National Archives: Hunger strikes warning

Published on 28/12/2012 00:01

The IRA’s hunger strikes could have spread to English prisons, it has been revealed.

Brian Keenan, a prisoner in Leicester jail, wrote to Sinn Fein’s Gerry Adams in 1981 outlining his thoughts on ending hunger strikes, and described “a long-term solution to the potential danger of a hunger strike amongst republican prisoners in English prisons. That potential hunger strike would be motivated by a desire for repatriation to Northern Ireland prisons, and I have reason to believe that it would be imminent.”