HOWZAT

I thought that the offer was sufficient for us to settle the hunger strike honourably. As I saw it, the offer from the Mountain Climber had reduced the gap between the government’s bottom line and our maximum demands to the point where it wasn’t worth more comrades dying.

I was acutely aware that, should McDonnell die, we would enter a more dangerous phase of the hunger strike. Like us, the British would see his death as the crossing of a threshold and would probably dig in for the long haul. And by not taking what was on offer, we ran the risk of the British removing it from the table altogether.

The only core demand on which there had been little movement was free association. In the end I concluded that, while this was more than a peripheral demand, it was not as important as the clothes and the prison-work issues.

Did these concessions go far enough? Was the glass half-empty or half-full? I thought it was three-quarters full. In fact, the British had gone further than I had considered possible. I felt it was almost too good to be true. I asked myself how the British government would sell this in Westminster. But that was hardly our problem: the proposals were there in black and white, direct from Thatcher’s desk.

After about three hours’ arguing with myself over the pros and cons of the Mountain Climber’s offer, I reached the conclusion that, in all conscience, these proposals formed the basis of a honourable settlement.

Bik agreed, and I was euphoric. It seemed to me that the huge sacrifice of Bobby Sands, Frank Hughes, Raymond McCreesh and Patsy O’Hara had broken the British government — something I hadn’t thought possible. No more hunger strikers would have to die for their beliefs. All that was left was for the IRA army council to rubber-stamp our acceptance of the deal — a matter that Bik and I both considered would be a formality, given that we appeared to have won four of our five demands.

But if we thought the response from the army council would be a formality and that, like us, its members would accept the British offer, we were to be sadly mistaken. On the afternoon of July 6, a message came in from the army council saying it did not think that the Mountain Climber’s proposals provided the basis for a resolution and that more was needed.

The message said that the right to free association was vital to an overall settlement and that its exclusion from the proposals, along with ambiguity on the issue of what constituted prison work, made the deal unacceptable.

Bik and I were shattered. The possibility that the council might reject the proposals had never entered into our calculations. We were convinced that we had achieved a great victory and that the republican movement could present the deal as a momentous triumph; now it appeared that our analysis and optimism had been flawed and premature.

At the time, I believed that the leadership felt we had jumped at the first available set of proposals and clumsily accepted them, when a second and better offer might come from the Mountain Climber. Bik and I attributed almost god-like status to the IRA leadership. We believed that their analysis of our opinion was justified because we thought that, tactically, they were far superior to us.

I nonetheless harboured doubts about the wisdom of their tactics. What if the second offer didn’t come? We would be into a protracted hunger strike, and there was no telling how many would eventually die. I asked myself if it was wise for our leadership to endanger the life of McDonnell — and those queuing up behind him — over whether we were banged up for a couple of hours during the day.

Years later Peter Taylor, in his book Provos, asked: “Why was the hunger strike not settled once six men had died and the substance of the five demands seemed to be on offer?” Taylor, like others, misses the point. His question should have been: why was the hunger strike not settled once four men had died and the substance of the five demands seemed to be on offer? The offer didn’t change; it might have been more placatory in tone, but the fundamentals remained the same.