Keyword: hunger strike

From Ramle Prison to the World

Picture: Fatin Al Tamimi/Flickr Richard Pithouse - On the first day of March in 1981 Bobby Sands, imprisoned in the Long Kesh for links to the armed resistance to the British occupation of Northern Ireland, began a hunger strike. For seventeen days he was able to keep a diary. The first entry begins with two lines that have become immortal: “I am standing on the threshold of another trembling world. May God have mercy on my soul.” In 1976 Margaret Thatcher's government had introduced a policy of 'criminalisation' that denied...