twenty three there were a lot
of different nationalist factions fighting one another. One of these
was the IRA, and there was civil war going on
back then as well. So there's just been decades and

(12:18):
decades of unrest by the time the nineteen sixties roll around, Yeah,
and that nineteen twenties civil war um was in Ireland itself.
So after it became a sovereign nation, all those groups
that had fought the British started fighting each other to
figure out who was going to run the show from
then on. So the IRA that you and I think about, UM,
that you know, we learned about from you two and

(12:39):
the news and the eighties and all that, Um, they're
the ones that you would call the provisional IRA, and
they formed out of the beginning of the troubles, those
protests and riots beginning in nineteen sixty nine. They were
one of the paramilitary groups that developed and they became
UM pretty famous in no small part because of the
hunger strikes they ended up carrying out. Should we take

(13:02):
a break? I think so, I think we've reached breakness.
I know, the nerves that was nervous during that setup.
Were you You thought I was just gonna keep going
and going. No, No, not that. I was just like, man,
this stuff is so you know, there's there are fine lines,
and I just don't want to misspeak. Oh I don't
think we did. But now that I just said that,
of course we did. All right, Well, we'll gather ourselves

(13:24):
and we'll be right back to talk about the history
of hunger strikes a little bit right after this, Okay, Chuck.

(13:50):
So why would anybody engage in a hunger strike and
why would they be most closely related or thought of, um,
in relation to the I R A. Well, uh, you know,
there is some evidence that they were rooted in Celtic tradition, UM,
hundreds of years ago. There were you know, there were
stories of people undergoing hunger strikes and it might you know,

(14:15):
it wasn't necessarily political at the time. So how it
would go down is like maybe somebody owed you money
and wouldn't give it to you, so you would go
very publicly to where they live, camp out on their
doorstep and engage in a hunger strike. And it was
sort of just a very public display of you know,

(14:35):
maybe you didn't have means to get it any other way,
so it was a very public display and way of saying,
this person is doing me wrong and I am out
here like starving myself. Pay attention, right. It was so
common it was actually written into Gaelic law. I was
called the troupes cad or trust God, I'm going with
trups cad um, and it was it was the concept

(14:59):
of hospitality in Ireland among the Gaelic people was so
strong that, um, it was just unthinkable to let somebody
starve on your doorstep. So it was really kind of
playing on two things. It was drawing attention to somebody,
and then it was also showing what a terrible person
they were for letting this person starve on their doorstep.
The thing is this is real, that really happened, Like

(15:21):
it's it comes up in some of the um epics
from the Gaelic culture, and like it's documented that it
was a real thing. But what's not documented is it's
linked to the I r A hunger strikes of the
beginning of the twentieth century and then towards the end
of the twentieth century. Because nobody involved in those ever
said I'm I'm doing I'm pulling a trop scad um.

(15:44):
They didn't link it to it, but you could make
a case that it was kind of like in the
culture to think of doing something like that, because it
had been around for hundreds of years. Yeah, I think
that's fair to say. And you know, it continued, like
in the early nineteen hundreds, there were how are you
saying at suffragettes, suffragists, suffrage suffragists. Yeah, like how you

(16:05):
call a female or male server a server, a female
or male actor and actor? We don't do, you know.
I know that David Bowie song always confuses me, though, well,
it's a good song and it should remain. But they
would undergo hunger strikes, but they would bring in sort
of like religious iconography sometimes and sort of paint themselves

(16:28):
as martyrs. They would invoke the Virgin Mary and Joan
of Arc and stuff like that. And again, this is
not exactly the same thing. But this is just to
say that in the early nineteen hundreds there were, uh,
there were women in Ireland that were undergoing these hunger strikes.
They also happened in Russia, and I think they called
some of these like the Russian method. Uh. They would

(16:51):
get there, they would do this reverse like force feeding,
like reverse stomach bumping to force feed some of these people. Um.
Sometimes that would killed them. So it was it was
just a nasty way to draw attention, and the way
that it was countered was also nasty. Yeah. So the
first i RA members to hunger strike want to go

(17:13):
on hunger strike, um, were inspired by the suffragists um,
who were sometimes in the same prison as them. The
first ira A member to do it was James Connolly,
who went on hunger strike in and was actually released
from prison as a result. UM. And then a few
years later, UM, the case of Thomas Ash drew national

