Hunger strike: Margaret Thatcher's battle with the IRA 1980-1981

This authoriative history by best-selling popular historian Thomas Hennessey, based on recently declassified British government documents, argues that it was almost impossible for the British government to grant the demands of the Republican prisoners, regardless of the impact the hunger strikes had in boosting support for Sinn Féin. The concession of the ‘5 demands’ would have amounted to POW status for Republican prisoners and would have fatally undermined the British position that it was fighting terrorism. Controversially, Hennessey concludes that the long-term consequence for the Republican Movement was an irreversible change of strategy, effectively sowing the seeds of the end of the armed struggle as far back as 1981.

Thatcher’s personal role in the hunger strikes is forensically analysed, including her clashes with Charles Haughey, and her early experience of Irish Republicanism: the assassination of Airey Neave, Lord Mountbatten and the Warrenpoint Ambush. Hennessey also reveals her authorisation of the backchannel between MI6 and the IRA; fierce clashes between the foreign office and the NIO over the handling of the crisis; the role of the United States and the views of Ronald Reagan and Ted Kennedy; and further examines Richard O’Rawe’s controversial assertion that there was a deal on the table to end the strike in July 1981, after the death of the Patsy O’Hara, the fourth prisoner to die.
Hunger Strike is the unique and definitive account of one of the seminal events in modern Irish history.