Bobby Sands

They won't break me because the desire for freedom, and the freedom of the Irish people, is in my heart. The day will dawn when all the people of Ireland will have the desire for freedom to show. It is then that we will see the rising of the moon.

I am dying not just to attempt to end the barbarity of H-blocks or to gain the rightful recognition of political prisoners, but primarily because what is lost here is lost for the Republic.

If a British government experienced such a long and persistent resistance to domestic policy in England, then that policy would almost certainly be changed... We have asserted that we are political prisoners, and everything about out country - our arrests, interrogations, trials, and prison conditions - show that we are politically motivated.

They will not criminalise us, rob us of our true identity, steal our individualism, depoliticise us, churn us out as systemised, institutionalised, decent law-abiding robots. Never will they label our liberation struggle as criminal.

There can never be peace in Ireland until the foreign oppressive British presence is removed, leaving all the Irish people as a unit to control their own affairs and determine their own destinies as a sovereign people, free in mind and body, separate and distinct physically, culturally and economically.

My life now centered around sleepless nights and stand-bys, dodging the Brits and calming nerves to go out on operations. But the people stood by us. The people not only opened the doors of their homes to lend us a hand, but they opened their hearts to us. I learned that without the people, we could not survive and I knew that I owed them everything.

Well, I have gotten by twenty-seven years, so that is something. I may die, but the Republic of 1916 will never die. Onward to the Republic and liberation of our people.

Our revenge will be the laughter of our children.

They have nothing in their whole imperial arsenal that can break the spirit of one Irishman who doesn't want to be broken.

I was only a working-class boy from a Nationalist ghetto. But it is repression that creates the revolutionary spirit of freedom.

I was set to confront the might of the imperial empire with an M-1 carbine and enough hate to topple the world.

'They have nothing in their entire arsenal to break the spirit of one single Republican prisoner-of-war who refuses to be broken,' I thought, and that was very true. They cannot or never will break our spirit.

They won't break me because the desire for freedom, and the freedom of the Irish people, is in my heart.

I'll wear no convicts uniform nor meekly serve my time that Britain might brand Irelands fight 800 years of crime.