Laurence McKeown

Laurence McKeown (born 1956) is an Irish author, playwright, screenwriter, and former volunteer in the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) who took part in the 1981 Irish hunger strike.

McKeown was born in 1956 in Randalstown, County Antrim, Northern Ireland. As a teenager, McKeown had ambitions of becoming an architect and when aged 16 he started working in the offices of a quantity surveyor. When aged 17 he joined the IRA, and he was arrested in August 1976 and charged with causing explosions and the attempted murder of a member of the Royal Ulster Constabulary. At his trial in April 1977, McKeown was found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment in the Maze Prison.

While in prison McKeown took part in the blanket and dirty protests attempting to secure the return of Special Category Status for convicted paramilitary prisoners. In late 1980 the protest escalated and seven prisoners took part in a fifty-three-day hunger strike, aimed at restoring political status by securing what were known as the "Five Demands":

The strike ended before any prisoners had died and without political status being secured, and a second hunger strike began on 1 March 1981 led by Bobby Sands, the IRA's former Officer Commanding (OC) in the prison. McKeown joined the strike on 29 June, after Sands and three other prisoners had died. Following the deaths of six other prisoners, McKeown's family authorised medical intervention to save his life on 6 September, the 70th day of his hunger strike. He described his recollection of the events in an interview:

You're very sleepy and very, very tired and you're sort of nodding off to sleep but something's telling you to keep waking up. This was the thing that kept everybody going through the hunger strike in trying to live or last out as long as possible. I knew death was close but I wasn't afraid to die – and it wasn't any sort of courageous or glorious thing. I think death would have been a release. You can never feel that way again. It's not like tiredness. It's an absolute, total, mental and physical exhaustion. It's literally like slipping into death.

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