Review: Hunger
Directed by Steve McQueen
In selected cinemas now

The film Hunger depicts the 1981 hunger strike of Irish Republican prisoner Bobby Sands. It is a stark reminder of the last “war on terror” waged by the British state against the nationalists of Northern Ireland. The horrors of Abu Ghraib in Iraq were rehearsed in the brutality inflicted on the Irish political prisoners.

For more than 30 years armed Irish Republicanism, mainly in the form of the Irish Republican Army (IRA) fought a bitter war of liberation against the British state. At the time the media portrayed the IRA as vicious psychotic gunmen, “men of violence”, criminals with no genuine support in their community. The “Provos” attracted all the venom that is now directed at Al Qaeda or Jemaah Islamiyah.

But it is important to remember where this armed struggle came from. In the late 1960s a mass civil rights movement burst on to the streets of Northern Ireland to demand equal rights for the “Catholic” minority of the six counties.

Northern Ireland had been created in 1921, as a Protestant enclave, attached to Britain, while the rest of Ireland became independent. The ruling elite of Northern Ireland, loyal to Britain, made no attempt to hide their biases. James Craig, first prime minister of Northern Ireland, proudly declared, “We are a Protestant Parliament and a Protestant State”. The unstated reality was that if you were part of the sizeable Catholic minority you were a second class citizen.

Northern Ireland’s civil rights movement sought to address the discrimination against Catholics in housing, jobs and voting rights. The central issue for the civil rights marchers was not Ireland’s partition into two states but a fight for basic democratic rights. The response of the Northern Irish state was to try to beat the protesters off the streets.

In July, August and September 1969, five per cent of Catholic families were driven from their homes in Belfast. As attacks by the Royal Ulster Constabulary and the Loyalist militia (the B Specials), against Catholics and the civil rights marches escalated, the Catholic minority sought to defend themselves—erecting barricades and arming themselves with stones and petrol bombs.

In 1969 the Northern Ireland government requested that the British army help restore “order”. Believing they would provide non-partisan security, initially the British army were welcomed by many in the Catholic community but it quickly became apparent that the British troops were first and foremost determined to protect the sectarian structures of the Northern state.

Hundreds of Catholics were imprisoned when internment without trial was introduced in 1971. Then in 1972 on Bloody Sunday, 14 civilians were shot in cold blood by British troops.

In late-1960s Northern Ireland there were influential leftist currents but these were unable to offer a political alternative. With protesters (and innocent bystanders) being shot down on the street, it seemed the IRA and armed struggle against the British state was the only choice.

By 1981, the year of Bobby Sands’ (and nine other Republican prisoners’) hunger strike, the war in Northern Ireland had settled into a bitter grinding conflict of vicious repression, bombings, and sectarian murder. The hunger strikes however offered an alternative to the military stalemate and the possibility of a return to the mass struggles of the civil rights movement. The minority community revived its political activity and broad based committees were established to support the striking prisoners’ demand for political status, without necessarily endorsing the IRA’s armed struggle.

Hunger, while vividly showing the brutality of the British regime and the bravery and self-sacrifice of the Republican prisoners, does not to move much outside of the Maze prison walls. You get a hint of the mass movement that grew for the hunger strikes in the credits at the end of the film which tells the audience that during the hunger strike Bobby Sands was elected to both the Northern Ireland and the British parliaments.

In 2008 with the Northern Ireland peace process ten years old—the IRA declared a ceasefire in 1994 and the Belfast Agreement was signed in 1998—perhaps something of a wider vision might have been expected.

The peace process in Northern Ireland, far from breaking down barriers between Protestant and Catholic, has instead institutionalised sectarianism in the form of “power sharing” between Loyalists and Republicans. With declining living standards for Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland, tragically the political leaders of both sides now seem to agree on one thing—a neo-liberal agenda of privatisation and partnerships with business.

But the mass mobilisations of the civil rights era and the hunger strikes period offered the prospect of a path out of divided communities that are still walled off from each other.

By Phil Chilton