BOBBY SANDS: WARRIOR BARD OF LONG KESH

Commemoration  of the 40th Anniversary of the Death of Bobby Sands,  held on May 8, 2021 at the Galway Bay Irish Pub in Pawtucket, Rhode Island.

With about one hundred people in attendance, this is the  speech I presented on that day.

BOBBY SANDS : WARRIOR BARD OF LONG KESH

 So glad to be here today to join you all in  celebrating the heroic sacrifice of  ten  Irish  patriots  led on  Hunger Strike by Bobby Sands, Member of Parliament. 40 years have passed since their  glorious martyrdom. I do think that the manner and choice of their deaths made them martyrs and we should rejoice. As Saint Augustine  reminds us "It would be an affront to pray for martyrs, we should pray to them."  Bobby himself said on his last days "God will understand,"

In 1981 we had masses said for them one after another. Now we pray to them and they help us move forward.  Bobby famously called LONG KESH "the Breaker's Yard" but he refused to be broken.

In Rhode Island the Irish Northern Aid became active and created a series of meetings and demonstrations  to try to alter Mrs. Thatcher's seeming determination to see them all die.

We made several trips to Boston to Beacon Hill to make some noise  at the home of the British Consulate. 

I recall that one of those visits coincided with trash night and we  improvised inspired by the  women of Belfast  who often banged trash can lids to warn or British troops policing the area. So we gleefully made a great racket banging trash cans on the elite Beacon Hill.

MY memory of those days and nights is still vivid. On one occasion we requested and were granted an appointment with Senator Claiborne Pell to ask him to endorse the Hunger Strikers.

Can you imagine my dismay, when sitting in his office we made our request?  Pell responded by telling us that he was still grieving for the violent death of his relative and friend whom he called "Dickie" Mountbatten.

Lord Mountbatten had been killed in the summer of 1979 when the IRA placed a bomb in his boat  that he was sailing in a lake near his summer home in County Sligo, Ireland.

I remember thinking --well that is the end of this meeting. And I was right, we soon found ourselves out in the hallway. 

This may sound incredible, but  I did not believe that Bobby Sands would die. 

No, I and many others thought that surely the spectacle of  Ten men lined up for such slow and terrible deaths would cause Mrs. Thatcher to relent. After all, their demands of  non-criminal status did not seem extreme. Surely even the British would see that the  idea that political prisoners  should not be treated as criminals was a reasonable expectation.

We were wrong. 

Mrs. Thatcher never relented in her murderous hatred of the IRA,  and Bobby Sands and his nine soldiers never relented either.

Will you think me foolish if I admit  that I was shocked by the actual death of Bobby Sands? It was a major grief experience for so many Irish Americans. With the hindsight of 40 years, it may all seem inevitable now. However, then it seemed  an impossible tragedy and many of us were shaken by the extent of our own sorrow.  

 We held meetings; we had masses said. It all sounds so inadequate, but that is what we did.

The families of the Hunger  Strikers visited us from Ireland and toured the  cities of American supporters. Our connections became closer and more intimate as we met the brothers and sisters,  and their stories of their loved ones made them like family to us all.

Our crowds grew larger, and so did the donations we collected to support the cause of Irish freedom.

Everyone wanted to meet and  offer hospitality to the grieving relatives.

I worried about their welfare and safety, and it was with a sigh of relief that we delivered them to Hartford-- the next stop on their tour after Providence.

A  recent Google search reveals that Hartford has erected an actual monument to Bobby Sands-- it is the only one in the United States.

My title is  BOBBY SANDS-- WARRIOR BARD OF  LONG KESH.

A TERM PERHAPS NOT CLEAR TO ALL IS LONG KESH

That is the name for a prison  others call The Maze--  situated at the former Royal Air Force station of Long Kesh, on the outskirts of Lisburn. This was in the townland of Maze, about nine miles (14 km) southwest of Belfast. The prison and its inmates were involved in such events as the 1981 hunger strike.

I also want to talk about why I use the term WARRIOR BARD to describe Bobby Sands.  Many of you may have noticed that  I borrowed the term from a well known Irish song  THE MINSTEL BOY by Tom Moore

Land of song said the Warrior bard,

though all the world betray thee

One sword at least thy rights shall guard

One faithful harp shall praise thee.

Warrior Bard --the combination of the poet soldier --  runs deep in Irish  history.  The Bards were  a definite class in Celtic Druidic Ireland.  They were trained as Bards, and they were trained in  their oral tradition. Each of them had to memorize poems and insults and imprecations.  They were  taught orally, and they would lie in dark rooms on beds reciting the verses they heard to memorize them in that darkness.

They were at the  head of the army going into battle hurling their insults and dire  predictions of loss and defeat  at the approaching enemy.

Bobby Sands replicated that oral tradition and  brought it back as the central aspect of their struggle in the cold cells of Long Kesh.  The knowledge of the Irish language  was a valuable tool for communication since the guards did not know Irish.

Bobby found and embodied that moral superiority that shines in every line he wrote in such  an extraordinary crucible of pain, suffering and daily humiliation.  What a writing workshop he dared to  hold and to produce lines  that we see now are  monuments to the indomitable nature of the creative spirit when it is harnessed to the engine of human freedom.

— Danny Morrison, October 1981.* * *wrote

"It has been said that were Bobby alive to see these poems today he would have rewritten or changed some of the simpler rhyming words. But that is to miss the point. These poems were written by a young man under the most depressing of conditions. More importantly his poetry is the raw literature of the H-Block prison protest which hundreds of naked men stood up against their cell doors (in the late of night when the Screws left the wings) to listen to and to applaud.

It was their only entertainment, it was a beautifully rendered articulation of their own plight. Out of cruelty and suffering Bobby Sands harnessed real poetry, the poetry of a feeling people struggling to be free..."

Danny Morrison told it straight at the time. It has taken me almost  40 years to  know the truth of his assessment and the significance of Sands' achievement

So the  prisoners embraced their  ancient language.  Bobby Sands writes of language lessons  that were held  "after the screws left" and there were no text books. They learned the language the way we all learned our mother tongue--they learned it  orally. In  an amazing  mimicry the conditions of the Irish prisoners  forced them to recreate the  oral tradition of  Irish. And Bobby Sands emerged as the Bard in that tradition. At night wrapped only in Blankets , the men would stand at their cell doors and  Bobby would lead them in songs and recitations.  He  composed many poems which were song lyrics when he set them to tunes as he did with  his favorite song "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald." In his own words--

THE VOYAGE

It was 1803 when we sailed out to sea

and away from the sweet town of Derry.

For Australia bound and if we didn't drown

The mark of the fetter we'd carry.

Our ship was the GULL 14 days out of Hull

And on orders to carry the croppy.

Like a ghost in the night she sailed out of sight

Leaving many a wee'un unhappy

In our rusty iron chains well we sighed for our we'ans.

And our good wives we'd left in our sorrow.

And the main sails unfurled our curses we hurled

At the English and the thought of tomorrow.

I would like to end with more of Bobby's words. A cousin of mine  just gave me a prayer card for someone, Oglach Matthew Devlin, who is related to us and died in 2005 in Ireland.

On the back of his card there is a portion of a poem by Bobby Sands,

 THE RHYTHM OF TIME.

Here are two of the verses:

There's an inner thing in every man,

Do you know this thing, my friend?

It has withstood the blows of a million years

And will do so to the end.

It  lights the dark of  this prison cell,

It thunders forth its might.

It is the undauntable thought, my friend,

The thought that says, I'M RIGHT!