“It’s hard to know what way to behave when a friend and a comrade is slowly dying on Hunger Strike just a few cells away, everyone of course tries to put on a brave face and act normal but both he and we know that it is only make believe. We’ve organized story telling and sing songs to keep up his moral[e], ours too, but it’s hard, very hard. It won’t be long now until he’s taken away to join the other Hunger Strikers in the prison hospital and then?

Well it seems that only slow terrible death awaits them all. We try to shout words of encouragement but what can you say to a dying man[?] The screws for their part keep him as isolated from us as possible and go out of their way to taunt and belittle him, yet in their midst he, like his comrades is a giant. If they even had one ounce of their courage if even they had a spark of decency, decency from these who have tormented us all these years? Compassion from these who have made all this suffering necessary?

No, not even a friendly word, not even a word of sympathy during the long days and nights of agony but then neither he nor we expect it. We know only too well that these people have been put here to torment and persecute us and they have done their job well but not well enough. They have served their British masters, the poor pathetic fools, they think that inhumanity and cruelty can break us, haven’t they learnt anything? It strengthens us, it drives us on for then more than ever we know that our cause is just.

Bobby Sands, Frank Hughes, Patsy O’Hara and Raymond McCreesh hunger for justice, they have suffered all the indignities that a tyrant can inflict yet still they fight back with their dying breath. Only a few yards from here, four human skeletons lay wasting away and still the fools the poor pathetic fools cannot break them. Even death will not extinguish the flames of resistance and this flame will without doubt engulf these who in their callousness and in greed have made all this necessary. Britain you will pay!”

“He died as he lived – a republican socialist. Remember his sacrifice with honour and pride.”

Chemical Street, east Belfast

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Copyright © 2006 Peter Moloney
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