21/05/2026
Statement from Republican Network for Unity
Commemorating Volunteers Raymond McCreesh and Patsy O’Hara, 45 years on
Forty-five years ago today, within hours of one another, two young men from this small island of ours drew their last breath inside the H-Blocks of Long Kesh. Raymond McCreesh of Camlough, County Armagh, and Patsy O’Hara of the Bogside in Derry. Both in their early twenties. Both starved to death for the principle that Republican political prisoners are not, and never were, criminals.
Today RNU stands with their families, their comrades, and true Republicans across Ireland in remembering them, not with cold ceremony and empty words, but with the inner warmth and strength that genuine sacrifice is still remembered by those of us who still try to walk in their shadow.
Raymond McCreesh was born on 25 February 1957, one of eight children in a devout Catholic family from the townland of Dorrans Rocks, just outside Camlough in South Armagh. By all accounts a quiet, family-oriented young man, one of his brothers, Brian, was ordained a priest. Raymond came of age in a community living under daily British military and RUC harassment, under the shadow of internment, and the open unhealed wound of Bloody Sunday. He joined Na Fianna Éireann at 16 years of age and shortly afterwards took the oath of the Irish Republican Army. He was arrested in June 1976 near Belleek, charged with possession of a rifle and attempted murder of British soldiers, and in March 1977 sentenced to fourteen years. He entered the H-Blocks with his head high and went straight onto the blanket protest. He refused, from the day the cell door closed behind him, to wear the uniform of a criminal because he was not one. He embarked on hunger strike on 22 March 1981 and died on 21 May, after 61 days without food. Like his compatriot martyrs, he asked for nothing more than to be recognised for what he was, a political soldier of the Irish Republican cause.
Patsy O’Hara was born on 11 July 1957 in Bishop Street, Derry, a few hundred yards from where, fifteen years later, the cowardly Paras would open fire on his civilian neighbours. He was a child of the Bogside, and the Bogside shaped him early. He was just 14 years old when he was shot and wounded by a British soldier during disturbances after internment was enacted. By his teens he was active in republican politics, joining Official Sinn Féin, then moved with many others to the Irish Republican Socialist Party when it was founded in 1974, taking up arms with the Irish National Liberation Army. He was interned, harassed, imprisoned in the Free State by British lackeys, and finally sentenced in the six counties in January 1980 for possession of a hand gr***de. Like Raymond, he refused the criminal label from the first day he was imprisoned. He became O/C of the INLA prisoners in the H-Blocks. He began his fast on the same day as Raymond, 22 March 1981, and he died on the same day too, bonded in spirit to his comrade right to the end, passing only hours after Raymond. His last words to his father are remembered still: “Let the fight go on.”
Five demands. That was all. The right not to wear a prison uniform. The right not to do prison work. The right of free association. The right to educational and recreational facilities. The right to one visit, one letter, one parcel a week. Reasonable things, human things, withheld out of pure political malice and cruelty by a British Conservative government under Margaret Thatcher that had calculated, wrongly, that young Irishmen and women would break before she would.
They did not break. We will not break. Ten of our bravest died on Hunger strike. Raymond and Patsy among them. We do not romanticise their deaths. There is nothing romantic about a young man wasting away in a prison cell and on a prison bed while his mother sits beside him counting his last breaths. What we honour is their sacrifice, the conscious, sober, repeated choice to refuse the criminalisation not just of themselves, but of the cause they served and the communities they came from.
That just cause is not yet attained. Partition still remains. The British state still claims jurisdiction over six of our counties. The conditions that lit a fire within Raymond and Patsy, occupation, repression, sectarian policing, economic neglect have not gone away, however much the betrayers of Republicanism and their masters in Westminster might pretend otherwise.
To the McCreesh family in Armagh, and to the O’Hara family in Derry, RNU sends its deepest respect and solidarity. Forty-five years on, neither man is forgotten, and never will be.
Beirimid cuimhne orthu. Tiocfaidh ár lá.
Republican Network for Unity
21 May 2026
