At a Glance
Bellaghy and the Making of a Volunteer
Francis Hughes was born on 28 February 1956 in Bellaghy, a small village in the bogland of South Derry, in a landscape of drumlins and loughs that had seen centuries of conflict between its Catholic nationalist population and the various authorities — British, loyalist, and Unionist — that had governed the area. He was one of ten children in a farming family, raised in the Catholic and nationalist tradition that was simply the inherited identity of almost everyone around him. The Hughes family were quiet, respectable people — not political activists in any formal sense — but in South Derry in the late 1960s and 1970s, the distinction between ordinary Catholic life and the conflict that was escalating around it was difficult to maintain.
The context into which Francis Hughes grew up was defined by the violence that erupted after the civil rights marches of 1968 and 1969, the deployment of British troops on the streets of Northern Ireland, the introduction of internment without trial in August 1971, and the events of Bloody Sunday in January 1972, when British paratroopers shot dead fourteen civilians at a civil rights march in Derry city. These events radicalised a generation of young Catholics in Northern Ireland for whom the structures of the state — the police, the army, the courts — had demonstrated their hostility in the most direct possible way. Young men in South Derry joined the IRA not as an abstract ideological commitment but as the obvious response to a situation they experienced as a form of war that had been declared against their community.
Hughes joined the IRA in his late teens. He was not, by accounts that have accumulated in the decades since, a man who was driven by abstract ideology or political theory. He was a local young man who had grown up in a community that was being policed as a subject population and who responded in the way that some of his generation did: by taking up arms. The distinction between him and many of his peers was the extraordinary effectiveness with which he prosecuted what the IRA described as its campaign.
The Volunteer: Operations in South Derry and Tyrone
By the mid-1970s, Francis Hughes had become one of the most active and most sought-after IRA volunteers in his area. The South Derry Brigade operated across the drumlins and bogs between the Sperrins and Lough Neagh, an area of rural Northern Ireland where the IRA's rural guerrilla tactics — ambushes, sniping, bombings — were particularly difficult for British security forces to counter. Hughes operated in this terrain with what British military sources acknowledged was remarkable skill: a man who knew every field, laneway, and farmhouse of his home ground and used that knowledge to remain at large despite being one of the most intensively hunted individuals in Northern Ireland.
The specifics of his operational record are necessarily incomplete, given that the IRA did not publish operational logs and that British security force records of the period have not been fully released. What is clear from the accounts that have been gathered — from neighbours, from republican sources, from the records of inquests and court cases — is that he was involved in a significant number of operations against British Army and RUC targets over several years, and that the security forces regarded him as a priority target. He was charged and convicted, in absentia for the most part, of a range of serious offences. He remained free, operating in an area where his local knowledge and the support of the community in which he had grown up gave him advantages that no amount of military technology could entirely negate.
The world Hughes inhabited was one of extraordinary tension: a young man living under a false identity, moving between safe houses, always aware that the net was being drawn tighter. The SAS — the British Special Air Service, deployed increasingly in Northern Ireland from the mid-1970s for covert operations against IRA volunteers — was specifically hunting men like Hughes. A number of IRA volunteers in the period were killed in what became known as "shoot to kill" operations, in which the security forces engaged IRA members in circumstances where the possibility of capture appeared not to have been seriously pursued.
Capture at Drumcroon, 1978
On 16 March 1978, Francis Hughes was involved in a gun battle with an SAS patrol near Drumcroon, on open hillside near Maghera in County Derry. The engagement left one SAS soldier dead and Hughes seriously wounded — a leg wound that was severe enough to prevent him escaping. He was captured, received emergency medical treatment, and was taken into custody. The wound required extensive treatment and left him with lasting physical effects. He was tried on a range of charges — including murder, attempted murder, and firearms offences — and received a sentence of life imprisonment plus eighty-three years. He was sent to the Maze Prison, known to republicans as Long Kesh, where he joined the blanket protest that had been running since 1976.
The blanket protest was the consequence of the British government's decision in 1976 to remove political prisoner status from republican prisoners. Previously, republican and loyalist prisoners had been held in compounds with a degree of self-organisation that gave them something approaching prisoner-of-war status. The new policy required them to wear prison uniforms and conform to ordinary prison regulations. The republican prisoners refused, wearing only a blanket rather than prison clothes, and living in conditions of deliberate degradation that included the "dirty protest" — refusing to use prison facilities, smearing cells with excrement — in a cycle of escalating confrontation that eventually produced the hunger strikes.
The 1981 Hunger Strike
The context of the 1981 hunger strike was a political confrontation between the republican prisoners in the Maze and the British government under Margaret Thatcher over five demands: the right to wear their own clothes, the right to refuse prison work, the right to free association with other prisoners, the right to educational and recreational facilities, and the restoration of remission lost during the protest. These demands were, in essence, a claim to political prisoner status — the recognition that the men imprisoned for IRA activities were political actors, not ordinary criminals. Thatcher refused to grant this recognition on the grounds that it would amount to a political endorsement of IRA violence.
