1981 Irish hunger strike Sands, which was formerly called Winston Churchill Street. A memorial to the men who died in the Irish Rebellion of 1798, the Easter Rising and the hunger strike stands in Waverley Cemetery, Sydney, Australia, which is also the burial place of Michael Dwyer of the Society of United Irishmen. In 1997 NORAID's Hartford Unit in the United States dedicated a monument to Bobby Sands and the other hunger strikers. The monument stands in a traffic roundabout known as "Bobby Sands Circle", at the bottom of Maple Avenue near Goodwin Park. On 20 March 2001 Sinn Féin's national chairperson Mitchel McLaughlin
1981 Irish hunger strike 1981 Irish hunger strike The 1981 Irish hunger strike was the culmination of a five-year protest during The Troubles by Irish republican prisoners in Northern Ireland. The protest began as the blanket protest in 1976, when the British government withdrew Special Category Status for convicted paramilitary prisoners. In 1978, the dispute escalated into the dirty protest, where prisoners refused to leave their cells to wash and covered the walls of their cells with excrement. In 1980, seven prisoners participated in the first hunger strike, which ended after 53 days. The second hunger strike took place in 1981 and was a