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FORTY-FIVE YEARS ago this year, ten Irish Republican prisoners died on hunger strike in the H-Blocks of Long Kesh prison in the north of Ireland. I knew them all.

They were friends and comrades with whom I had spent years on protest. I too, participated in the hunger strike, surviving 70 days, then remained in the prison for a further 11 years before my release on licence in 1992.

May 05, 1981 — Bobby Sands passed away on the 66th day of his fast. Alamy Stock Photo Alamy Stock Photo

When most people recall the 1981 hunger strike, it’s often the intransigence of Margaret Thatcher, then British Prime Minister, who refused to concede to our demands, that they focus on.

However, it was not Margaret Thatcher nor the Conservative Party that introduced the policy of ‘criminalisation’ (1 March 1976) that ultimately led to the 1981 hunger strike, but the Labour Party under Harold Wilson.

That policy aimed to classify us, the latest generation of Irish people involved in a centuries-old anti-colonial struggle, as merely criminals. The policy was not introduced on its own, however.

Laurence McKeown's books, including memoir, And Flowers Grew Up Through The Concrete tell his story of imprisonment and hunger strike. Laurence McKeown Laurence McKeown

Simultaneously, increased powers of arrest, new interrogation centres and extended periods of interrogation without access to a solicitor, and the removal of jury trials also came into play.

And, with this new raft of legislation (all part of a major counter-insurgency project), a whole new lexicon was introduced to the airwaves: ‘gangsters’, ‘Godfathers, ‘Mafia-style shootouts’, ‘tit-for-tat shootings’, etc.

These became the terms heard regularly in news bulletins as the British government attempted to portray our struggle, and us, as criminals and they as the honest, ‘neutral broker’.

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Hunger strikers photographs in a shop window in Whiterock a suburb of Belfast during The Troubles. 1981. Alamy Stock Photo Alamy Stock Photo

All of that failed, of course. The........

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