Madam, - I have never met Richard O'Rawe or read his book on the 1981 hunger-strike but I have been following with some interest the argument between himself and Danny Morrison. Both quote from David Beresford's book Ten Men Dead yet neither refers to page 374 where Kieran Doherty, the eighth hunger striker to die, is noted as requesting his girlfriend, Geraldine Scheiss, to assist him come off the fast.
In 1987 (when Ten Men Dead was published) I was a workmate of Geraldine Scheiss and always found her honest and forthright. The morning after reading the book I asked her about Beresford's statement and she told me that it was true: Kieran had wanted to end his torture. He was to die two days later.
As equally frightening memory is from June 1981 when an acquaintance, then a well-known Republican, asked me to scan a poem written by Bobby Sands to check its historical accuracy; as an active local historian I was to become acquainted with people of diverse political aspirations. Four men had died and I got into an argument with the Republican, pointing out that all indications were that Margaret Thatcher would never give in to the hunger- strikers as her disposition and ego had little humanity and she would certainly let many more die rather than submit to their demands.
The usual argument - that the prison OC was the only person with power to call off the strike - was his defence, but when I insisted that the Army Council had ultimate power in all decisions concerning the IRA he finally burst out with: "We have the f---ing people on the street and we intend keeping the f---ing people on the street." That outburst has remained with me and, considering the normally pleasant demeanour of its owner, really sums up for me the Republican mood in that dreadful summer of 1981.
Ten young men were to give their lives. And in the weeks of their hunger-strike and in the years to follow, many others who had absolutely no choice in the matter were to suffer needless death and injury. I can understand the frustrations of the hunger strikers at the evocations of the London government under the misguided Thatcher and her advisers, but good leadership was then and perhaps still is, lacking in so many facets of British and Irish (legal and otherwise) political life. History, of course, will eventually unearth the truth. - Yours, etc.,
FRED HEATLEY, Belfast 11.