Gerry had been framed by the police for the Guildford pub bombings in 1974 and had spent 15 years in prison for something he did not do. The same thing was to happen later in Armagh in February 1980 when the prison administration attacked the women political prisoners, assaulting them and withdrawing toilet facilities.

In March 1978, 18 months after the start of the blanker protest, with over 300 prisoners on protest, the prison administration stepped up the beatings and harassment and forced the blanket men on to the no-wash, no-slop out protest. the story of the selfless sacrifice of the Irish Republican hungerstrikers needs to be known, as does their betrayal by the politicians who went on to capitalise from their suffering and deaths. However, the plight of the H-Block and Armagh prisoners again faded to some degree from the public view, until the establishment of the National H-Block/Armagh Committee in October 1979. This inside account of the 1981 hunger strikes by one of the IRA prisoners’ leaders is without doubt the most significant; it will force a complete reassessment of this pivotal epsode in modern Irish History. It became clear very quickly that these men had been backed into a corner and had no option but to see it through.

In Blanketmen, O'Rawe gives his personal account of those turbulent times that saw British and Irish governments entering unprecedented negotiations with the IRA Army Council and the prisoners themselves. O'Rawe is critical of IRA leadership as well as himself, and the deaths from the hunger strike and his role in them clearly still haunt him. This left one censored letter in and out of the prison each month as their only contact with the outside world, until after several months some prisoners compromised by agreeing to wear uniforms for visits to maintain contact with the paramilitary leaderships outside the prison.

Nugent had previously been interned in the compounds of Long Kesh during 1975, but was arrested in May 1976 and received a three-year sentence after being convicted of possessing weapons and hijacking a car. He tells of the pressure he felt seeing his mates slowly starving themselves to death to uphold their principles and the fight for their right to political status. In this passionate, disturbing and controversial book, O'Rawe reveals the reasons and motives behind the negotiations and strategy changes that eventually brought about the Peace Process.Both of us were former Blanketmen, protesting republican prisoners, and we knew that we would be touching on the 1981 IRA/INLA hunger strike, in which ten of our comrades died.

On 4 February the prisoners issued a statement saying that the British government had failed to resolve the crisis and declared their intention of "hunger striking once more". Outside the prison the IRA responded by shooting prison officer Patrick Dillon in April 1976, the first of nineteen prison officers to be killed during the five-year protest. Among other things, this meant that they would now be required to wear prison uniforms like ordinary convicts. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ructions conjured up, in my mind, an individual who was a menace to society, someone who would be capable of committing murder on the one hand and showing common decency on the other.This book is hard hitting, enlightening, and an honest account of the innermost thoughts of an IRA man in the H blocks throughout the dirty protest, and hunger strikes. Read more about the condition New: A new, unread, unused book in perfect condition with no missing or damaged pages. There was and is no excuse for anyone to have died in the troubles and the deaths of these ten men was a waste of their lives, but unlike many of their victims, these men had a choice. That seemed to be a bit of a Catch-22 to me: how can you become a big-named author if the publishers are not going to run with your books because you’re not a big-named author? One of the ‘Blanketmen’, he took part in the dirty protests that led to the hunger strikes of the early 1980s.