At a Glance
Bellaghy: A Village at the Centre of the Troubles
Thomas McElwee was born on 30 November 1957 in the family home built by his father Jim on the Tamlaghtduff Road in the parish of Bellaghy, County Derry. He was the sixth of twelve children — Kathleen, Mary, Bernadette, Annie, Enda, Thomas, Benedict, Joseph, Nora, Pauline, Majella, and James — in a family that was, even by the standards of a community known for strong family bonds, considered exceptionally close. Jim McElwee was a retired builder; Alice McElwee had been born in Philadelphia to a Derry family who had returned to Ireland, and had lived in Bellaghy for most of her life.
One of Thomas's sisters, Margaret, had married into the Hughes family. Through that marriage, Thomas was the first cousin of Francis Hughes, who lived less than half a mile away in the same townland of Tamlaghtduff. The two boys grew up together — walking to the bottom of the road each morning to catch the school bus, returning together each evening, sharing the small-scale routines of rural childhood in 1960s Derry. They attended St Mary's Primary in Bellaghy and then Clady Intermediate, three miles away. Thomas was good at English and Maths, geography and history. He was described by those who knew him as quiet, good-natured, helpful around the house, particularly attentive to his mother.
But Bellaghy in the late 1960s and early 1970s was not an ordinary rural community insulated from the violence that was reshaping Northern Ireland. It was a predominantly nationalist village in South Derry, and South Derry was an area of considerable IRA activity — the country lanes and small farms of the area offering terrain that favoured ambush operations and made it difficult for the British Army to operate with confidence. Thomas McElwee grew up watching the Troubles unfold around him: army patrols stopping cars on the roads near his home, the constant presence of security forces in the village, the arrests of neighbours and relatives, the knowledge that the conflict which was filling the news was happening in the fields a short walk from his front door.
Na Fianna Éireann and the Independent Republican Unit
Thomas joined Na Fianna Éireann — the republican youth organisation — when he was fourteen years old. It was 1971, three years into the current phase of the Troubles, and the year of internment without trial, which had radicalised nationalist opinion across Northern Ireland more effectively than any IRA propaganda could have done. The wholesale arrest and imprisonment of hundreds of nationalists, many with no paramilitary connections, on the basis of out-of-date intelligence and political calculation, transformed the mood in communities like Bellaghy from one of civil rights protest to one of active resistance.
The independent republican unit that Thomas subsequently joined was led by his cousin Francis Hughes — one of the most effective IRA operators in South Derry, a man the British Army regarded as one of their most dangerous adversaries in the area. The unit operated in the countryside around Bellaghy, carrying out ambushes on British Army patrols and bomb attacks in neighbouring towns including Magherafelt, Castledawson, and Maghera. The years before Thomas's arrest in October 1976 were, by all accounts, intensely active ones in the area: British forces were increasingly reluctant to move through the country lanes surrounding Bellaghy without heavy escort, testimony to the effectiveness of the local republican campaign.
After leaving school, Thomas had enrolled at Magherafelt Technical College for a period before changing direction and going to the Ballymena Training Centre to begin an apprenticeship as a motor mechanic — a choice consistent with his known enthusiasm for cars and stock car racing. Harassment from loyalist workers at the training centre forced him to leave, and he subsequently found work with a local mechanic in the Bellaghy area. He was a young man of nineteen when his active republican life came to an abrupt end.
The Ballymena Operation and the Cost of a Premature Explosion
On 9 October 1976, Thomas McElwee was part of a planned IRA firebombing operation against commercial targets in Ballymena. Seven members of an active service unit were involved in transporting the devices. One of the bombs exploded prematurely in a car, and in the explosion Thomas lost the sight of his right eye. The premature detonation set in motion a chain of events that would consume the remainder of his short life: in the chaos and aftermath, McElwee was arrested, hospitalised, and charged.
