Joe Mcdonnell
The fourth IRA Volunteer to join the hunger-strike for political status was Joe McDonnell, a thirty-year-old married man with two children, from the Lenadoon housing estate in West Belfast.
McDonnell was arrested in Operation Demetrius and interned on the prison ship HMS Maidstone along with Gerry Adams and others.
Internment had been introduced shortly before, and in 1972, Joe was dragged from the house, hit in the eye with a rifle butt and bundled into a British army jeep.
The McDonnells went to live with Goretti’s mother for a while, but eventually got the chance to squat in a house being vacated in Lenadoon Avenue.
He was a good friend of the late Bobby Sands, with whom he was captured while on active service duty, and it was predictable, as well as fitting, that when Bobby died, Joe volunteered to take Bobby’s place and continue that fight.
As an active republican before his capture in October 1976, Joe was regarded by his comrades as a cool and efficient Volunteer who did what he had to do and never talked about it afterwards.
It’s no surprise that Joe has broken some of the biggest stories in L.A. sports history and has gotten some of the most sought after interviews in the business.
Not among those who volunteered for the earlier hunger strike last year, it was the intense disappointment brought about by the Brits’ duplicity following the end of that hunger strike, and the bitterness and anger that duplicity produced among all the blanket men, that prompted Joe to put forward his name the next time round.
Joe McDonnell was a volunteer in the Provisional Irish Republican Army who died in the 1981 Irish hunger strike.
His determination and resolve in that course of action can be gauged by the fact that never once, following his sentencing to fourteen years imprisonment in 1977, did he put on the prison uniform to take a visit, seeing his wife and family only after he commenced his hunger-strike.
Although McDonnell was not involved in the first hunger strike, he joined Bobby Sands and the others in the second hunger strike.
There were only two Catholic houses in this predominantly Protestant housing estate, and the house was attacked on numerous occasions.
Internment had been introduced shortly before, and in 1972 the British army struck with a 4.00 a.m.
