Joe Borowski (politician) Borowski Cookbook". He withheld his income tax for five years in the 1970s, to show his opposition to Canada's federal abortion policies. In 1981, Borowski went on an eighty-day hunger strike to protest the absence of a provision for the unborn in Canada's Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The public effect of this demonstration was blunted somewhat when it was pointed out that he had outlived contemporary IRA hunger-striker Bobby Sands, who in 1981 had starved to death in Maze Prison after a hunger strike that lasted only 66 days. Three years earlier, his lawyers had put forward a case
1981 Irish hunger strike conditions there. In 1979, former MP Bernadette McAliskey stood in the election for the European Parliament on a platform of support for the protesting prisoners, and won 5.9% of the vote across Northern Ireland, even though Sinn Féin had called for a boycott of the election. Shortly after this, the broad-based National H-Block/Armagh Committee was formed, on a platform of support for the "Five Demands", with McAliskey as its main spokesperson. The period leading up to the hunger strike saw assassinations by both republicans and loyalists. The IRA shot and killed a number of prison officers; while loyalist paramilitaries shot