(17:34):
and I think maybe even international attention because he went
on hunger strike and they accidentally killed him when they
tried to force feed him. Yeah, they pumped milk and
eggs into his lungs by accident, which is uh, I mean,
it's hard to think of like what kind of an
awful death after you're already starving yourself. Uh. And we

(17:54):
should also point out to that. Another similarity that they
had with these original early nineteen hundreds suffragists with their
hunger strikes is they were and this is a very
key thing for what ended up being, you know, the
hunger strikes in the nineteen eighties that we're going to
talk about in a bit, But they one of their
main aims was to be looked at as political prisoners

(18:17):
and not criminal prisoners. Yeah. That was a big ongoing
thread throughout all of this, starting with the suffragists and
then all the way into the eighties with modern IRA.
So um, I mean, should we talk about that for
a minute? Yeah, sure, Well, you know, there's a huge
difference in being viewed as a criminal and wearing prisoners

(18:39):
clothing and having a prisoners rights which are to say,
like criminal prisoners rights which are to say, not very many,
and what they were fighting for and what the the
I r. A Was later fighting for in the eighties
and the seventies, which was we're political prisoners. We want
to be able, we don't want to look like common criminals.
We want to wear our own clothes. We want to

(19:00):
be able to uh, to associate with with each other
and walk about, um outside of ourselves and congregate. And
in nineteen seventy six, you know, they allowed this for
a while, but nineteen seventy six of British government said no,
we're going to treat you like your terrorists and like
your common criminals. And you've got to wear these You
can't congregate anymore. You've got to wear, you know, uh,

(19:21):
a prisoners jumpsuit. And this was a big, big deal.
It really was for a number of reasons. One UM,
the reason why the Brits said we're not going to
recognize you as political prisoners was because they had at
first um and they decided that this was generating too
much sympathy and legitimizing the i r A and its

(19:45):
struggle for Irish independence way too much, and by casting
them as criminals rather than political prisoners, they were saying like, hey,
these people are dangerous, their thugs, they're terrorists, and you
should be on the side of us, the Brits and
the Protestants who are cleaning up the streets and getting
these people off the streets and into jail. So it

(20:06):
wasn't just the way your day to day life panned
out in prison. It was also like the larger public
perception a battle for that that was going on that
both sides were really entrenched in their way of thinking
with that. Well, yeah, and that's the reason a hunger
strike in the case of the IRA was, or could

(20:27):
be at least very effective as a pr tool, because
a common criminal prisoner is it going to literally starve
themselves to death for a cause. So on one hand
you have the British government saying, you know, we're not
going to recognize you, you're just terrorists. On the other hand,
you've got the i ra A starving themselves to death, Uh,

(20:47):
fighting for rights to where their own clothing. I think, Uh,
this one thing you sent me said as far as
their them congregating, is that in prison they just saw
that as another I ra A headquarters. Basically. Yeah, they
did a lot of strategizing in the early seventies and
they were able to chuck because of something called um
Operation Demetrius, and that was something that the British Army

(21:09):
carried out in one and it ended up backfiring because
it generated a tremendous amount of public sympathy for the
i r A and its movement um because the British
Army just started rounding up suspected members of the i
r A and put them in what amounted to a
prisoner of war camp um. There was no due process,
they didn't get to plead their case in front of

(21:30):
a judge if they accidentally got scooped up, and they
really had nothing to do with the I RA A
t s. There was no recourse for getting out of there,
and they set up the Brits set up a prisoner
of war camp um in Northern Ireland to hold I
think hundreds and hundreds of of prisoners starting in UM one,
and it really really rubbed the public the wrong way

(21:52):
because it's nineteen seventy one. You know, this isn't like
the seventeenth century all over again. It's one and they're
rounding people up and holding them in prisoners of prisoner
of war camps um against Theirwell that's crazy. Yeah. So
you know, a hunger strike could be a pretty effective
way to draw attention to this. Uh you know. Ed

(22:16):
points out a few um things about hunger strikes that
could make it more effective, which is obviously to do
it as a collective action is a much stronger message
that you're sending than any individual. Um. So if you
have a group with a political cause, you're gonna get
more attention. Um. You know, it casts the prison officials

(22:36):
in a light of which they're either allowing these people
to starve to death, which is, you know, a monstrous
thing to do, or they're forced feeding them, which sometimes
kills them, which is a monstrous thing to do. And
you know, your body basically shuts down. I think we've
talked about starvation and other episodes before, but you know,
your body uses up your fat stores and once that's gone,

