The Chronicles of Long Kesh: Provisional Irish Republican memoirs and the contested memory of the hunger strikes

This article analyses the recent struggle for control of the Provisional Irish Republican movement’s collective memory of the 1980-81 hunger strikes, during which ten Republicans died.2 It proceeds through an examination and interpretation of the published memoir-writing of some of the key protagonists within the broad Irish Republican movement. In particular, it examines the controversy surrounding the allegations made by Richard O’Rawe (former Public Relations Officer for the Irish Republican Army (IRA) prisoners at the time of the 1981 strike), in his two volumes of memoir, Blanketmen (2005), and Afterlives (2010). The article addresses the role of dissent in the movement’s collective memory, and the specific role of ‘memory entrepreneurs’ (Jelin, 2003) in the contestation of the Irish Republican ‘official’ memory of the hunger strikes.