Reflections on the blanket
Documentary brings memories alive
By Lynn Caldwell

I'm sitting in a theater in a shopping mall and I'm flashing back to grade 12 history class with Mr. Helmkay at Ladysmith Secondary on Vancouver Island. It's a strange connection.

What's even more strange is that the theater is on the Falls Road, a line that snakes through the heart of working-class Catholic Belfast. I'm watching a new documentary, I gCillin an Bhais (Cells of Death), made by Sonia Gillespie, a young filmmaker from Donegal. The story takes us back to 1981, the dreadful year of the hunger strikers, the IRA prisoners in Long Kesh prison who were asking the British government for five basic demands: essentially they wanted the return of their status as political prisoners. The hunger strikes followed four years of blanket protests, when the prisoners' own clothing was taken from them. Rather than wear prison garb, they wrapped themselves in blankets. The late '70s was also the time of the dirty protests, when their cells were not cleaned and the prisoners smeared their own excrement on the walls. Ironically a more hygienic way of dealing with the mess: it dried faster than if left in piles.

The images from that era are stark: thin young men, long-haired and bearded, wrapped in blankets like boys playing cowboys and Indians; workers in space suits going in to clean up cells. The early times in the Troubles were the days I, a young school kid in Vancouver, was discovering the newspaper: baffled by Watergate, wondering at Patricia Hearst, skimming for interesting bits, mostly the comics and Ann Landers, but lighting on pictures such as these of men in a place already bewitching me.

Later, the spring of 1981 in Ladysmith, Mr. Helmkay tried to harness in a small group of students who felt ready to face the world. He wanted to teach them to think, to look at events and episodes and find themes, patterns, to follow a red ribbon of war or economic crisis and see what the logical, and illogical, conclusions would be.

He believed we were ready to go past the memorization and repetition of the past few years, beyond the rote to analysis and reasoning. Part of studying history in his class was looking at the present and exploring what we thought (after much prodding and cajoling on Mr. Helmkay's part) would become decisive moments, subjects in someone else's history class.

We read the papers daily and watched the news, recording what we thought was the most significant event. Every week, we chose one of the events as the most significant. The only events I remember from those weekly sheets of paper and the ones that were tops every week on my pages, were the IRA hunger strikers in Northern Ireland.

For an 18-year-old who was just beginning to think, perhaps it was romantic in the same way Robin Hood is romantic. It had nothing to do with flowers and lace: a story of good-looking young men facing the System head on, willing to give their lives for a cause they lived. Maybe it was an affinity I felt because of distant Irish roots or maybe the inexplicable longing that I felt even at that stage, a desire that would take 10 years to be articulated and assuaged. I don't know, but all those grade 12 feelings came back at me in the week before Easter, as I watched a simple documentary about four men telling a story of a bit of their lives.
Before graduation, I wrote my final paper on Bobby Sands, the first hunger striker who was elected as a member of parliament in Westminster for the Fermanagh /South Armagh constituency as he deteriorated in a prison hospital bed. Bobby Sands was the first to die.

I have looked for that essay, wanting to see from my now perspective what that newly-thinking me made of it. It's probably the only school paper I don't have: maybe I put it somewhere for safe-keeping, maybe I re-read it later and decided it was trash. Or maybe mercifully it has been hidden from me, so I won't stand in harsh judgement of a young person on the west coast of Canada who only had an inkling of what it was all about.

So I sit in the cinema, listening to the bare stories of a few of the men who were there: three who were on hunger strike and survived, the other who was the head cat for the IRA in prison, the one with the tough job of deciding who went on hunger strike, the one who determined — at the hunger strikers' wishes — that they be allowed to stay on their strikes. Bik, as he is called, tells how Bobby Sands appointed him because he knew that Bik would be able to let his friends die. And Bik was the one to decide who would replace each as they died, thus creating a long unbroken line of protest, of slow, patient and willing suffering.

It was a shameful period in the story of England and Ireland, one of many, but perhaps all the more shameful because most of those responsible at the time still do not see it as such. To let 10 men slowly starve themselves to death for five — what we would possibly consider insignificant — demands is not something of which any leader should be proud. They died, it can be argued, by choice, for principle's sake, but equally it can be argued that the governments of the day chose to let them die on principle.

With the rhetoric and the reality continuing in the North, affecting the South, I try to be objective in the face of something that so easily can slip into maudlin sentiment based on something less than what the reality of Ireland is.

It is hard to determine how far the nation has come. The lines are more blurred than ever. Peace is offered to the republicans, who have been fighting for independence; peace offered to the loyalists whose lives have been shaken and stirred. But whose peace and at what cost?

It is good to be able to look back now and see the path my life has taken: on that particular day in March, it swung back in an arc to the hunger strikers as I sat in the Felons, an ex-IRA prisoners' club, and had a pint with those ordinary men. Twenty years on: it is good, it is history. That period is over, but it is hard to say if this one is any better. Tomorrow, my life will go on and the negotiations with no end will continue in Belfast.

Ireland will be one day farther into the new century. I carry with me the slim knowledge of learning to think, and the surer realization that I may never understand.

Journalist Lynn Caldwell currently lives in Dublin.