One Day In My Life

Bobby Sands was twenty-seven years old when he died, on the sixty-sixth day of his hunger strike, on 5 May 1981. He had spent almost the last nine years of his short life in prison because of his Irish republican activities. By the time of his death he was world famous for having embarrassed the British establishment by being elected MP for Fermanagh and South Tyrone and having defiantly withstood political and moral pressure to abandon his hunger strike.

'They were followed in 1982 by Bobby’s ‘One Day in My Life’ with an introduction by Seán Mac Bride. This was published by Mercier Press of Dublin and Cork whose founder and director John M. Feehan in 1983 wrote and published ‘Bobby Sands and the Tragedy of Northern Ireland’, an impassioned account of the political context of Bobby’s life and the war then raging. Feehan deserved credit for such work in the face of the prevailing censorship and demonization of republicans. With superb irony, he placed on the title page of his own book Margaret Thatcher’s words: “You have to be prepared to defend the things in which you believe and be prepared to use force to secure the future of liberty and self-determination.” ' - MÍCHEÁL MAC DONNCHA, An Phoblact