Film about Bobby Sands fails to separate fact from fiction

IF he had called off his hunger strike, Bobby Sands would be 54 and still, very possibly, the MP for Fermanagh and South Tyrone.

Perhaps, like many members of the Sands family, he would have rejected the peace process. He might even have taken up arms against it. Either way, he would have been a major figure in Irish public life for, whatever else one might say about Bobby Sands, he was a cut above the average republican foot soldier.

One of the inevitable imponderables, though, is what anyone might make of a film about their own death. While his erstwhile comrades in the Provisionals have welcomed Steve McQueen’s new movie Hunger, Sands’s remaining family have maintained an ominous silence. Perhaps they choke at the absence of any context in the film.

Some of the Sands family asked at the time of the Good Friday agreement what Bobby had died for. If they have indeed watched Hunger, they will be none the wiser. Those still loyal to the Adams line are clear in their own minds: “His death garnered worldwide attention and sympathy, and it marked the beginning of the long run of electoral successes that eventually propelled Sinn Féin into government,” says former prisoner Ronan Bennett.

It could be argued equally that the strikers’ deaths only succeeded in radicalising another generation, prolonging the agony, putting off the evil day when the republican leadership came to terms.

In one sense, McQueen can be forgiven for his lack of explication. It’s more than a decade since Terry George’s Some Mother’s Son depicted the strike while adhering to the familiar “this is the way it happened” formula. Hunger, unlike that effort, does at least attempt — or affect — to portray the screws, Brits, Prods, Orangies, Black Bastards etcetera as something other than cartoon Nazis.

McQueen’s lyrical approach, at its best, is edgy, discomforting and clinical. To those of us familiar with the outlines of the history, it might be a valid challenge to our conventional view of film as a storytelling device. To those less familiar — the award-givers at film festivals across Europe, for instance — it is positively dangerous.

Distilling the Troubles down to decontextualised snatches of brutality lets the strikers off the hooks, not least why they were in the Maze — Long Kesh to republicans — in the first place. For the record, their blows for Irish freedom ranged from possession of guns and grenades to (literally) blowing the brains out of little children unfortunate enough to be born Protestant.

But if you didn’t know better, you might be forgiven, watching Hunger, for thinking these “victims” were prisoners of conscience.

In the film’s opening sequences we are told tenderly that more than 2,000 “have died” up to that point in the Troubles when, in fact, the overwhelming majority were civilians murdered by republicans in cold blood. The prisoners ask each other how long their sentences are, not the reasons courts handed them down.

Another of the strikers, Pat Sheehan, who came off the blanket, describes entering the H block as “like walking out on to Croke Park to play for your county in an All-Ireland Final” such was the wild cheering.

It’s a curious turn of phrase, a strange ordering of priorities. Does killing a soldier feel like scoring a goal, one wonders? Even Bennett admits “the emphasis [of the film] is on the state as the perpetrator of violence and on republicans as the victims”.

That might suit republicans just fine – former prisoners Jim Gibney and Raymond McCartney have described it as “true to life” and “fair and accurate” respectively – but how does it qualify as an “original” approach, to use Bennett’s own word? The pity — and the danger — is that McQueen, like Sands, obviously possesses an enormous, if destructive, talent. Shots of one of those on the dirty protest playing with a fly speaks to the crushing boredom of prison life. Cacophonic noise is spliced with long periods of total silence; blinding light with an all-enveloping murk.

What doesn’t change, though, is the emotional balance. When a prison officer is gunned down in front of his mother while visiting her in a hospice, the viewer is left in no doubt that he fully deserved his punishment, not because he killed anyone, mind you, but because he gave our reluctant heroes a bath and washed faeces off their cell walls.

The IRA’s lack of any sense of proportion might have been an interesting subject to dwell on but there is more republican victimhood that McQueen needs to race back to.

The centrepiece of Hunger is a scene, scripted by Enda Walsh, in which Sands (Michael Fassbender) discusses the sanctity of life with a Catholic priest (Liam Cunningham) who tries to talk him out of his martyrdom bid.

For what seems like forever — 18 minutes, in reality — the two men are held in profile by a static camera shot.

It is, admittedly, spellbinding and Sands doesn’t quite refute the charge from the sympathetic but peace-loving priest — modelled no doubt on the late and much lamented Fr Denis Faul — that he is motivated by narcissism. But while the morality of suicide is usefully tossed around, that of culling your fellow Irishmen — to get into a British-controlled regional assembly, remember — is not.

Sands’s eventual shocking death is shamelessly portrayed, again at great length, as Christ-like, bedsores substituting for stigmata.

You would have to be completely heartless not to be moved by such dedication — or fanaticism, depending upon your point of view.

Someone so young dying over the course of 66 days must be unspeakably awful.

Lest we forget, it took Ronnie Hill, a schoolmaster and the last victim of the Enniskillen bomb, 13 years to die, tended to night and day by his devoted wife, Noreen, never having regained consciousness.

The only point Ronnie Hill was making was to solemnly remember the millions who fell fighting fascism until someone else, presumably one of those inspired by Bobby Sands, decided for Ronnie that he should die for Ireland too.

But to mention Ronnie Hill would amount to context and McQueen can’t have that because it would amount to seeing two sides of a story (as well as shining a spotlight on hunger strikers with a much more inconvenient back story than Bobby Sands).

Ripping the hunger strike out of context also means, above all, reducing the history of the 20th century to a conflict between the lads and the Brits. It’s as if the only nationalism is Provisionalism.

Are we forgetting Terry Keane’s words: “Charlie [Haughey] was vehemently opposed to the hunger strike” and was pelted with eggs in Dún Laoghaire (of all places) by IRA supporters for his trouble? That Fine Gael resisted any attempt to pass motions of sympathy to the Sands family? That Frank Cluskey, the Labour leader, referred in uncomplimentary terms to “a slow dance of death”? That de Valera was himself utterly unbending when faced with IRA hunger strikers of his own in the 1940s?

But, then, why let context get in the way of hard left propaganda? Why let fiction give way to fact?