(22:58):
once that's gone, it starts literally like eating at your muscle,
eating at your internal organs, and between you know, forty
and seventy something days, your your body is going to
finally succumb to organ failure and you're gonna die. Yeah.
Um yeah, once your once your body starts eating its
own organs, you're in trouble. And even if you managed

(23:19):
to survive the um, the hunger strike, um, you probably
have done some serious permanent damage to yourself. So so,
like we were saying, after Operation Demetrius, right, they rounded
up a bunch of suspected ira A members treated them
as prisoners of war. But at the same time they
were also busting other ira A leaders with legitimate and

(23:42):
legitimate criminal acts like gun possession things like that. So
you had two groups of i ra A prisoners being
treated separately, the ones in the interment camp being treated
like political prisoners or prisoners of war, and then the
ones in the jail being treated like common criminals. So
to kind of get the same treatment in the jail
as the political prisoners in the pow camps were given.

(24:06):
A guy named Billy McKee who was an i ra
A leader. Um, stage the first modern hunger strike in
nineteen seventy two, that's right, and um it was an
effective strategy for about four years. But this was right
at that time. I think it was VY six when
they had that shift from recognizing them as political prisoners

(24:29):
to uh just you know, criminal prisoners. So this was
pre that time and kind of led up to that shift. Yeah.
And then, um, so you've got the criminalization campaign being
carried out by the Brits and the Protestants in Northern
Ireland who were running the government. Um, and remember it
has a twofold effect, like you can no longer congregate,

(24:53):
you can no longer strategize. We're no longer going to
recognize your hierarchy of ranks, um, and just deal with
your leaders like you're just a common criminal now. And
it also turned the tables on the ira A prisoners,
who had formerly been treated with general respect by the guards.
The guards were let loose on these people, UM, and

(25:16):
it led to a really horrible time to be an
ira A prisoner because it's almost like there was pin
up rage or something among the guards and they just
released it on the prisoners. They poured scalding water on them,
they hosed them down with um cold water hoses in
winter time. UM. They they beat them regularly and routinely,

(25:43):
and again they were treated as common criminals. And uh,
it was a from what I can tell, from about
nineteen seventies, six to night one was about as bad
a time as you could be an ira A prisoner
as there ever was. Yeah, we'll take a break in
a sec but before we do, I do want to
mention the movie that I watched today because I figured

(26:05):
there was probably a movie about this. UM. Steve McQueen,
the director that did Twelve Years of Slave and shame
directed the movie, his first movie actually directed. Huh was
it an infomaniac? You watched? No? No, no, that wasn't him.
Oh wait was that that? No? That thin? Yeah, but

(26:26):
he did one where um Fossbender is a sex addict. Right,
that's shame, Okay, Shane, That's what I meant, is that
what you watched? No, no, no, that's not watched. You're like,
what when's the Hunger striking to start? Uh? It was
his first movie from two thousand and eight, also with
Michael Fassbender as Bobby Sands who will you know? Get
to after the Break, But it was called Hunger and

(26:48):
boy oh boy. Uh. I recommend it in one sense
and that it was a powerful film. Um, but it
was hard to watch, my friend, I can't imagine. It
was brutal. Um, it's a very The way he structures
it is sort of a kind of a non traditional narrative.
It's not like a traditional biopic that you would expect.
It's a very quiet, not a lot of dialogue. Um,

(27:11):
it's only ninety six minutes long, but it's a very
slow paced film. But just a really I mean, I
get the sense that it was a really realistic depiction
of those years that were you were talking about between
seventy six and eighty one, and these guys were just brutalized, man,
they were uh, Like they would call in the riot
squad and basically open the cells and throw their naked

(27:35):
bodies into the hallway and beat them with batons and
like like cut off their hair and their beards like
until they were bloody. And it was it was a
very very tough movie to watch. And at the Hunger
Strike part of it is only like the last twenty
minutes or so of the film. The whole first part

(27:55):
is just sort of the conditions in prison, uh, and
what's going on. So I recommend it on one hand,
it is not for the faint of heart. But we'll
kind of take a break now and we'll talk about
what else is going on in the prisons in right
after this, all right, so uh, in the film and

