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Nicholas Woolley reports on the aims of Bobby Sands and the republican hunger strikers in the Maze prison and looks at the efforts made by various groups to save his life.

The report opens with the announcement of Sands' election while he was on the sixth week of a hunger strike that would eventually end with his death. The republican hunger strike was a strategy for the restoration of Special Category status that had been withdrawn by the British government in 1976.

The election of Bobby Sands as an MP in the Westminster parliament focused international attention on his protest, with representatives of the Irish parliament, the former US Attorney General Ramsey Clark, two members of the European Commission of Human Rights and the Pope's private secretary Monsignor John Magee all making visits to the prison in an attempt to persuade Sands to give up his fast.

The report concludes with the words of Sands' mother, Rosaleen, who comments on his condition and makes a plea that there should be no violence in the wake of his death.

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