Remembering Tom Mór
The 20th anniversary of the death on hunger strike of Volunteer Thomas McElwee, Big Tom, was marked on Saturday 11 August.
A day of commemoration, organised by the local 1981 Committee, was held in Tom's native Bellaghy with an exhibition of personal items marking different stages of Tom's life, handicrafts and republican artefacts on show in the local hall.
Sinn Féin President Gerry Adams attended the exhibition and unveiled a plaque at Tom McElwee's house, among the rolling hills of South Derry, close to where his cousin Francis Hughes was also born and raised.
Of the ten men to die on hunger strike, five were from the county of Derry - that two were cousins whose upbringing was so similar and intertwined was remarkable. The boys from Tamlaghtduff were truly among the most remarkable of men; the bravest and most committed of republicans.
After he unveiled the memorial stone at the McElwee household, where he was with Tom's mother and his many brothers and sisters, Adams attended a special memorial mass in honour of the dead hunger striker.
The Sinn Féin President was then the main speaker at a wreath-laying ceremony in Bellaghy graveyard at the burial site of Tom, where he was laid to rest beside his cousin.
Hundreds of people attended the ceremony, many travelling many hundreds of miles, including Cork hurling great Jimmy Barry Murphy.
The MP for the Mid-Ulster, Sinn Féin negotiator Martin McGuinness attended, as did Francie Molloy, Sinn Féin chairperson of Dungannon council. Many ex-POWs from across the north, many of whom were on the blanket with Tom and his brother Benedict, were also there. Benedict, who was arrested and charged with Tom, spent around eight years in the H Blocks.
As he addressed the crowd, Gerry Adams, repeating something he has said on many an occasion, reminded his audience that the thinking behind British policy was to hive off the prisoners from the greater republican family and break them.
The policy of isolation was based on the thinking that the prisoners were the weakest link in the republican chain and if they were broken then the republican struggle would be broken or badly wounded.
The prisoners and the hunger strikers in particular, he said, showed the British and Margaret Thatcher that the spirit of resistance ran deeper than they imagined and proved that the British just don't understand the value Irish people put on their freedom.
Adams also disclosed how Tom, as he prepared himself for death, wrote it was his wish that the people of Ireland could live in peace with each other in the future.
The Sinn Féin President was speaking the day before he was due to address the main commemoration parade in Belfast, where he warned republicans that the unionist and the British strategy at this present time was to pressurise republicans into giving ground. We need only look to the example of the hunger strikers to see the failure of British and unionist attempts to break the republican struggle, he said.
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