3
Street Art
The Army comes to visit. The house will have been surrounded and the door will be opened the fast way. Less time for the occupants to flush anything incriminating. Quite a few families in this area were on the receiving end of this kind of call.
The Hunger Strikers.
A number of Republican prisoners went on hunger strike to press their demand to be regarded as political prisoners rather than ordinary criminals. They maintained that as their actions had been inspired not by purely criminal motives but in support of a political cause they should be given 'political' status and kept separately from and treated differently from ordinary prisoners. A number of them died and the action eventually ceased. Further action in the form of the 'dirty protest' followed, prisoners refused prison clothing on the grounds that it marked them as criminals, they refused to wash, use prison facilities of any kind or cooperate with the prison authorities in any way. Political status as a principle was never conceded by the prison authorities but in practice the various paramilitary groups did in time have their own wings of the Maze Prison and achieved some degree of control of their lives within the constraints of prison regulations.
The two pictures above are of side-by-side paintings in Bishop St.