Word: thirsting
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Meanwhile, the Irish government | has turned on the I.R.A.'s militant Provisional wing, to which it once gave refiuge. Sean MacStiofain, the Proves' former chief of staff, is in military detention, discredited for having broken his hunger and thirst strike. Martin McGuinness, the Proves' 22-year-old Derry brigade commander who used to receive reporters in the Bogside gasworks (Any regrets for the shootings? "Certainly not," he would snap), has also been arrested. Other captured leaders include a strategist who used to explain, coolly and lucidly, the lessons in terror that the I.R.A. had learned from...
...causes for it, but the sheer bulk of its interviews and newsreel clips not only occasionally deadens, but gives the audience a misconceived faith in the completeness of Ophuls' very selective vision. Documentary talents like Ophuls' are hard to find, however, and they're needed desperately to slake a thirst for social commentary rarely touched by fiction filmmakers...
...boldly attempted to rescue their organization's chief of staff, Sean MacStiofáin, who had been arrested the week before, convicted as a member of an illegal organization and sentenced to six months in prison (TIME, Dec. 4). MacStiofáin promptly went on a hunger and thirst strike to protest his imprisonment, and was taken to Dublin's rambling old Mater Hospital for treatment...
Then came the deflating anticlimax. As he prepared to receive Communion from a priest, MacStiofáin broke his thirst strike. The Rev. Sean McManus, an old friend who had flown in from Baltimore after MacStiofáin was arrested, said he found the I.R.A. leader "shaking, on the point of death" from a heart seizure and crying deliriously, "I love Ireland, I belong to Ireland, God give us freedom!" McManus pleaded with MacStiofáin to relent. "If you die tonight," said the priest, "I am convinced there will be serious trouble in the South of Ireland." A moment...
...would starve himself to death unless released. It did not seem to be an idle threat. In the past half century five I.R.A. men have sought martyrdom by continuing a hunger strike to the agonizing end. MacStiofáin was on the seventh day of his hunger and thirst strike when he was carried into court on a chair. Weak, barely able to speak, he sat wrapped in blankets; a prison doctor, who periodically revived MacStiofáin, told reporters later that the I.R.A. chief could barely last three or four more days...