No matter how it started this thread really has gone into below the bar, BS territory, hasn't it?
And I apologise in advance if this post is unduly long.

The offence for which Bobby Sands was tried has already been noted. With three other people he was in a car in which there was a gun. They were tried in a non-jury court and we can imagaine the social and political sympathies of the one-man judge/jury. He sentenced them each to fourteen years imprisonment.   This is not a usual sentence in the UK. It was not and is not a sentence given to loyalist paramilitaries.

(Semantic digression:
In the language of politicians, the BBC and most other journalists:
Armed republican = terrorist
Armed pro-British, loyalist = paramilitary)

In the gaol, the conditions that had been previously applied to those convicted in non-jury (Diplock) courts had been arbitrarily (and isn't strange that 'arbitrarily' means 'without arbitration'?) changed.

One might be surprised therefore at the moderation of the demands of the hunger strikers. They didn't demand release. They didn't request that they be granted the kind of trial that has been guaranteed under British law since Magna Carta.

Don Concannon. I had thought of him merely as one of those little footnotes of history, one of those Labour Party guys who took Mrs Thatcher's side against the hunger strikers. He was a former British soldier and that is the side he was on. Perhaps he was simply in the wrong party. A while ago in England I met a man, a former member of the National Union of Miners. His contempt for Don Concannon was more bitter than that of any republican I have met. The phrases 'blacklegs', 'scabs' and the 'c-word' were bandied about. But that's all to do with Arthur Scargill and the NUM. Another story. I assume that littleweedrummer would know more about that than me.

As inOBU (am I right in thinking that OBU stands for One Big Union?) points out the problem has nothing to do with religion. There are protestants in the republican movement. At least one Sinn Fein councillor is a protestant. The founding father of republicanism , Wolfe Tone, was a protestant. Today's republicans look upon people like Henry Joy McCracken as their ideological forefathers.

The catholic church most emphatically does not like republicanism. One example. The priest Denis Faul, though much concerned with the welfare of prisoners, regularly expresses his contmempt for republicans. One of his kinder descriptions is 'Blackguards (blaggards)'. I know of a couple of priests who have been ambivalent about the IRA. They are no longer priests. I don't know if they jumped or if they were pushed.

Loyalists tend to use the word 'protestant' not as a statement of religious belief but as a shorthand for a political standpoint and social background. I know members of the UVF and their description of Dr. Paisley, for example, is, well, unchristian.

Violence. The state was founded on violence, threats of violence, gross illegalities, disloyalty and threats of mutiny by officers of the British Army. It is a gerrymandered state, born in blood and violence, and maintained in existence by gerrymandering, state-sponsored violence and other criminal acts. It can be argued that the violence was necessary to prevent a protestant people from being subsumed into a romanist state. It can be argued that the criminal acts and treason were required to prevent these people from being betrayed by the British governement. Perhaps. Nonetheless it was violence, criminal acts and treason.

Bobby Sands did not create the violence; the violence created Bobby Sands.