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He was a towering figure of the Irish Republican movement who had one of the most controversial deaths in Ulster's long and troubled history.
Now, Bobby Sands, the hunger striker who starved himself to death 25 days after being elected a member of Parliament, is to be the subject of a television film made by Turner Prize-winning artist Steve McQueen.
Hunger will focus on the IRA leader's final six weeks inside the Maze prison, where he was serving a sentence for possession of arms.
Channel 4 said the decision to dramatise Sands' death, which prompted several says of riots in nationalist areas of Northern Ireland and drew 100,000 to his funeral, was motivated by an attempt to examine the mind of a man who was prepared to die for a cause rather than to glorify him in any way.
McQueen, who won the Turner Prize in 1999 and whose film installations include footage of a tape recorder drifting off beneath a balloon and a house collapsing, said he was fascinated by the concept of using the body as a form of "political warfare".
"It will be a film with international contemporary resonance. The body as site of political warfare is becoming a more familiar phenomenon. It is the final act of desperation; your own body is your last resource for protest. One uses what one has, rightly or wrongly.
"I want to show what it was like to see, feel, hear, smell and touch in the Maze at this time in history. What I want to convey is something you can't find in books or archive: the ordinariness and extraordinariness of life in this prison. Yet also the film is an abstraction in a certain way, a meditation on what it is like to die for a cause."
Sands joined the Provisional IRA in 1972, the year the Troubles were at their most violent - leading to a record death toll. His sister, Bernadette Sands McKevitt, also became a prominent republican.
In September 1977, he was convicted of possessing firearms, including a revolver from which bullets had been fired at the police after a bombing the previous year, and was sentenced to 14 years in prison.
He served his term at the Maze, living in the notorious H-Blocks which were reserved for inmates belonging to paramilitary organisations.
In prison, Sands began writing and publishing articles in the republican newspaper An Phoblacht and on March 1, 1981, he started refusing food and spurred other prisoners to join the strike, which was instigated to gain status as political prisoners rather than criminals, although it is often regarded as an exercise to gain international publicity.
A month later, Sands was nominated for a seat to become MP for Fermanagh and South Tyrone and won.
Three weeks later, he was dead from starvation after 66 days of striking. Nine others who were involved in the hunger strike died after him.
- INDEPENDENT
