10th ANNIVERSARY OF DEATH OF FREEDOM FIGHTER COMMEMORATED IN DUBLIN

10th ANNIVERSARY OF DEATH OF VOLUNTEER BRENDAN HUGHES COMMEMORATED IN DUBLIN

(From the End Internment FB page, courtesy of the Dublin Committee of the Anti-Internment Group of Ireland)

Irish Republicans (mostly independent) and a number of anarchists and socialists commemorated Brendan Hughes (“The Dark”) today (18th Feb 2018) at the General Post Office building in O’Connell Street, main street of Dublin. Republicans from Glasgow also participated.

People with black flags and portrait photos of Brendan Hughes outside the GPO building in Dublin marking the 10th anniversary of the freedom fighter’s death. (*Photo source: End Internment FB page*)

Around two score assembled with black flags and portraits of the IRA Volunteer who died aged only 59 ten years ago (2008). Hughes was from a Belfast Republican working class family and entered the struggle, enlisting in the Provisional IRA in 1969. He was arrested in 1973, beaten and jailed but escaped, leaving Belfast but subsequently returning to Belfast, to the Malone Road middle-class area under an assumed name while he continued in his resistance activities.

Captured again in 1974 with a number of firearms at his address he was sentenced to 15 years in jail. In 1973 he was convicted of assaulting a prison guard in the jail and was sent to Long Kesh. This was after political status had been removed from Republican prisoners and Hughes joined the “blanket protest” (refusing to wear prison uniform). Later he led the “dirty protest” (prisoners refused to “slop out” after being beaten by guards and emptied their bodily wastes out the windows until these were blocked up, then out under their cell doors, until they were swept back at them and finally on to the walls of their cells).

Hughes began hunger strike which he maintained for 53 days in 1980, ending with others only after what appeared to be a deal offered by Thatcher. It is believed his health never recovered from his prison experiences; he suffered from problems with his heart and eye problems, in addition to arthritis.

Brendan Hughes in Youtube program exposing the pacification process. (*Image source: Youtube*)

Released from jail after 10 years, he became a serious critic of the “Peace” (pacification) process; according to his brother, Hughes asked that his former comrade Gerry Adams not be permitted any role in his funeral. His brother admitted later that he had bent to pressure and had allowed Adams to carry Hughes’ coffin.