He is re-enacting his jail experience in a play about the hunger strike, now being staged in Belfast and elsewhere as part of a series of commemorations of the events of the spring and summer of 1981. At the time of the hunger strike, he was a prisoner in the Maze. The strike capped a hardening confrontation with jail authorities. Ordered to wear prison garb, the prisoners wrapped themselves in blankets, saying they considered the uniforms a badge of criminality. The hunger strikers, humiliated and angry over a similar and largely fruitless strike the year before, felt that once their course was charted, they could not depart from it.
Muscles waste away, kidneys fail.
Sharp bones poke through flesh. Thick green bile is vomited up. Lawrence McKeown knows this all too well. He woke up in the hospital, realizing foggily that his family had gone against the wishes he so often repeated to them. McKeown was willing to take up the fight again, but momentum had stalled.