(28:34):
in real life, in fact, this is how the film
starts out. Is the first prisoner that comes in refuses
his prison clothes, and that's what started the blanket protests
when they were basically like, I'm not gonna wear your
common criminal outfit, and they basically said okay, well, you're
just gonna be naked seven for years, and here's your blanket,

(28:58):
and that's that's going to be your clothing. And that's
what they did. It's called the blanket protests. That first
prisoner under this new criminalization scheme said, you know, final,
just wear a blanket, and like, in very short order,
I think four hundred other Iria prisoners did the same thing.
It's called the blanket protest. They were all just naked
in the movie the whole time where they really have

(29:21):
you seen the new Kids in the Hall? I haven't yet.
I'm dying too though, the naked the whole time. No,
but in in some places and it's like, wow, it's
pretty hilarious. Yeah, And I have to say I think
they're they're better then they were in the first go round.
It's which is very surprising, but it really they I

(29:43):
laughed out loud more than I did that I remember
doing in an average Kids in the Hall episode. Okay, well,
I was a little actually worried to watch it for
fear of like, they're not, you know, going to be
as great anymore, and I would be it would taint
the original or something. No, definitely, and I'm never understood
that how does something like a follow up taint an original?

(30:04):
It does. It doesn't taint the original, it taints the
whole For me sometimes as a as a whole memory sense. Yeah,
that makes more sense for sure. But yeah, like those
originals aren't funny now, it's not like that. It's just like, oh,
like a boy. Then they went on to do something
not good. So, um, yeah, I wouldn't worry about that,

(30:25):
and I don't want to talk it up too much.
So you're expecting like, yeah, I don't want you to
be let down, but I don't think you will be fantastic.
Can't wait? Yeah, so um yeah, So this blanket protest,
I'm not sure how long it went on, but it
went on for quite a while, And it happened during
that period that I guess hunger covers um, which again

(30:46):
was about the worst time you could be an ira
A prisoner, because like they weren't doing this too common
criminals that were in the same prison, they were doing
it to the ira A members. So they went from
treating them as political listeners with a general amount of
respect and all of the freedoms that that that came with,
to regularly beating them and posing them down with cold

(31:10):
water in the winter and like taking their clothes and um.
Like that was the shift, the change in treatment, and
they were doing it to the ira A because they
were trying to send a message. The British government was like,
this is what we think of you. This is how
we're going to treat you. You should probably stop right
now because this is what you can expect if we

(31:31):
catch you from now on. That that like treat that
gentleman's agreement that we had before, that's gone. Yeah. So
in ninety eight, and the film kind of portrays the
Blanket protest is concurrent with the Dirty Protest. I'm not
sure if that's the case, because the Dirty Protest came
around in night this is when. And this was really

(31:52):
gross and hard to watch in the film. Oh I'm
sure Steve McQueen covered very well, I know, and believe
it or not, this makes me want to see Twelve
Years of Slave more because, like I knew it was tough,
but now that I've seen this, I know it's gonna
be hard to sit through again. And I'm still avoiding it,
but I want to see it more because i know
it's going to be like super realistic. I think so

(32:13):
hunger was your gateway drug to twelve years, I guess so.
But the dirty protest is when the prisoner said, all right, well,
if we're gonna be in here and you're not gonna
give us any rights, we're not gonna bathe. We're gonna
smear our feces all over the wall and our food
all over the wall, and we're gonna take our our
urine and feces and dump it under the uh the

(32:36):
cell door out into the hallway. So you have to
deal with it. And it was a very very it's
a disgusting movie to watch, but this really happened. So
one of the other things that happened to was that
among those ira A prisoners who were treated like this,
they formed a bond that has probably never been formed

(32:57):
in the history of humanity, because you know, no group
was ever necessarily subjected to that exactly like that, in
exactly the same way. So, I mean, I'm sure there
are other similar bonds among you know, enslaved and um
imprisoned populations. But because they were already fighting for a
cause that they believed in, and they were suffering for

(33:19):
a cause that they believed in, this stepped up treatment
just made that bond between them even stronger. So one
of the things that they they they that came out
of all this was um, what's called the five demands,
and it was basically, like you could summarize it as,
we want to be treated like political prisoners again. Yeah,

(33:40):
and they were all reasonable demands. One was again to
wear their own clothes. Uh. Number two was to not
have to go on work detail. Uh. They said they
wanted to be allowed a visit and a package in
a letter, one one and one per week. And in
the film they did get visitors and they were um
small uggling in all kinds of things under the table,

