IRA Hunger Striker Dies - 30 Years On

Two thousand people watched the funeral of former hunger striker, IRA commander and later Sinn Fein critic, Brendan Hughes yesterday.

The 59-year-old Belfast man was taken into hospital last week after becoming critically ill. He died on Saturday - almost exactly three decades since leading the 'first' IRA hunger strike.

While Sinn Fein President Gerry Adams was among the mourners who helped carry Mr Hughes's coffin to the church, his party's move into the political arena and the advent of power sharing was heavily criticised by Hughes in his last years.

However, he had been a senior figure in the terror organisation for decades, serving as 'officer commanding' IRA prisoners in the Maze jail and ordered a dirty protest and later led the first republican hunger strike in 1980.

Brendan Hughes joined the IRA in 1969. He was arrested in the early 1970s along with Gerry Adams and Tom Cahill and sent to Long Kesh, which later became the Maze prison.

He escaped shortly afterwards in a rolled-up mattress concealing in a bin lorry but was eventually re-arrested having first been on the run in the Irish Republic, then returning to Belfast under an alter-ego as a toy salesman to continue directing the IRA's daily litany of shootings and indiscriminate bombings.

In January 1978 he was transferred to the H-Blocks where he became the IRA OC and led the hunger strike.

Brendan Hughes led a hunger strike in 1980 that lasted 53 days after republicans believed they had struck a deal with the authorities on the issue of prisoners' uniforms.

Mr Hughes called the hunger strike off as colleague Sean McKenna was on the verge of death.

Bobby Sands, who had been a close aide of Mr Hughes, took over from him in the Maze Prison. He ordered the second hunger strike in 1981 in which he and nine other inmates died.

(BMcC)