H-Block Armagh Story event to be hosted in Tipperary

Thurles Sinn Féin are delighted to announce that it will host The H-Block Armagh Story event with Eoghan “Gino” Mac Cormaic in Hickey’s pub Thurles at 7:30pm on Thursday, July 27.

Eoghan will be in conversation with the chair of the event Dan Harty and will read from his book and reflect on his time in the H-Blocks, on the blanket and no-wash protests.

There will also be a Q&A with the audience at the end.

Following on there will be rebel music by John O’ Connor of Tipp town. Eoghan Mac Cormaic was arrested at the age of 20 in 1976 and spent the next fifteen years in prison in the H Blocks of Long Kesh before moving to Galway in 1991.

Along with many others in the H-Blocks and in Armagh Women’s Prison, he began a prison protest towin back Special Category Status being that was being denied to them in 1976.

What developed became known as the Blanket Protest, an almost unbelievable set of prison conditions and protest, which would eventually lead to the death of ten republican prisoners, including Bobby Sands on hunger strike in 1981.

Mac Cormaic spent a total of 1,960 days on ‘the Blanket’ and no-work protest, and his story details – often in a wry and humorous way – the life endured by the 350 men and women who faced down this major British policy and eventually won their demands.

For anyone wanting to learn what life was like in the protest wings and, indeed to understand the causes and motivations of those on protest, his book On the Blanket is a must-read, and this public event a unique opportunity to hear a first-hand account of those historic days between 1976 and1981.