(34:03):
which is always a great part of any prison film. Uh.
They wanted the freedom to associate again and organized and congregate.
And then they wanted, um to revoke any of the
punishments that happened because of these protests that were already
in place. Yeah, and like you said, they're reasonable and
there's so reasonable. They almost seemed small like the iris

(34:25):
going through this and that's all they want. But again, remember,
being treated like a political prisoner has a lot to
do with optics in the general public, right, So that
makes a little more sense that that it was just
that is all they were asking for, um, and there
was They got a big assist by a woman named
Bernadette mccalis key UM, who had been a member of

(34:46):
Parliament Parliament, not the George Clinton version, but like the
original she played keyboards so um. So she was fairly
well known and she actually ran in the European Parliament
on a five demands platform in ninety seventy nine, and
there was an assassination attempt on her life from the
Ulster Defense Force, which was one of those paramilitary groups

(35:07):
that that began at the beginning of the troubles, but
they were a Protestant paramilitary group, um. And she survived
the assassination attempt and would show up to rallies and
protests on crutches. Um. But she did a really great
job at focusing public support and attention on what was
going on in the prisons and the protests that were

(35:29):
being carried out and why they were being carried out.
That's right. Uh. And following that the early nineteen eighties
when we saw sort of the two main modern hunger strikes. Uh.
That was the one in the seventies, but the two
in the eighties really I think got the most media attention.
Uh one began October and this was I believe seven

(35:53):
strikers quit eating again to try and get these five
demands carried through. Lasted fifty three a's and remember that's
right in the wheelhouse of where you Could die, and
h one named Sean McKenna was very near death. And
you know this whole time, Margaret Thatcher is you know,
she's known as the Iron Lady for a reason, and

(36:14):
she was very much a hard liner. And I think
it was a direct quote in the movie. You know,
she said basically that they're these terrorists are resorting to
a last resort, which is pity that we should have
pity on them. But basically that's not going to happen um.
But she was prepared to come to a settlement in

(36:34):
this case because of the optics. The strike did end
because they didn't want Sean McKinnon to die because that
would be really bad optics. So that was the nineteen
eighty strike, proceeding the one in March of eighty one. Yeah,
and the reason the March of eight one hunger strikes
started is because the Brits had agreed um verbally to

(36:56):
to giving in on the five demands and treating the
IRA prisoners as political prisoners again and then re naket
on it. They just didn't follow through. Uh, they never
got it in writing, basically is what it amounted to.
And so they staged an even bigger, even more public
hunger strike starting March one, and they, um it's I

(37:17):
think it involved at least twenty three hunger strikers, but
rather than all striking beginning at the same time like
they did in October, um, they staggered it five people
a week so that this hunger strike would be drawn
out even longer. Yeah, and that, um, that makes sense.
I also was wondering too during the film, like or

(37:38):
before the film, like why why can't they just squash
this in the press and not let any of this out,
because the hunger strike is only good if the public
knows about it. But they were still getting visitors that
throughout this whole time, So there were you know, Bobby
Sand's parents visited him in prison and saw like his

(37:59):
condition and as he was like slipping away, and uh,
you know, we mentioned Sands because he was very much
the sort of the main public face of this eight
one strike. Bobby stands. Actually Um was elected to the
British House of Commons while he was wasting away in prison. Um.
He obviously wasn't allowed a campaign or anything like that,
and couldn't have because he was, you know, slowly dying

(38:22):
of starvation. But this was a very big deal that
he was actually elected to the House of Commons. Yeah,
it was a big deal because it focused a tremendous
amount of public attention, Like every every paper in the
world was writing about how a guy in prison was
elected to parliament. Um, and and now that we're talking
about him, why is he in prison? And oh, he's

(38:43):
on a hunger strike? Why is he on a hunger strike?
So it was a really big pr COO for the
i r A. But then also politically speaking it had
like a UM it was a really big signal that
the only way he could have been elected was if
moderate Catholics, who normally just didn't go to the polls
because they didn't want to support the ira A, but

(39:04):
they also weren't about to vote for a Protestant candidate. Um,
they came out and they voted for the ira member.
So it showed that the average person in Northern Ireland,
the average Catholic was really upset with how the British
were treating the IRA and their their treatment of the
IRA was starting to backfire, and that it was generating
public sympathy and support that hadn't been there before. Yeah,

