Biting at the Grave: The Irish Hunger Strikes and the Politics of Despair

In 1981 the conflict in Ireland's northern counties was marked by the hunger strikes of IRA prisoners pursuing status as political prisoners. Ten men died in the strikes; one, Bobby Sands, an unseated member of Parliament, in death assumed heroic dimensions at home and abroad. Pinpointing how the hunger strikes ``exposed the contradiction at the core of the Catholic nationalist psyche,'' O'Malley, an Irish citizen and author of Uncivil Wars: Northern Ireland Today, assembles strands of elitism, nationalism and the peculiar sanction of the dead into a powerful and passionate chronicle of a people's yearning. This masterly survey of Ireland's multifaceted political history is given human scale in poignant interviews with the strikers' survivors. (Apr.)