One of the firebombs from the operation destroyed a clothing boutique called Alley Katz on the town's main street. Yvonne Dunlop, a twenty-six-year-old woman employed in the shop, was killed in the blaze. She was the mother of a young son who ran for his life as she called a warning before the fire engulfed her. Yvonne Dunlop's death is a fact that belongs inseparably to any account of the Ballymena operation and of Thomas McElwee's story: she was an innocent civilian, killed by an IRA operation in which McElwee was a participant. The moral weight of that fact was apparently not lost on McElwee himself — reports from those present in his final hours state that his last words included a request for forgiveness.
McElwee spent several weeks in a military hospital wing before being transferred to Crumlin Road Gaol. At his trial in September 1977, having spent over eight months on remand, he was charged and sentenced to twenty years' imprisonment for possession of explosives and the murder of Yvonne Dunlop. On appeal, the murder charge was reduced to manslaughter; the original sentence was not reduced. He was nineteen years old at the time of the offence and twenty at the time of sentencing.
The H-Blocks: Blanket Protest and the Long Years of Resistance
McElwee arrived in the H-Blocks of Long Kesh at a moment when the prison protest was entering its most demanding phase. The British government had withdrawn Special Category Status — the recognition of republican and loyalist paramilitary prisoners as political prisoners rather than ordinary criminals — for new convictions from 1 March 1976 onwards. The first prisoner to refuse the prison uniform under the new regime, IRA volunteer Kieran Nugent, had wrapped himself in a prison blanket and told the warders they would have to nail the clothes to his back. By the time McElwee arrived in late 1976, the blanket protest — prisoners wrapping themselves in prison blankets rather than wear criminal uniforms — had spread through the H-Blocks to involve hundreds of men.
McElwee joined the blanket protest immediately on his arrival in the H-Blocks. He and his younger brother Benedict, who had been arrested in the same October 1976 incident, were placed on the same wings and became, according to other prisoners, frequent targets for particular brutality from prison warders who were angered by their refusal to accept criminal status. The brothers were singled out repeatedly; the stubborn refusal to concede anything — to wear the uniform, to accept the label of criminal, to acknowledge the legitimacy of the system imprisoning them — was met with a persistent and deliberate counter-pressure that was, in its way, a mirror image of the prisoners' own strategy.
In 1978 the blanket protest escalated into the dirty protest, after a series of confrontations between prisoners and warders over the conditions under which prisoners could leave their cells. Prisoners who feared violence from warders if they left their cells to use the toilet facilities refused to do so, leading eventually to the decision to refuse to wash and to smear the walls of their cells with excrement. The cells became, as the Archbishop of Armagh Tomás Ó Fiaich described them on a visit to the H-Blocks in 1978, something closer to the sewer pipes of Calcutta than to the cells of a modern prison. McElwee endured these conditions for years, maintaining what those who knew him in the H-Blocks described as an extraordinary equanimity and steadiness of character — a man, they said, who instilled confidence and belief in those around him.
The five demands that had animated the prison protest since its earliest days were clear and specific: the right not to wear a prison uniform; the right not to do prison work; the right to free association with other prisoners and to organise educational and recreational pursuits; the right to one visit, one letter, and one parcel per week; and the full restoration of remission lost through the protest. The British government under Margaret Thatcher consistently refused to concede any of these demands, insisting that republican prisoners must be treated as ordinary criminals and refusing to recreate anything resembling the political prisoner status that had existed before 1976.
The 1981 Hunger Strike: The Tenth Man
The 1981 hunger strike began on 1 March, when Bobby Sands — the former OC of the IRA prisoners in the H-Blocks — refused food. The strike was staged rather than simultaneous: each new striker would join at intervals, ensuring that the political pressure of impending deaths was sustained over a longer period and that the British government faced a continuous rather than a single crisis. By the time Thomas McElwee joined the hunger strike on 8 June 1981, Sands had already died (5 May), as had Francis Hughes (12 May), Raymond McCreesh (21 May), Patsy O'Hara (21 May), Joe McDonnell (8 July), Martin Hurson (13 July), and Kevin Lynch (1 August). Kieran Doherty had died on 2 August.
