Bobby Sands: 66 Days Bobby Sands: 66 Days Bobby Sands: 66 Days is a 2016 documentary film about Bobby Sands and the 1981 Irish hunger strike from Northern Ireland. The film mixes reenactment, animation, interviews and archive footage to relate the story of Bobby Sands and the 1981 Irish hunger strike, as well as covering the events leading up to the hunger strike and its complex legacy. Martin McCann reads several excerpts from Sands' own diary. "Bobby Sands: 66 Days" premiered at Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival in Toronto on 3 May 2016. It went on general release in Ireland on 5 August
Hunger strike the winter of 1923. By February 1923, under the 1922 Special Powers Act the British were detaining 263 men on "Argenta", which was moored in Belfast Lough. This was supplemented with internment at other land based sites such as Larne workhouse, Belfast Prison and Derry Gaol. Together, both the ship and the workhouse alone held 542 men without trial at the highest internment population level during June 1923. After the end of the Irish Civil War in October 1923, up to 8,000 IRA prisoners went on hunger strike to protest their continued detention by the Irish Free State (a total