The Creggan: A Life Shaped by Loss and Discrimination
Michael James Devine was born on 26 May 1954 in the Springtown Camp — a former US Navy base on the edge of Derry that had been converted into a makeshift housing settlement for Catholic families who could not obtain council homes because of the systematic discrimination against Catholics in Derry's housing allocation. The camp was a symbol of the inequality that defined the city: prefabricated huts, no proper sanitation, no security of tenure, the daily reminder of what it meant to be Catholic in a city whose local government had been rigged for decades to maintain Protestant and unionist control.
In 1960, when Michael was six, the family moved to the newly built Creggan estate — the large Catholic housing development on the hills above Derry city centre that would become, over the following decade, one of the focal points of the Troubles. His father Patrick died of leukaemia in February 1966, when Michael was eleven. His mother Elizabeth died suddenly of a brain tumour in September 1972, when he was eighteen. Both losses came during the most violent and disorienting period in Derry's modern history, and the combination of family grief and surrounding political violence produced in Michael Devine the particular kind of person who does not have the luxury of political neutrality.
He attended Holy Child Primary School and St Joseph's Secondary School in the Creggan — the standard educational trajectory of a Catholic boy in west Derry. At nineteen he married Margaret; they had a son, Michael Junior, and a daughter, Louise, before the marriage ended in separation. The children were seven and five years old when their father died in Long Kesh. The picture of his seven-year-old son at the funeral, holding the hand of his uncle Frank McAuley, was one of the most widely published images of the summer of 1981.
Politicisation: From Civil Rights to the INLA
The political education of Michael Devine proceeded through the street events of Derry in the late 1960s and early 1970s. He was only fourteen when the first civil rights march was batoned off the streets of Derry by the RUC in October 1968 — an act of police violence that was filmed by a television crew and shocked much of the watching world. The Battle of the Bogside in August 1969, when the RUC invaded the Bogside and was repelled by local people behind barricades, produced the no-go areas of Free Derry that Mickey Devine helped to man as a young volunteer. In July 1971, British soldiers from the Royal Anglian Regiment fired into a crowd of people stoning them, fatally wounding two civilians, Dessie Beattie and Seamus Cusack — an event that drove Mickey Devine into the James Connolly Republican Club in Derry.
Bloody Sunday on 30 January 1972 — when the British Parachute Regiment shot dead thirteen unarmed civil rights marchers in the Bogside, with a fourteenth dying later of his wounds — was, by his own account recorded by those who knew him, the decisive moment. There was no turning back after Bloody Sunday. He joined the Official IRA-aligned Republican Clubs but became disillusioned with the Officials' drift toward ceasefire and political engagement at the expense of active resistance. In 1974, virtually all the republicans in Derry left the Officials. In December 1974, Mickey Devine became a founding member of the Irish National Liberation Army — the INLA — formed as a militarily active organisation operating on explicitly socialist-republican principles, distinct from both the Provisionals and the disintegrating Official IRA. He was twenty years old.
Arrest, Trial, and the Blanket Protest
In the early years the INLA was poorly resourced and operated at the margins of the republican movement in Derry. In the evening of 20 September 1976, after an arms raid on a private weapons store in Lifford, County Donegal — where the INLA commandeered several rifles, shotguns, and three thousand rounds of ammunition — Mickey Devine was arrested along with Desmond Walmsley and John Cassidy as they returned across the border. Also on the operation, though never convicted, was his friend and comrade Patsy O'Hara, with whom he would later share the honour and the agony of the H-Blocks.
Mickey was held and interrogated for three days at Strand Road RUC barracks in Derry before being transported to Crumlin Road jail in Belfast, where he spent nine months on remand. He was convicted on 20 July 1977 and sentenced to twelve years' imprisonment. He was transferred to the Maze Prison — Long Kesh — and immediately joined the blanket protest, refusing to wear prison uniform in assertion of his political prisoner status. He endured four years of the blanket protest, which included the no-wash protest in which prisoners lived in the most extreme physical degradation. In March 1981, when Patsy O'Hara joined the hunger strike as the INLA's Officer Commanding of the H-Block prisoners, Mickey Devine took over as INLA OC — a position he retained even when he himself joined the strike three months later.
