NOTHING BUT AN UNFINISHED SONG

A moment-by-moment chronicle of the Irish revolutionary’s political education in Gulag Belfast.

While sympathetic to Sands (1954–81), O’Hearn is frank about the controversial, often violent IRA actions in which the man participated. The biography’s main aim, writes O’Hearn (Sociology/Queen’s College, Belfast), is “to tell who Bobby Sands was and how he related to and was shaped by his time and place.” A product of the tumultuous ’60s in Ireland, the boy experienced the worst of the British colonial occupation. His family was driven from their home, and Sands was beaten and stabbed by Loyalist gangs simply for being a Catholic. He enlisted as an IRA volunteer, carrying out robberies that he justified as fundraising efforts. By the time Sands entered the Belfast prison system, he was one of the “political animals” at the most committed end of the spectrum of IRA detainees. Yet his ideas were still unformed, and jail became the place where he could think and read—everything from poetry to black humor, Che Guevara to Franz Fanon—as he sought for ways to encourage grassroots democracy and resistance to British rule. Jail also became a theater for symbolic expression: IRA members considered themselves political prisoners and would not accede to any procedure that labeled them criminals. They refused to wear prison clothing and resisted restrictions on their right to associate or to receive visits from friends and family. If it would force the authorities to recognize their political status, they were willing to die, and they did: Sands and nine others perished during a hunger strike in Belfast’s dreaded H-Block cells. The first to die, he became an international symbol of resistance yet remained a cipher. Who was he, and how had he come to give his life for the cause? Few knew, because Sands was incarcerated for most of that short life; O’Hearn’s account fills in many gaps.

Balanced, but in the end, it’s impossible not to be moved by the conviction of Sands and his comrades.