Bobby Sands began his hunger strike on 1 March 1981, the anniversary of the beginning of the 1916 Rising's commemoration. The strike was a carefully organised escalation: individual prisoners would begin striking at staggered intervals, so that deaths would come in succession rather than simultaneously, maximising political pressure while giving the British government multiple opportunities to negotiate before more men died. Sands's election as MP for Fermanagh and South Tyrone in April 1981 — winning a Westminster by-election while on hunger strike from his prison cell — transformed the political dimensions of the protest and demonstrated to the republican movement the electoral potential that had previously been overlooked.
Francis Hughes joined the hunger strike on 15 March 1981, two weeks after Sands. He was twenty-five years old, still dealing with the physical effects of his leg wound, and in the knowledge of what he was undertaking. The decision to go on hunger strike was not taken lightly or impulsively: the prisoners had been living in extreme conditions for years, the previous hunger strike of 1980 had ended in what they regarded as bad faith by the British government, and the men who joined the 1981 strike did so with a clear understanding that they might die. Hughes did not waver. He refused food for fifty-nine days.
Death and Funeral
Bobby Sands died on 5 May 1981, on the sixty-sixth day of his strike. Francis Hughes died eleven days later, on 12 May 1981, at 5:43 in the morning, on the fifty-ninth day of his own. He was twenty-five years old. His body was taken from the Maze to his home in Bellaghy for the wake that is the Irish Catholic funeral tradition, and the scenes that followed were among the most significant of the entire hunger strike period.
Tens of thousands of people came to Bellaghy and the surrounding area for his funeral. The roads into the village were lined with mourners from across Northern Ireland, from the Republic, and from the Irish diaspora. The funeral procession moved through Bellaghy to the local cemetery, accompanied by a guard of honour and the display of republican symbolism that the British authorities and the Royal Ulster Constabulary were powerless to prevent without creating a confrontation that would have been politically catastrophic. Hughes was buried in his home village, where his grave has been a site of republican commemoration ever since.
The deaths of Sands and Hughes — the two men most associated with the early phase of the hunger strike — produced a wave of civil unrest across Northern Ireland: rioting in Belfast and Derry, protests across the Republic, demonstrations in Irish communities around the world. The Thatcher government maintained its position throughout, refusing to grant the five demands and insisting that the strike was a matter of choice by the prisoners themselves. Eight more men died over the following months before the strike was called off in October 1981, after families of some prisoners gave instructions to doctors to intervene when the strikers became unconscious.
Legacy: Hunger Strike, Electoral Politics, and the Peace Process
The 1981 hunger strike was a transformative moment in modern Irish political history, and Francis Hughes is among the ten men — along with Sands, Patsy O'Hara, Raymond McCreesh, Joe McDonnell, Martin Hurson, Kevin Lynch, Kieran Doherty, Thomas McElwee, and Michael Devine — whose deaths shaped the trajectory of the subsequent three decades. The political lessons were absorbed with remarkable speed by the republican movement's leadership. The electoral success of Sands and — in the Republic's June 1981 general election — of Kieran Doherty and Paddy Agnew demonstrated that Sinn Féin could compete electorally in a way that had not previously been attempted. The phrase associated with the republican strategist Danny Morrison — the "armalite and ballot box" strategy — emerged directly from this realisation.
The hunger strike did not achieve its immediate objectives — the five demands were not conceded in the form the prisoners had sought — but it achieved something larger: it transformed Sinn Féin from a political organisation subordinate to the IRA's military campaign into a serious electoral force, it generated an international awareness of the Northern Ireland conflict that it had not previously commanded, and it created a generation of Sinn Féin activists and voters whose political formation had been the hunger strikes. The path from 1981 to the 1994 IRA ceasefire, the Good Friday Agreement of 1998, and the eventual Sinn Féin electoral dominance of both jurisdictions passes through the Maze Prison in the spring and summer of 1981.
Francis Hughes occupies a specific place in this history: as the second man to die, following Sands, he confirmed that the strike was real, that the men involved were not bluffing, and that the political stakes were genuine. His reputation as a guerrilla fighter — acknowledged even by British military sources as exceptional — gave his death a particular weight in the communities of South Derry where he was known. He is commemorated in republican murals across Northern Ireland, in songs, and in the annual hunger strike commemorations held in Bellaghy and elsewhere. His name appears alongside Sands's in the iconography of the protest — two young men from rural Northern Ireland who chose to die rather than accept what they regarded as the criminalisation of their cause.
Whether that cause was just, and whether the methods used in its pursuit were justified, remain contested questions in Ireland and beyond. What is not contested is the nature of what Francis Hughes did: he chose death over capitulation, with full knowledge of what he was choosing, and he did not change his mind in fifty-nine days of starvation. The moral weight of that choice — whatever judgement one reaches about the politics that surrounded it — is not easily dismissed.