Bobby Sands

Bobby Sands was an IRA volunteer who died on hunger strike in the Maze prison in 1981, having been elected to the Westminster parliament while starving himself. He grew up in north Belfast in a Catholic family that was intimidated out of two homes. He joined the Provisional IRA at eighteen. He was imprisoned in 1973 for firearms possession, released in 1976, and arrested again months later after the bombing of the Balmoral Furniture Company in Dunmurry and the gun battle that followed. He was sentenced to fourteen years. The dispute that killed him was about status rather than release. Republican prisoners had held Special Category Status, effectively that of prisoners of war, until the government withdrew it in 1976. Inmates responded with the blanket protest, refusing prison uniform, and then the dirty protest. A first hunger strike in 1980 ended without resolution. Sands led a second, beginning on 1 March 1981, with prisoners joining at intervals so the deaths would be staggered. Five weeks in, the sitting MP for Fermanagh and South Tyrone died and Sands stood in the by-election. He won it, which made the British government's position that he was a criminal rather than a political figure very hard to hold. Margaret Thatcher did not move, saying crime was crime and not political. Sands died on 5 May 1981 after sixty-six days without food, aged twenty-seven. Nine more strikers died before the protest ended in October. Around a hundred thousand people attended his funeral, and the electoral success pushed the republican movement towards the political strategy that eventually produced Sinn Fein's rise.

• Lived: 1954 CE – 1981 CE
• Nationality: Irish
• Roles: revolutionary, politician