(39:28):
and he we should point out he was a young guy.
He was twenty six years old when he started this strike,
and I think he turned seven during the strike, so
he wasn't you know. I think I had heard of
Bobby Sands and I always just sort of pictured him
as maybe some guy in his forties for some reason.
But he was a very young guy. And uh, he finally,

(39:49):
you know, died of starvation on May five. Uh, this
was sixty six days into the strike. Riot start erupting
um all over the place and protest all over the world. Basically,
it was a very very public matter. And I remember
hearing about this when I was a kid, even though
I didn't understand what was going on. I remember hearing

(40:10):
about Bobby Sands dying. Oh yeah, wow. It was definitely
not in my wheelhouse at the time. I think I
was playing with a Tonka truck. Maybe. No. I remember
big news events like that, though I didn't, you know,
I remember John Lennon dying and I was like, he's
the guy with a round glasses. Yeah, that kind of thing, right. Um,
So when Sands died, that was a really really big deal.

(40:34):
Thousands and thousands of people turned out for his his funeral,
including very famously um Ira A paramilitary members who were
wearing like um Balaklava's basically um at the funeral, um
along the streets along his funeral procession. There were thousands
more people you know who turned out. So it showed
just how much like people supported the IRA, or at

(40:57):
the very least sympathized with the IRA, that they were
willing to die, to starve themselves to death for their cause.
And Bobby Saints knew he was gonna die. He said
towards the beginning he fully expected to die. Um and
he did. He put his He did what what I
would say most of us would never do. He starved

(41:17):
himself to death for the cause that he believed in,
to help the cause that he believed in, help to
basically serve as an inspiration to show this cause means
so much that me and some other people are willing
to die, to starve ourselves to brutal brutal death to
help um to help further the cost, to help generate

(41:37):
publicity for this cause. So by the way, Fastbender dropped
forty pounds for this role, so he kind of pulled
a Christian bale. It was. It was really like, uh,
tough to see that, you know, I mean, he's already
he's a pretty slight guy, even like under normal circumstances.
You know, he laid one seventy and dropped down to

(41:58):
one thirty. Uh. He apparently ate like nuts and berries
and stuff every day, and that was about it. So
Sans obviously was the main headline. But he was just
one of ten men that died in prison during these
hunger strikes. I think there were twenty three total. Thirteen survived,
and um Ed is keen to point out that, you know,

(42:22):
the reason that some of these men survived is you know,
eventually you're gonna lose consciousness and your family might step in,
and you know you're gonna get your medical nutrition intravenously.
In that case. That wasn't the case obviously with the
ten who did who did die in prison. But I
think in a lot of the cases of the thirteen
that survived was because they weren't able to make their

(42:44):
own choice and their family intervened, right, So this strike,
get this, this hunger strike, the second one went on
from March first to October three and claimed the lives
of ten men in people died during that brief period
of time from hunger from starving themselves. And it finally ended,

(43:06):
at least in part because one of the villains in
this story, Humphrey Atkins, who was at the time the
Secretary of State for Northern Ireland and was very much
aligned with the UM the no pity viewpoint of Margaret Thatcher.
He was replaced. He was replaced by somebody who wasn't
quite as much a hardliner, guy named James Prior. And

(43:27):
Prior is like, I want to put an end to this,
so let's start negotiating, and they ended the strike on
October three, again with ten people dead in that six
month period from starvation. Yeah, and it kind of you know,
depends on which side you're on and whether or not
you believe it was an effective thing, because they ended up.

(43:47):
UM it's sort of been uh an a roundabout way
getting a lot of the five demands met, but it
was never like an official declaration that you are political
prisoner and we're going to meet your five demands. It
just sort of it wasn't so you know, if you
look at it from the Thatcher side, they never gave in.

