The Revolution Will Not Be A Simulacra

On the 1st  of March 1976 the British state made a decision that would change politics in Ireland forever, and transform Sinn Fein from the political wing of the Provisional IRA to the largest and most popular party on the island. Then Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, Mervyn Rees announced the end of special category status for republican prisoners, beginning a strategy of recategorising the Troubles from an anti-colonial struggle to a problem of violent organised crime.

Special category status had de facto afforded republicans additional rights over those with common criminal convictions: wearing their own clothes, exemption from prison work, and additional social visits and letters. Margaret Thatcher was to remain steadfastly committed to criminalisation, “There is no such thing as political bombing or political violence. We will not compromise on this. There will be no political status. Crime is crime is crime. It is not political. It is crime and there can be no question of granting political status.” Five years after the revocation of special category status, repeated failures in pressuring the British state to reinstate special category status pushed then 26 year old leader of the IRA in Long Kesh, Bobby Sands, to start a new type of hunger strike. 

Sands’ strategy was designed to maximise support on the outside and leverage public outrage to force concessions on the five demands, restoring de facto political status. To do this, the strike would need to last much longer than any one participant would be able to remain alive while refusing food. That this would work, only, if there was not one moment of martyrdom but a sustained campaign of loss at the hands of the British state. To achieve this, internees joined Sands in refusing food in two week increments. 

Over the course of the next five months, ten hunger strikers would die in Long Kesh. In the course of the struggle for Irish independence post-partition the deaths of these young men would be a catalyst in bringing Sinn Fein into the mainstream, creating a channel to articulate a republicanism that had until this point been sidelined from official public political discourse. What Bobby Sands was right: the hunger strikes showed the world the violent indifference of the British state to the lives of those who dedicate themselves to justice. 

Beginning in 2024, the British state began imprisoning without trial members of Palestine Action who are accused of breaking into Elbit System’s Filton site. As they are under remand, these people are not serving a defined sentence. Thus far only six have been brought to trial, which is ongoing at Woolrich Crown Court in London. On November 2nd, the first of these protests began their own hunger strike, moulded in the legacy of 1981. Their five demands are the right to immediate bail, the end of censorship to their communications, the right to a fair trial, the de-classification of Palestine Action as a proscribed organisation (UK legal label for terrorist groups), and the shut down of Elbit Systems UK, an Israeli military technology developer. 

By the end of this strike, two detainees, Heba Muraisi and Kamran Ahmad, had been refusing food for longer than 8 of the 10 men who died in 1981. Like Thatcher then, Keir Starmer’s Labour government wanted to depoliticise the Palestine Action protests. Criminalisation is a necessary strategy for the British state because it allows them to ignore Palestine Action’s political aim: to end British complicity in the ongoing genocide in Gaza. What will be decisive in the strike’s impact will be the action of the public in the coming days and years. When Bobby Sands died in the H-Blocks, more than 100,000 people attended his funeral in Belfast. While the impact of these strikes on the public remains to be seen, it too may be a moral turning for the public’s conscience on Britain’s state support for Israel. Already, a YouGov poll found that twice as many Brits sympathise with the Palestinian cause compared to Israel, but the impact of strikes could be the point where this thinking is extended to the operations of companies like Elbit. It will take years for us to understand their full impact.

It is natural then, that these heroes would remain large in the minds of young lefties in Ireland today. But now, in this proverbial time of monsters, the minds of many young anti-imperialists are forged through a politics of pastiche, of Instagram accounts posting snippets and allusions to the theory that informed the soldiers of republican socialism past. The instagram activist, the person who satisfies their desire for resistance through posting on their personal accounts, then comes to see political engagement as an individual endeavour. It is from this framework that a new, and worrying, trend has emerged in Ireland’s Palestine solidarity movement, which is already waning in strength as the old guard of the IPSC refuse to escalate, and anti-mass movement adventurists take increasingly publicly polarising and ineffective action.

Beginning in May of 2025, a Galway-based musician declared a hunger strike, initially under the vague demand of food being allowed into Palestine, but later course-correcting to the Government passing the much-delayed Occupied Territories Bill. She received widespread coverage in national media, and was invited to address a private members debate in the Dáil. Journalists took her at her word: for who could forget, make light of the sacrifices made by those ten men in 1981. On day three, with a large watermelon where her arms, she went to the gates of Leinster House, crying out that her demands be met, and the watermelon be her first bit of sustenance in this new Ireland, free from economic complicity in the crimes of the Zionist entity. Seven days after the initial Instagram story, citing hunger pains and dizziness, she announced the end of her strike: to even more media coverage than the announcement. 

Not long after, a copycat strike was similarly announced, albeit this time in a full grid post. This striker was not even forgoing full food, but on a journey towards hunger striking that would be eased into over several days of weaning on soup. This iteration received almost no media coverage and was abandoned on a similar timeframe. These actions are not precisely adventurist, but a part of a new phenomena of the internet age, where the catharsis of radical action is simulated through posting. 

If Bobby Sands' revenge was the laughter of our children, then perhaps Margaret Thatcher’s is the part-time Instagram hunger striker.