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 supported the hunger strikers gained seats, such as the Irish Independence Party with 21 seats, while the Irish Republican Socialist Party (the INLA's political wing) and People's Democracy (a Trotskyist group) gained two seats each, and a number of pro-hunger strike independent candidates also won seats. The British government rushed through the Representation of the People Act 1981 to prevent another prisoner contesting the second by-election in Fermanagh and South Tyrone, which was due to take place following the death of Sands. Following the deaths of Joe McDonnell and Martin Hurson, the families of some of the hunger strikers attended