[FuckingRotter]

You're over playing the impact of the Maze hunger strikers on the world stage. Their claim was that they were prisoners of war and should be treated differently from ordinary prisoners.

In the United Kingdom, terrorists still get sent to prison. Some get nutted off to the home for the bewildered, but that is by the by.

In Iraq I believe they hang terrorists like common criminals.

Bobby Sands died in 1981. Margaret Thatcher remained priminister until 1990, when the Conservative party ousted her in a row about the then EC. The key though, whatever small gains Sinn Fein may have made from Sands death, is that it wasn't how Thatcher viewed the IRA, it is how the law treats terrorists, as common criminals.

This is very important, and some thing you have to acknowledge regardless of your views on the state of things in Ireland. In most countries as far as I am aware, the law allows us to prosecute terrorists as criminals, and this is very important. If they aren't killed in the process of capturing them, they are tried and convicted in the same way as you or I may be if we robbed a bank. Why? Because to do otherwise lends a prestige and legitimacy to the cause of terrorism that it does not deserve.

The United Kingdom was not at war in Northern Ireland. The provisional were a criminal insurgency, that terrorised its own community and spread economic decay in the areas it claimed to be defending, as much as it waged a campaign against the UK government. Nobody, no government was ever going to give Sands and the IRA any form of legitimacy, because that would be a dangerous precedent. So Sands died for nothing. He didn't even put the IRA in the headlines, because they were already there.

Most people, quite rightly, view terrorists as extremists, they belong in prison, in asylums, or in the ground. I'm reminded of Ian Brady, who ended his days being force fed because he was deemed mentally incompetent to make the decision to not eat.

I'm not even going to attempt an ounce of compassion for Bobby Sands, he wasn't some poor hard done by victim of society. He was convicted twice for firearms offences. I doubt if he was planning to hold up the local corner shop to get nappies for the kids either. His second conviction followed the bombing of a furniture store and a shoot out with the RUC. Sands and his protest mob wanted special treatment. They seemed to think that their motives for criminality set them apart from "normal" people. They didn't want to work, and they didn't want to wear prison uniforms. The also believed they deserved a different legal status to the rest of us.

Well, he got his special treatment alright! Bread and water every three days, and all his furniture taken out of his cell. Serves him fucking well right if you ask me!