Owen Carron was a small, intense man who always wore a suit and tie in public. He was a teacher. He was a known Irish republican in the County Fermanagh and that wasn't conducive to a quiet life. And of course, he had in April of 1981, against all odds and the will of the aligned forces of the crown, won a furious parliamentary election campaign for Bobby Sands as his election agent. With Bobby's death, the Brits could wait no longer to declare a bi-election for the vacant seat. The election was called for the 20th of August. So that another hunger striker would not win the seat, the British parliament passed a law making it illegal for a serving "criminal" to stand for office. Owen Carron ran instead.

During the local district council elections in May, the British army and UDR set out to harass candidates standing in support of the hunger strikers. They and their supporters were stopped and searched constantly in order to disrupt their campaigning. Candidates supporting the H-Blcock protest were elected to 36 seats, 51,000 votes in all. But no one was tortured worse or more frequently than Owen Carron.

Bernard O'Mahoney, a British army private, wrote about Carron in his memoir, "Soldier of the Queen". He mentioned that Owen was prominently discussed during army briefings: "We were clearly instructed to make life difficult for him -- and the order seemed to have come from on high." O'Mahoney was happy enough to comply.

"Our aim was to hound him into the ground."

Here is how O'Mahoney put it: "All of us, whenever we got the chance, proceeded to make his life hell. Our pursuit of him was so sustained and relentless that after a while I even began to feel a little sorry for him. One patrol would stop his car, detain him for as long as possible while searching him, let him go, then radio ahead to another patrol who would intercept him and repeat the procedure. He could rarely get more than a few miles without being stopped. If we stopped him alone in a quiet area we would tell him we were setting him up for assassination by loyalist paramilitaries or threaten to shoot him ourselves. If we stopped his partner, we would tell her he was having affairs with other women, that we had caught him with this or that Sinn Fein woman. All lies, of course. Our aim was to hound him into the ground. We wanted to make his life completely miserable -- and I think we succeeded."

Most of the time, Owen just stood their while his car was being dismantled, waiting to get on with the campaign. What else could he do? A few times, however, he exploded into a string of insane, wild curses. But that only gave the Brits more pleasure, so he tended to hold his anger.

Owen Carron elected MP and Micky Devine dies on the same day: 20 August 1981

O'Mahoney describes the scene in the barracks as the election wound down: "In those last weeks we kept up our harassment of the prospective MP Owen Carron. On that last night I didn't stay up to hear the election results, but I woke the next day to discover our regiment had obviously failed to win the hearts and minds of the people of Fermanagh-South Tyrone. The electors had voted overwhelmingly for Owen Carron. The most harassed man in the constituency had won by 2,230 votes. On the news, Mrs Thatcher said she was bitterly disappointed by Carron's win." O'Mahoney recalls an Enniskillen-born Brit soldier commenting about Owen Carron's victory, "We should have shot that c___ when we had the chance."

On the same day, 20 August, Micky Devine of Derry City died on hunger strike. Some Brit soldier or UDR man would have won the regimental hunger strike pool, guessing closest to the day Micky died. There normally would have been a drunken, triumphal celebration in the Barracks, but it was dampened by Owen Carron's election.

British army private O'Mahoney wondered to himself whether he and his regiment's disgraceful treatment of Carron actually helped get him elected.

Micky Devine: "Take my coffin with you."

As Micky Devine lay in his prison hospital bed, Bernadette McAliskey told him how she and others walked out of Tom McElwee's funeral because the priest demanded an end to the hunger strike and blamed the republican movement. Micky told her that if that happened at his funeral, he wanted her to walk out just as she did at Thomas's funeral, only she was to take his coffin with her her. Micky had a Derry City man's sense of humor. Being on hunger strike, gave him a lot of time to look bad on his life. It wasn't an easy life to look back on. He was only 27 years old.

Micky never caught a break. Born into poverty in a cold, leaky World War II Nissan hut, he spent the first six years of his life in the tin slum known as Springtown. Catholics lived there and it was run by the unionists of the Derry Corporation. Micky and his sister Margaret had to sleep under piled blankets and coats to keep the rain off them. They were sick a lot. His father, Patrick, couldn't find work, typical for Catholic men in post war Derry City. When Micky was 11, his father died, leaving him to live with his mother and grandmother in the Creggan estate on the hill above the Bogside.

Micky was Micky, a unique individual. He very small as a child, and only 5'4" as a man, orangey hair, walked sort of like a duck, and wore thick eyeglasses. He showed his wit at an early age but naturally lacked confidence. He quit school at 16 to work at shops in Derry City centre. He was smart, a very good worker, and started to become successful as a retailing assistant.

"Dodge City"

But as his business career was beginning, so was the Battle of the Bogside. They called it "Dodge City". Dodge City was never this bad. Young Micky Devine joined the Young Socialists and worked with the Derry Housing Action committee. In 1971, he began to work with the "Official" IRA and helped man the barricades of "Free Derry Corner" from attack from crown forces and loyalists mobs. At first Micky brandished a hurley stick, he wasn't much bigger than a hurley. Later he would be given a rifle. He was sixteen.

Free Derry, the area around the Catholic ghetto of the Bogside, was at the time a "No Go" area for the Brit army, RUC, and loyalists. It wasn't easy to keep that way, with Brit military and mob incursions and constant CS gas bombardments, but the people were fierce, particularly the young people.

