The most famous hunger-striker in Irish Republican history, up to the time of the building of the H Blocks was Terence McSwiney, the Lord Mayor of Cork, who died, after seventy-four days, during the Anglo-Irish war of 1919–21. McSwiney became the inspiration for W. B. Yeats’ play, The King’s Threshold, in which Seanchan, a poet, starves himself to death. During World War II, de Valera had allowed IRA men to die on hunger strike rather than concede them the right of political status.
