Bobby Sands Trust website relaunched

North Belfast republicans, former IRA POW Brendan ‘Bik’ McFarlane and North Belfast Sinn Féin MLA Carál Ní Chuilín, also a former POW, helped to re-launch the Bobby Sands Trust website in the Felon’s club recently.
“I think that the work done by the Bobby Sands Trust, which deals with the prison struggles in Armagh and in the H Blocks of Long Kesh, is hugely important and significant," said Sinn Féin President Gerry Adams at the re-launch.
The Sinn Féin President dedicating the site to the memories of the ten H-Block martyrs and to Michael Gaughan and Frank Stagg who died on hunger strike in prison in England.
Speaking at the event, Danny Morrison, Sinn Féin's director of publicity of during the harrowing period of the hunger strike and secretary of the Trust, explained:
“The Bobby Sands Trust was set up in 1981 before the deaths of the hunger strikers and it collected Bobby's writings from the period in order to keep his memory, and that of his comrades, alive and in the public record,” said Danny.
He said the site has become a prestigious international resource documenting the prison struggle and is now complete with multimedia, including TV media footage from the period, and the poetry and songs Sands wrote in Long Kesh.
Morrison said the Trust aims to archive the full history, poetry and music of the Irish republican struggle in prison since the United Irishmen, and that of prison protests from other anti-imperialist struggles around the world.
Morrison and Adams also praised the foresight of Tom Hartley, who diligently collected and archived the communication coming out of the H Blocks at the time of the hunger strike, which are now at the National Library in Dublin.

Speaking at the launch, Adams said: “There is an enduring interest in the human aspect, the political impact and the legacy of the hunger strike – from students, from people around the world who may have no connection with Ireland and from young people who had not even been born at the time.
“The criminalisation policy of the British government, which aimed to crush the national struggle in Ireland, didn't take into account the individual responses of republican activists.
“It didn't take into account the response of Ciaran Nugent, who refused to wear the prison uniform. And it didn't take into account the determined response of the young prisoners who made the ultimate sacrifice to expose the criminalisation policy as a lie.”
Adams explained that the Bobby Sands Trust ‘means that those who want to learn about aspects of the situation at that time are now able to read, in the words of those who were involved then, their thoughts and ideas and fears and hopes, and then to be able to form their own judgements based upon all the information provided’.

To view the redesigned Bobby Sands Trust website, visit www.bobbysandstrust.com.