The Hunger Strike: Sixty Days
Mickey Devine joined the 1981 hunger strike on 22 June 1981, the third INLA volunteer to do so, following Patsy O'Hara (who had died on 21 May) and Kevin Lynch (who would die on 1 August). He was twenty-seven years old. The strike was already five deaths old by the time he joined — Sands, Hughes, McCreesh, O'Hara, McDonnell had all died — and the political landscape had been transformed but not resolved. Margaret Thatcher's government had not conceded the five demands; the SDLP and the Irish government were pressing for negotiated settlements that the prisoners' leadership continued to view as inadequate; and the dying continued.
Mickey Devine had a wife from whom he was separated, two small children, a sister Margaret who was closely involved in supporting the family through the crisis, and a brother-in-law Frank McAuley who became the public face of the Devine family in the final weeks. He held to the strike with the same steadiness that his comrades described as his characteristic quality — what the Bobby Sands Trust later recorded as a willingness to do any job, however small, and a selflessness that was common to all the hunger strikers but perhaps most consistently remarked upon in Devine.
The day Mickey Devine died — 20 August 1981 — was also the day Owen Carron was elected Member of Parliament for Fermanagh and South Tyrone in the by-election caused by Bobby Sands's death, winning the seat by a margin that exceeded Sands's own majority. The political momentum the hunger strike had generated continued to build even as the last man died. Mickey Devine died at 7:48 in the morning, after sixty days without food. He was the tenth and last of the ten men who died in the 1981 hunger strike.
Funeral and the Weight of Being Last
His funeral was held on 22 August 1981 in the Creggan, his home estate. Thousands attended. Three British military helicopters flew overhead as the cortege made its way to Creggan Cemetery, where he was buried in a grave beside Patsy O'Hara — the friend and comrade who had died three months before him. INLA volunteers carried the coffin; a firing party delivered three volleys. The Tricolour, the Starry Plough — the flag of the Irish republican labour movement — his beret, his gloves, and his belt were presented to his partner Margaret McCauley. His seven-year-old son held the hand of his uncle at the graveside.
The oration was delivered by Naomi Brennan, Chairperson of the Irish Republican Socialist Party. She described Mickey Devine as a revolutionary, a soldier, but above all a socialist — a man who understood from his daily life in the Creggan what British imperialism meant in concrete, material terms: unemployment, discrimination, gerrymandering, the long years without hope on the dole. She reminded those gathered that Devine had seen the fat cats behind the Derry walls all his life, and had liked none of it.
Legacy: The Overlooked Tenth
Mickey Devine occupies an unusual place in the memory of the 1981 hunger strike. He was the last man to die, which gives him a kind of finality, but he was also an INLA member rather than a Provisional IRA prisoner, and the subsequent dominance of Sinn Féin over the political inheritance of the hunger strike has tended to centre IRA figures — Bobby Sands above all — at the expense of the INLA volunteers. The INLA itself declined sharply after the early 1980s, wracked by internal feuds and killings, and its claims on the memory of 1981 have been contested and diminished. The IRSP has argued persistently that Sinn Féin appropriated the hunger strike's political legacy while INLA families received none of the financial support gathered by republican networks in America.
In 2019, the Criminal Cases Review Commission referred a separate conviction against Michael Devine — for firearms offences arising from a different set of charges — to the Northern Ireland Court of Appeal, citing concerns about procedural and evidential issues in the original trial. The referral did not overturn the main finding of his involvement in INLA activities but indicated that the legal basis of at least part of his imprisonment was questionable.
He is remembered through murals on the walls of the Creggan and the Bogside, in the annual IRSP commemoration in Derry, and in the grave beside Patsy O'Hara at Creggan Cemetery. The Bobby Sands Trust, which documents all ten hunger strikers, records his as the story not of a republican superhero but of a typical Derry lad — someone whose life was shaped entirely by the specific combination of poverty, loss, discrimination, and political violence that defined the Creggan in the late 1960s and 1970s. That framing is both accurate and generous. He was twenty-seven years old, a young man with two children and a lifetime still theoretically ahead of him, who died in a concrete cell in Long Kesh on a Thursday morning in August, the last of ten.