The death of Francis Hughes on 12 May had been a particularly bitter blow for the McElwee family. Thomas and Francis had been boyhood friends, raised in homes less than half a mile apart, who had walked the same roads to school, played together as children, and fought together as young men in the same republican unit. When Francis died on hunger strike in the Maze, Thomas — who had himself already volunteered to join the subsequent strike — and his brother Benedict were both in the H-Blocks as blanket men. The family, from the outside, watched and waited.
Thomas McElwee began his fast on 8 June 1981, the tenth man to do so. He was the ninth IRA-affiliated striker to die in the 1981 protest. He lasted sixty-two days — longer than some, shorter than others — before dying at 11:27 in the morning of 8 August 1981. His girlfriend Dolores O'Neill had visited him for half an hour the previous day, one of his last conscious contacts with the world outside the prison walls. His brother Benedict, still a prisoner, was refused a visit in the week before Thomas died; when Thomas died, Benedict was asked by the prison authorities to identify the body.
Bellaghy Again: A Second Funeral in Three Months
The funeral of Thomas McElwee brought thousands of mourners to Bellaghy on 10 August 1981, the second time in three months that the village had received its dead back from the Maze. British Army helicopters hovered over the surrounding fields. RUC and British Army units converged on the roads into Bellaghy. The coffin was carried out of the McElwee family home by Thomas's eight sisters — a procession that became one of the defining images of the hunger strike summer — and an IRA firing party fired a volley of shots as the cortège reached the road, before disappearing beyond the range of the crown forces.
Two pipers led the procession along the five-mile route to the church for the Requiem Mass. Thomas's brother Benedict was granted ten hours of parole to attend the funeral of the brother he had not been permitted to visit in his final days. At the Mass, the parish priest used his sermon to criticise the hunger strikers and call for an end to the fast; some women in the congregation got up and walked out, unable to sit and listen to what they regarded as a political speech on a day of grief. Thomas McElwee's dying wish had been to be buried beside Francis Hughes, his cousin and companion in the republican unit and on the hunger strike. It was granted.
Legacy: A Village's Reckoning with History
Thomas McElwee was the youngest of the 1981 hunger strikers at the time of his death — twenty-three years old, tied with Patsy O'Hara. The average age of the ten men who died in 1981 was twenty-five, a figure that reveals the youth of the generation that the Troubles were consuming. McElwee had been inside since he was nineteen. He had lost an eye in an IRA operation before he was old enough to vote. He spent the years in which most young men form the habits and relationships of adult life in the conditions of an H-Block blanket protest. What he might have made of the years that came after is a question that has no answer.
The 1981 hunger strike, which claimed ten lives over seven months, transformed the political landscape of Irish republicanism in ways that none of the participants anticipated and that Thatcher's refusal to concede made possible. The international attention it generated, the electoral successes it produced — Bobby Sands elected as an MP while dying, Kieran Doherty and Paddy Agnew elected to the Dáil — demonstrated that the republican movement could translate suffering into political mobilisation in ways that pure military operations could not. The phrase that Danny Morrison used at a Sinn Féin conference to describe the new strategy — the ballot box and the Armalite — captured the dual approach that emerged directly from the hunger strike period.
For Bellaghy, the cost of the Troubles was paid in bodies that came home from prison: Francis Hughes in May 1981, Thomas McElwee in August 1981. The song Farewell to Bellaghy, which takes McElwee as its central subject, frames both deaths within the community that produced them — the country roads, the republican unit, the village that lost two young men in the same summer to the same cause in the same prison.
The British government eventually conceded the substance of the five demands after the hunger strike ended in October 1981, without publicly admitting that it had done so. Prisoners were allowed to wear their own clothes, prison work requirements were modified, association rights were extended. The demands for which ten men died were quietly implemented. Thomas McElwee did not live to see it. He was buried in Bellaghy beside his cousin, beneath the same Derry sky he had known all his short life.