(44:10):
If you look at it from the ira A side,
they ended up in a roundabout way getting the same status.
But I think there were probably a lot of i
RA too that saw it as a defeat because they,
you know, weren't officially recognized as such. Right and we
should say going on outside the prison gates in in
Northern Ireland throughout this time, our car bombings, assassinations, protests, riots, um,

(44:34):
there are a lot of riots around Northern Ireland. And
when Bobby Sands died, um. And so it's not like
this is the only thing that ira A was doing.
We we just focused on this. But one of the
things that came out of these hunger strikes, um was
this idea, especially among the shinfan Um leadership, that they
they were never going to liberate Northern Ireland just through

(44:56):
the paramilitary, that they was going to require politics and
and um. This this showed, especially the election of Bobby
Sands to Parliament while he was in prison, that the
i RA was viable politically speaking. Yeah, it's gonna be
really interesting to see what happens moving forward. But that's

(45:19):
where they can kind of source that where they are
today is pretty much there from those hunger strikes in Yeah.
And I would love to hear from our listeners, uh
in Northern Ireland and in the Irish Republic, like what
they what their thoughts are of you know, because I
trust stuff you should know listeners generally as being uh

(45:41):
you know, alive in the world and having uh studied,
learned opinions, learned opinions. So I would love to hear
from both sides to see what they think. Um, I
want to know what the tenor is over there? Yeah?
Same here the word on the street, the word on
the cobblestone street. Uh, you got anything else? Uh? Now,

(46:05):
this is a good one, Chuck good pick. I'm glad
we did uh. And since I said I'm glad we
did it, it's time of course for a listener. Now,
by the way, did you know I'm way late on this,
but you know Bono's son as a band Uh no
sounds no. He has a band called Inhaler and I

(46:27):
just heard about it and listened to it. They put
out an album last summer, and it sounds exactly like
you two. Oh boy, he sounds just like his dad,
and it has the energy of like the early You two.
It's really good. I like it. Yeah, okay, good, Yeah,
I don't. I don't mean that in a in a
negative derivative way. You know, your your voice sounds like

(46:49):
somebody related to just by genetics. Yeah, I don't think
he's like, I want to sound like my dad, you know, sure, Yeah,
I don't think he's using auto team like that. I'm
just surprised he didn't go in like a totally different
direction musically, like maybe like folk folk rock or folk
progue or something. Yeah, I mean I did see that.
I read some reviews to some people kind of knocked
it for like going for that, you know, big stadium,

(47:12):
anthemic you two thing right out of the gate. But
you know, stuff, It is what I say, where the
sun don't shine. Let someone make the music they want
to make it good for them if they're getting huge.
I love it, yeah for sure. All right. So this
is just one of many squirrel emails we got. Who
knew that that was going to generate so much email?

(47:37):
Oh man, it's crazy, Like We got videos of people
scritching on little squirrels that they've been feeding. Squirrels crawling
up people's laps and up there sitting on their shoulder
like wild squirrels. It's pretty amazing. I'll like, white albino
squirrels are black squirrels. Where was it the head the
ones with the big long ears. I don't know, No,

(47:58):
I didn't see those those Toronto. Where is it Utah?
I'm guessing Utah. I can't remember. I feel bad now,
but yeah, they have these little sort of wizard long
ears that stick up. It's it's amazing wizard ears. Wizard
here's healf ears that wizards? Okay to me? Wizards? Right, yeah,

(48:19):
I don't think so, not according to Gary Guy. All right,
all right, so here we go. Um. In the recent
Squirrel episode, Chuck said, jommy kid that can get a
squirrel and hit it with a stick. And here's my story.
My wife and I were on a National Park road
trip in the Western US and while hiking in Zion,
I heard a commotion on the trail behind me. I

(48:40):
looked back. A couple was rushing over to the side
of the trail where there was a significant drop off
because their son had gone over the edge. It's terrifying
to witness, but thankfully the boy had been had gotten
caught on a tree and was not noticeably injured. Here's
how we got there. The boys spotted a squirrel in
the trail and hit it with a sticky. It came

(49:01):
after and screeched at the boy, startling him and causing
him to retreat straight over the ledge. Let this be
a teaching moment. Don't go after squirrels with sticks, or
you may be in for a nasty spill. And that
is from Read Stiller in Dallas, Texas, who is a
Texas and A and M grad and came to Athens

(49:21):
for the Aggies Bulldogs game a couple of years ago
and had a great time in Athens and said to
come out to College Station for a game and you
will have a great time as well. Very nice. Thanks
for the invite. We appreciate that. Who was that? That
is Read Stiller? Well thanks a lot, Read, We appreciate
that big time. That is a really good story. Actually,

(49:42):
um my evil part says if you want to get
in touch with us, like Read did, you can send
us an email to Stuff Podcast at iHeart Radio dot
com Stuff you Should Know is a production of I
heart Radio. For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the
i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen

(50:03):
to your favorite shows. H m hm