Archive on Four: The Hunger Strikes
BBC Radio 4

This superlative compilation, fronted by the BBC’s Northern Ireland veteran Peter Taylor (1 May) commemorated the fortieth anniversary of the H Block hunger strikes. In the face of the UK government’s unwillingness to back down, 10 men eventually died. One of them, the IRA’s Bobby Sands, was elected MP for Fermanagh and South Tyrone a few days before his death.

Taylor’s enquiry, drawing on an immense personal archive as well as contemporaneous reportage, went back as far as 1971 and the murder of three off-duty British soldiers which pushed “the Troubles” on to newspaper front pages. The question of whether IRA prisoners should be granted political status burned on through the 1970s, survived the transformation of Long Kesh prison into the Maze and underwent a decisive shift at the end of 1980.