New Sands pictures recall campaign for political status

Pictures have come to light which show Bobby Sands taking part in the first protest for political status for republican prisoners, just two months before his arrest.

The famous hunger strike martyr had only been released from Long Kesh in April 1976 where he had himself been a political prisoner.

He was rearrested six months later in October 1976. After being sentenced to 14 years, he spent several years ‘on the blanket’ protest before leading the 1981 hunger strike when he and nine other comrades died.

The Bobby Sands Trust said on Monday that the pictures came to light when photographs by Lelia Doolan, who chronicled life in Ballymurphy between 1974 and 1977 while studying for a PhD at Queen’s University, were being scanned.

A close-up of one photograph as the march proceeds down the Andersonstown Road shows Bobby Sands at the bottom right of the frame carrying a flag.

Another photograph shows Bobby Sands on the platform party in Dunville Park for the rally, with Máire Drumm, the vice-president of Sinn Féin, one of the speakers at the rally. She was assassinated two months later, while recovering from an eye operation in Belfast’s Mater Hospital

Cork-born Lelia Doolan, who turned 90 last May, photographed many scenes in West Belfast and housing estates, including Sandy Row. She later became the head of light entertainment at RTÉ, artistic director of the Abbey Theatre, and directed “Bernadette: Notes on a Political Journey,” a highly-praised documentary about Bernadette Devlin McAliskey.

When cataloguing the negatives, researcher Ciaran Cahill first recognised Máire Drumm. When he developed the images, he recalled similar photographs by French photographer Gérard Harlay which were discovered and published in 2019.

Both sets of images are of the same protest, the first of many against the British government’s withdrawal of political status for republican prisoners, in Belfast in August 1976.

Danny Morrison, the current secretary of the ‘Bobby Sands Trust’, said: “These photographs, from almost 50 years ago, are quite evocative, especially when one considers the tragic fates of Máire Drumm and Bobby Sands...

“Even then we instinctively knew that the attempt to criminalise the struggle for Irish independence, as in previous periods, would ultimately fail.

“However, we had no idea of the magnitude of the suffering to come, inside and outside the prisons, for all those entrapped by this British policy.”

Urgent Appeal