On This Day: MP Terrence MacSwiney dies in first major Irish republican hunger strike

October 25: An MP was among two IRA prisoners who died in the first major Irish Republican hunger strike on this day in 1920 – decades before Bobby Sands was even born.

Terence MacSwiney, 41, who was also Lord Mayor of Cork and a paramilitary chief, starved to death in Brixton Prison, London after 74 days without food.

And IRA volunteer Joseph Murphy also died after 76 days of fasting in Cork Jail, where 60 inmates demanding either release or political status had launched the strike.

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It followed the death of their comrade Michael Fitzgerald five days earlier at the height of the Irish War of Independence, which led to partial autonomy from Britain.

The protest triggered a surge in IRA recruits and thousands attended the funeral of the most prominent striker, MacSwiney, whose body was returned to Cork.

A British Pathé newsreel shows a bishop and two priests lead the pallbearers in carrying his Irish tricolour flag-draped coffin into the cathedral.

It then filmed a huge procession marching through the streets as his body was taken on a horse-drawn carriage to Saint Finbarr Cemetery.

Hundreds of troops were also shown patrolling the city after martial law had been introduced in much of Ireland.

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The hunger strike – which inspired a host of others, including the more famous 1981 protest – was the first in which British authorities would let prisoners die.

Previously, demonstrating prisoners, including members of the Suffragette women’s vote movement, would be force-fed by a tube being pushed down their throats.

But this policy was stopped after the botched effort that led to the death of Easter Rising battalion commander Thomas Ashe in Dublin’s Mountjoy Prison 1917.

Yet authorities were able to limit the 1920 hunger strike after releasing some of the prisoners and transferring others.

Among the latter was MacSwiney, who had refused to take his seat in Westminster along with the 72 other Sinn Fein MPs elected in the 1918 general election.

He began refusing food on August 12, 1920 upon arriving in Cork Prison after being arrested for possessing seditious documents and a cipher key.

Four days later, he was summarily tried by a court martial and sentenced to two years in jail.

On August 26, in a bid to separate him from other prisoners and quell the strike, he was moved to Brixton, where he continued fasting.

This form of protest is particularly symbolic in Ireland as it was partly designed to show solidarity with the million victims of the 1840s famine.

MacSwiney gathered worldwide attention when he declared: “I am confident that my death will do more to smash the British Empire than my release.”

It triggered an American boycott of British goods, protests in Paris and an Australian MP being expelled from his country’s parliament for supporting MacSwiney.

On October 20 he fell into a coma - with the starvation having causing his heart, vital organs and muscles to waste – and he died five days later.

His body initially lay in rest at St George’s Catholic Cathedral in Southwark, south London, where 30,000 people filed past it to pay their respects.

The 1920 hunger strike ended when Sinn Fein leader Arthur Griffith ordered the remaining nine prisoners to finish their fast after a record 94 days.

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The tactic was used again by 8,000 imprisoned IRA men who had lost the Irish Civil War when their side opposed the 1922 treaty that partitioned Ireland.

Three IRA prisoners also died in the 1940s prior to the southern Irish Free State becoming the Republic of Ireland.

But hunger strikes were revived to a greater effect in 1972 when Provisional IRA interned in Northern Ireland in 1972 forced the British government to grant them political status.

It was the later revoking of this status and criminalisation that led to the 1981 protest when, one by one, ten inmates starved themselves to death in Maze Prison.

Their hunger strike would eclipse the 1920 effort – and grab vast amounts of coverage - when their leader Sands, 27, became the first to die days after being elected an MP.