Word: irelands
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Finally, at the Milltown Cemetery, the coffin was carried to a special area studded with the graves of more than 200 I.R.A. faithful. Republican Leader Gerry Adams declared: "We will bury our dead with the dignity denied them while living." He added, "The ordinary people of Ireland have turned out to show their solidarity with Bobby Sands. They know that [his] death didn't have to happen...
True enough. But death had come at last to convicted I.R.A. Terrorist and Hunger Striker Robert (Bobby) Gerard Sands, 27, by virtue of his own will. His earthly remains were little more than a husk after a 66-day fast in the H-block section of Northern Ireland's Maze Prison. He was the first I.R.A. member to starve himself to death since 1976, the 13th Irish Nationalist to do so in this century. Sands had failed in his mam aim: to force the British government to grant special political status to himself and 700 other I.R.A. members imprisoned...
...funeral, Home Secretary William Whitelaw announced the government's other response: the intent to plug a legal loophole that had allowed Sands, a convicted felon, to stand for Parliament. Westminster wanted no repetition of the I.R.A.'s ploy when yet another by-election is called in Northern Ireland's turbulent Fermanagh and South Tyrone constituency...
...other force that also held itself in check in Northern Ireland was the province's Protestant majority ("the sleeping monster," as one senior British army officer called it) that outnumbers Catholics 2 to 1. On the day of Sands' funeral, Protestant Leader Ian Paisley held another memorial service, outside Belfast city hall, to commemorate the many victims of I.R.A. terrorism. Nonetheless, said Paisley: "Protestants will not react so long as the police and the army are controlling the situation in Catholic areas, and so far they have been doing that satisfactorily...
...urge the United States government and all its citizens to pressure England to work for a negotiated political settlement that would reunite Ireland and preserve rights for all its citizens. Delay or inaction will mean only more martyrs...