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.