At a Glance
Lenadoon and West Belfast
Joe McDonnell was born in Belfast on 6 September 1948 and grew up in the Lenadoon area of West Belfast — one of the working-class Catholic estates that formed the social geography of nationalist West Belfast, areas of terraced housing and tight community bonds that were, by the late 1960s, both the heartland of the republican movement and the front line of its confrontation with loyalist and British forces. Lenadoon itself had been the scene of some of the most dramatic events of the early Troubles: in July 1972, during the brief IRA ceasefire, an attempt by Catholic families to move into houses vacated by Protestant families in the mixed area of Lenadoon led to a confrontation with loyalists and the British Army that ended the ceasefire within days and marked the return to intensive conflict.
McDonnell grew up in this environment — the sectarian geography, the political tension, the daily reality of British military patrols and loyalist hostility — and followed the path that many young men of his generation and background took: involvement with the republican movement, membership of the Provisional IRA that had emerged from the split of 1969–70 as the dominant force in nationalist West Belfast's defence and resistance. He married Goretti, had two children, and lived in Twinbrook, another West Belfast estate that was home to a significant republican community and, notably, to Bobby Sands and his family.
Arrest with Bobby Sands, 1976
On 14 October 1976, Joe McDonnell was arrested alongside Bobby Sands and two other men at a house in Twinbrook following a bomb attack on a furniture company in Dunmurry. Four men were arrested; at the scene, a revolver was found. The charges related to the firearms possession rather than the bombing — a common feature of prosecutions in the period, where the more provable charge was used rather than the more serious one. McDonnell and Sands were convicted and sentenced to fourteen years' imprisonment. They were sent to the Maze Prison — Long Kesh — and entered the institution at the moment when the blanket protest was already under way.
The coincidence of their arrest and sentencing together — the same house, the same day, the same sentence — bound McDonnell and Sands together in a political as well as personal sense. They would serve their sentences alongside each other, participate together in the prison protests, and ultimately both die in the hunger strike of 1981, though McDonnell outlived Sands by sixty-three days. The relationship between the two men — not widely documented but clearly close, given the circumstances of their shared experience — is part of the texture of the 1981 protest.
The Blanket Protest and Prison Conditions
The Maze Prison in the late 1970s was the site of a confrontation that had been building since 1976, when the British government removed special category status from newly convicted paramilitary prisoners. The blanket protest — in which prisoners refused to wear prison uniforms and wrapped themselves in their cell blankets instead — had been running for years by the time McDonnell arrived. The conditions in the H-Blocks, as the cellular accommodation was known, were deliberately punishing: prisoners who refused to comply with prison rules were confined to their cells, denied recreation and association, and subjected to a regime designed to break resistance through attrition.
The blanket protest escalated into the dirty protest in 1978, when prisoners began refusing to wash or use toilet facilities, smearing the excrement on the walls of their cells. This escalation — simultaneously an act of resistance and a descent into conditions of extraordinary degradation — was a measure of the depth of feeling among the prisoners about the principle at stake. The five demands they were seeking were not trivial to them: they were the formal recognition that they were political prisoners engaged in a political conflict, not ordinary criminals whose actions were without political context or motivation. The British government's insistence on the contrary — on the "criminalisation" policy — was experienced by the prisoners as a fundamental denial of their identity and their cause.
A first hunger strike in late 1980, involving seven prisoners, ended in December after what the prisoners believed was an agreement on their demands. When it became clear that the British government had not conceded the substance of what the prisoners sought, the second hunger strike — the one that would kill ten men — was organised for 1981, with Bobby Sands beginning on 1 March.
The Hunger Strike: McDonnell's Fast
Joe McDonnell joined the hunger strike on 8 May 1981 — the same day that Raymond McCreesh and Patsy O'Hara died, the third and fourth hunger strikers to die. He had watched Sands die on 5 May, had watched Francis Hughes die on 12 May, and now took up the fast at the moment when it was clear that the British government was not going to concede. The staggered entry of hunger strikers — each beginning their fast at intervals designed to ensure that deaths would come in a succession that maintained political pressure — meant that McDonnell had been living alongside dying men for weeks before he himself stopped eating.
The sixty-one days of his fast were among the most politically intense of the entire hunger strike. He was the fifth man to die, and by July 1981 the international attention on the Maze Prison was extraordinary: the Irish government was engaged, the Catholic Church was involved, the United States government was receiving representations from Irish-American political figures, and the Irish Commission for Justice and Peace — a body established by the Irish Catholic Bishops' Conference — was conducting intensive mediation that, at one point in early July, appeared to be on the verge of producing a settlement.
The ICJP believed, for a period of days around 4–5 July, that it had secured British commitments on the five demands sufficient to end the strike. The prisoners in the Maze, receiving information through intermediaries, were uncertain whether the concessions were real. Sinn Féin's leadership was sceptical. McDonnell, moving in and out of consciousness as the fast reached its final stages, was unable to make a clear decision. The British government, it subsequently became clear, had not offered the substance of what the prisoners required, and the apparent breakthrough dissolved. McDonnell died at 5:11 in the morning of 8 July 1981.
Aftermath: Riots and Political Fallout
The news of McDonnell's death produced some of the worst rioting of the Troubles. In West Belfast, in Derry, in nationalist areas across Northern Ireland, young men and women took to the streets; petrol bombs, rubber bullets, and water cannon defined the nights that followed. Two people were killed in the violence surrounding his death — a Catholic civilian shot by the British Army, and a Protestant civilian killed by an IRA booby-trap bomb in circumstances connected to the civil unrest. The intensity of the reaction reflected both the specific circumstances of his death — the collapse of the apparent ICJP mediation, the sense that a solution had been within reach — and the accumulated anger of four previous deaths, each of which had produced similar scenes.
His funeral, like those of the hunger strikers before him, drew tens of thousands of people through the streets of West Belfast. His wife Goretti walked behind the tricolour-draped coffin, his children beside her. The images — broadcast across the world — continued the transformation of international perception of the Northern Ireland conflict that the hunger strike as a whole was producing. Governments that had previously treated the Troubles as a British domestic matter were receiving representations from their own Irish communities, their own legislators, their own press, demanding that something be done.
Legacy
Joe McDonnell is commemorated alongside the other nine hunger strikers in the iconography of Irish republicanism — murals, memorials, annual commemorations in his home area of West Belfast. His name appears in the songs and poetry that emerged from the hunger strike period, and his death, with its specific context of failed diplomacy and apparent near-resolution, carries a particular weight in the accounts of those who lived through 1981.
The broader legacy of the hunger strike — the transformation of Sinn Féin into an electoral force, the development of the "armalite and ballot box" strategy, the long road toward the peace process — has been extensively documented. McDonnell's contribution to that history was his death: a death that, like those of the nine other men, demonstrated the depth of republican commitment to political recognition and accumulated the political pressure that eventually forced a more serious engagement with the causes of the conflict. Whether the settlement that emerged — the Good Friday Agreement of 1998, the power-sharing institutions, the normalisation of Sinn Féin as a constitutional party — represented what the hunger strikers died for remains a question that people in Northern Ireland answer differently depending on where they stand.
What is beyond question is what Joe McDonnell himself did: he chose to die rather than accept the British government's insistence that he was a criminal rather than a political prisoner. He did so with full knowledge of what the choice meant, having watched four friends die before him. He was thirty-two years old, with a wife and two children. The weight of that choice — whatever judgement one reaches about the politics that surrounded it — belongs to him.