Nationalist Politicians and Spokesmen

"This has finally proved through the ballot box how deep the support is for the republican prisoners. The people have spoken on behalf of the Irish nation."
     Danny Morrison, Sands' campaign organizer
     New York Times, 11 April 1981, 1

Owen Carron

"Bobby Sands was a very ordinary young man in this city who at the age of 18 decided he could no longer accept second-class citizenship. He fought against the British. He died rather than be branded a criminal. He is the symbol of the moral right of the Irish people to struggle for self-determination. Because of his death, Irish Republican prisoners will never wear the British prison uniform or do prison work."
     Owen Carron, Sands' campaign manager, in his eulogy at
     Sands' funeral
     San Francisco Chronicle, 8 May 1981, 21-1-C

"I think it is reasonable to assume that at some point the IRA will make a response to Sands' death."
     Gerry Adams, Provisional Sinn Fein
     Washington Post, 10 May 1981, A14

"We have 100 volunteers waiting in the queue, all prepared to die if necessary."
     IRA spokesman
     San Francisco Chronicle, 16 June 1981, 12-2

"The only way the hunger strike can be resolved is by direct negotiations between the government and the prisoners themselves."
     Bernadette Devlin McAliskey
     Boston Globe, 10 July 1981, 4

"An extraordinary opportunity existed to resolve the prison crisis once and for all. Mrs Thatcher has once again shown a disastrous failure to understand the seriousness and the urgency of the situation in Northern Ireland arising out of the prison crisis."
     John Hume, leader, Social Democratic and Labor Party
     Chicago Tribune, 11 July 1981, 1-9-1

"Michael's death, the tenth in the present hunger strike in Long Kesh at the hands of the British government, clearly demonstrates to even those who do not want to see, England's concept of democratic rule in Ireland.

English politicians, as always when it concerns Ireland, are so malevolent that they do not even realize that every death in Long Kesh is another nail in the coffin of British imperialism."
      IRA statement regarding the death of Michael Devine
      Irish People, 29 August 1981, 1

"[Thatcher] has a total lack of feel for the Irish problem. I can't explain to her how the [Irish Catholic] community feels about the hunger strike without necessarily supporting the IRA."

"Try to get yourself into the prisoners' psychology. They went through the dirty protest for all those years, their leader died and was glorified, and now many more have died. In this group psychology, it is more difficult to live than to die. They are not living in the same world as you or I."
     John Hume, leader, Social Democratic and Labor Party
     Washington Post, 8 September 1981, A16

"The Thatcher government 'may well defeat the prisoners'...but it would be a pyrrhic victory because the underlying problem has been made far worse. The terrorists have more recruits and they have more money from Irish Americans. The community in Northern Ireland is more polarized and there has been serious political dislocation."
     John Hume, leader, Socialist Democratic Labor Party
     Washington Post, 8 September 1981, A16

"The main problem is the intervention for medical aid by hunger strikers' families. Unless the prisoners can find a means of overcoming the intervention of relatives, they must reassess the hunger strike. They may feel they have a means of overcoming the families' intervention. It is a very difficult situation we are in."
     Richard McAuley, Belfast chairman of Provisional Sinn Fein
     Chicago Tribune, 3 October 1981, N1-3-5

"The right by the prisoners to wear their own clothes has been won by the deaths of the 10 H-Block martyrs' during the 7-month hunger strike."
      Gerry Adams, Provisional Sinn Fein
      Washington Post, 7 October 1981, A11