Ireland's OWN: Hungerstrikes

Ireland's OWN: Hungerstrikes

5 May 2000
Funeral Oration for Kierán Nugent
—by Tom Hartley, SF

This morning we are gathered here to lay to rest our dear friend and comrade Kierán. His untimely death has left his family, his friends and comrades with a deep sense of loss and sorrow. Yet in a very real way we are gathered here this morning to remember and celebrate his role as a family man as a friend and especially to pay tribute to his great political legacy as the first blanket man and to reflect on his personal contribution to our struggle for unity and independence.

Kierán was only a boy when the Civil Rights movement began. In his youth he was to witness the political convulsions of the northern state in the aftermath of internment, of Bloody Sunday and the fall of the Stormont parliament. As a young 15 year old he was shot and seriously wounded by loyalists. A friend standing next to him was shot dead.

Because of his activism and his strong commitment to the republican ideal it wasn't long before Kierán found himself behind bars. This was during the period when the British Government introduced its three pronged strategy of Ulsterisation, Criminalisation and Normalisation.

The building of the first H Blocks ran parallel to a massive British propaganda campaign. The full resources of the British state were brought to bear in an effort to convince domestic and international opinion that the republican struggle was nothing more than an armed conspiracy of gangsters.

At every conceivable opportunity British Ministers tried to strangle the republican resistance with a single reference; criminality. Simply put, this was an attempt at a massive political fraud in an effort to distort the political nature of the Irish conflict.

In effect the British Government was turning truth on its head. Torture and prisons, internment without trial, discrimination and prejudice, poverty and repression, special laws and special courts, the dead of Derry's Bloody Sunday and McGurks bar, bad government through bad law, all indicators of English rule in Ireland were now to be hidden inside a strategy of criminalisation.

The introduction of this strategy had led to a degree of uncertainty among republicans as to the nature of British strategic direction. The British had worked hard at hiding their intentions, as always confusion and mis-information were the building blocks of their new strategy. It was all so simple in British eyes, Republican prisoners were to broken in the knackers yard they called the H Blocks and Armagh Jail.

Isn t it wonderfully ironic then that the one major flaw in British strategic planning was their inability to read the minds of republican remand prisoners. In the cells of the Crumlin Road jail and Armagh women's prison young republicans had decided to resist any attempt to treat them as criminals.

Kierán was a teenager when the British Government decided on its strategy of criminalisation. He was a teenager when the British Government decided that republican prisoners were to be broken as a means of breaking the republican community. He was still a teenager when on the 14 September 1976 he was flung naked into a H block cell. Here at this juncture of our history and hidden from all but a few, the all powerful repressive machinery of the English state in Ireland set out to crush a young republican from the Lower Falls. The first blanket man.

In the simplicity of his defiance, refusing to wear a prison uniform, Kierán Nugent in the long tradition of republican prison struggle, reclaimed for all of us, the legitimate and democratic right to oppose English government in Ireland. And by doing so, set in train the heroic struggle of republican prisoners in the H Blocks and Armagh prison, which in a few short years would see the strategy of criminalisation defeated and consigned to the dustbin of English failure in Ireland.

But those were years of sorrow, as the full weight of imperial brutality was used against republican prisoners, for the most part teenagers from the northern republican communities.

In the simplicity of his defiance, refusing to wear a prison uniform, Kierán Nugent a teenager from the lower Falls alone and in the vulnerability of his nakedness refused to be broken. If ever we need an example of the power of the human spirit we should reflect on that moment when the dignity of this young man broke the power and inhumanity of the British state. At the very moment with their first H Block prisoner, when they thought themselves all powerful, the British Government in Ireland had already lost their attempt to criminalise the republican people and their struggle.

Kierán Nugent was not raised to become a heroic figure of the republican struggle. He was an ordinary young man raised inside a loving and caring lower Falls family. Raised in such a setting his life should have been a long and happy contribution to his family and his community. But the journey of Kierán's young life was to be disrupted by the political upheaval of the northern state.

There will always be a great depth of feeling in our community for this young man from the lower Falls who rose to meet the enormous challenge of his time. It is a testament to the great strengths he received from his parents, his brothers and sisters that in a period of great solitude he was able to stand alone and face down the brutality of the British state in Ireland.

His decision not to wear a prison uniform and his many years spent protesting in a H Block cell will continue to tell us of his integrity, his strength, his humanity and his capacity to endure. His destiny, was to become in his time, the very first of an heroic generation who sought through protest and hunger strike, to assert the moral strength of their community in the face of a brutal onslaught by an amoral government.

We can be proud that this ordinary extraordinary young man came from our community and was the first of many ordinary extraordinary young men and women whose political legacy resonates to the four corners of the world when men and women sit down to talk of freedom and independence.

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