Abstract

A puzzle has been presented in the recent past in Northern Ireland: what is the correct description of the person who dies as a result of a hungerstrike? For many the simple answer is that such a person commits suicide, in that his is surely a case of ‘self-inflicted death’. Where then is the puzzle? It is that a number of people do not see such deaths as suicides. I am not here referring to political propagandists or paramilitaries, for whom the correct description of such deaths is ‘murder by Mrs Thatcher’ or ‘killed by British intransigence’. I am rather thinking of some theologians who, despite being opposed to the hunger-strike and indeed publicly condemning the whole campaign, refused to describe what the hunger-strikers did as suicide.