Sometimes it did get a bit romantic. Image was everything for lads seeking status. One night, Micky's brother-in-law Frank McCauley was walking with his daughter, Cathy, age six, through the Bogside, when they came to a republican checkpoint. Micky was with the other young men wearing hoods, carrying weapons, and stopping cars for a brief check. The point was to give the people the knowledge or impression that republicans were in control of the area, not the Brits. People passing might imperceptibly nod their heads and just kept on going.

Not little Cathy. "Hello, Michael!" she shouted to her cousin. Micky was mortified. Later, he was having a pint when Frank and Cathy came in. Micky demanded how she knew it was him. "I knew your feet, Michael," she said. She then proceeded to show him how he looked standing there with his two feet pointed outward like Charlie Chaplin. It wasn't easy for Micky to succeed at the macho soldiering game. His looks didn't inspire awe and he couldn't hit the sky with a rifle shot because of his poor eyesight. But he was an energetic political activist.

Bloody Sunday

On Sunday, 30 January 1972, as Brit paratroopers opened fire with high velocity rifles on a peaceful civil rights march in Derry City, Micky was fleeing from the para volleys with a group of young men. One on each side of him were shot dead as they ran for safety. He was seventeen. "I told you the bastards would start shooting! We can't just sit back and watch while our own Derrymen are shot down like dogs," he told a friend. He never forgot those thirteen wooden boxes in the church in the Creggan. "It's up to us to retaliate," he concluded. He went from activist to committed revolutionary.

The wee child that blew up in city centre

Frank McCauley tells the story of when Micky joined him for a pint at the Bogside Inn. Frank bought him a pint and Micky announced he was waiting for a girl. "Is it Maggie?" Frank wanted to know, the girl Micky was later to marry, unhappily as it would turn out. Then a young woman with a baby in a pram showed up and Micky told his brother-in-law he'd be around to buy him a pint back in a half hour. At least Frank assumed it was a baby. Micky told him the pair were off "shoplifting". And they were.

A half hour later Micky was back to buy his brother-in-law a pint -- without his girl friend and without the wain, but he kept looking at his watch. At around three o'clock the ground shook from the impact of a huge bomb exploding somewhere in city centre. Frank commented on impact shock and Micky replied, "Aye, and it was six seconds fuckin' late." Frank caught on. "That is the shoplifting I was telling you about. See that pram -- the wee child had some wind," complained Micky sipping at his pint

"Red Micky"

In September of 1972 his mother died. Micky found her on the sofa of their Creggan flat dead of a brain tumor with his grandmother trying desperately to revive her. She was 45 years old. Micky soon married Maggie in April of 1973 and they settled in the Creggan. Micky was the last person anyone would expect to settle down, particularly under the siege circumstances of Derry City for a man of his politics and energy. Neither of them were remotely ready for marriage in the best of circumstances. He was 19; Maggie was 17 and pregnant with their son, Michael Jr. They started off with no money at all and what they got Micky tended to drink away. By 1974, when Micky was almost twenty, he and most of his comrades left the Official IRA and joined the IRSP/INLA in 1975, which was gaining in popularity in Derry City. By then he was "Red Micky" and not only for his hair. He was involved with every aspect of the conflict, but not for long.

Captured

In 1976, a group of three INLA volunteers went on a successful raid for arms into Donegal. One of the raiders was Patsy O'Hara. The raid was easy. But by the time they got back to Derry, an RUC alert was out. One of the perpetrators was Micky Devine: "ginger hair and wearing silver-framed glasses." You could have picked Micky Devine out of a crowd from the moon. Micky was picked up almost immediately with a fellow raider John Cassidy. Micky broke and signed a RUC provided statement. Cassidy tried to protect him with a story, but with Micky's confession in the bag, he had to concede. Micky was convicted and sentenced to 12 years. Just like Micky's luck. His military career was hardly one year old when it was over. He felt down about his cave in.

But when he was sent to the Kesh he quickly joined the blanket protest, which was seven months old at the time. Those who endured conditions in the non-conforming H-Blocks from the early days had to be special men. Maybe nobody thought Micky was tough enough. A week in those circumstances would be enough to break the hardest individual. It probably had more to do with dedication than toughness, because it took spirit more than strength of body to endure torture year after year after year. And Micky took it year after year.

Micky wasn't one to complain, his Derry City black humor helped see him through.

"So much for Christianity, Michael Devine, H-Block 5"

For example, here's vintage Micky Devine in a sarcastic letter to the English Cardinal Hume [who had just referred to the hunger strikers' deaths as suicides and condemned the sin of self-violence]:

"As a blanketman these past three and a half years, I believe I can enlighten Your Eminence on a few forms of violence that you don't know about or have deliberately chosen to ignore.

"It would interest me to know what name you would use to describe locking a human being in a prison cell for four years and never allowing him to see daylight, depriving him of any and every method of easing the days, months and years of loneliness, a loneliness which you, in your mansion in Westminster, could never begin to understand...

"I'm prepared to bet this torn smelly blanket that I'm wearing that you can't remember the last time you were beaten unconscious or the last time you dined on black tea and hard dry bread... I would suggest you investigate the violence of your fellow countrymen who are responsible for driving their victims into near insanity...

So much for Christianity,

Michael Devine, H-Block 5"