The World is Watching H-Block: Propaganda and Diplomacy During the 1981 Hunger Strike in Northern Ireland

Speaker:
Will Leggat - Yale History Department

Title:
The World is Watching H-Block: Propaganda and Diplomacy During the 1981 Hunger Strike in Northern Ireland

In 1981, the world had its eyes on Northern Ireland. Demanding recognition that their imprisonment was political, a group of Irish republican prisoners at HM Prison Maze in Northern Ireland began a hunger strike that would last 217 days, claim the lives of ten strikers, and change the nature of The Troubles -the decades-long conflict over the status of Northern Ireland. As the strike continued to gain international attention, the UK Government’s continued refusal to engage with the strikers’ demands drew increasing criticism from the public, international human rights groups, and its diplomatic allies -most importantly the United States. In his yearlong senior essay, Will Leggat examines how the Irish republican movement and the UK government approached the propaganda battle that surrounded the strike, and argues that the strike was a turning point that shifted the conflict -and the trajectory of its eventual resolution- out of the domestic sphere and into the international.

Will Leggat is a senior History major in Yale College originally from Brooklyn, New York. His research interests primarily revolve around questions of how post-conflict states establish national identity. Past projects of his have examined the militant democratic approach of Germany’s post-war constitution and traced the evolution of the Soviet political project as reflected in the three iterations of the USSR Constitution between 1918 and 1936. His senior thesis, advised by Professors Bonnie Weir and Stuart Semmel, focuses on the propaganda battle surrounding the 1981 hunger strike at HM Prison Maze in Northern Ireland and how the strike internationalized the conflict.

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