When the decision was agreed in 1981 to run Bobby Sands as a candidate in the Fermanagh and South Tyrone by-election, following the death of MP Frank Maguire, we in the Sinn Féin Publicity Department had a problem.

We had no recent photograph to use for Bobby’s election poster, given that he had been in prison for the previous five years.

Bobby, who was 27, had spent one-third of his life in jail. In fact, he had only been free for six months, having been released from the Cages of Long Kesh in April 1976, then re-arrested that October.

In the Cages, he had had political status and a few photographs taken surreptitiously back then did exist.

We cropped a prison-group colour photograph and changed it to black and white. The image of a smiling young man, with long hippy-like hair, adorned telegraph poles throughout the constituency and powerfully rebutted the ‘criminal’ stereotype promulgated by the NIO.

Although photographs of Bobby exist—as a young footballer, a cross-country runner, out socialising with his wife and friends—none are of a high resolution.

Phone cameras today are ubiquitous but back then Instamatics were the norm resulting mostly in grainy images which no one complained about.

In 2019 the veteran French photographer Gérard Harley donated his 1972-76 archive to, amongst others, the Bobby Sands Trust and the Museum of Free Derry.

Photos from August 1976 of Bobby Sands participating in the first protest against the withdrawal of political status through West Belfast were discovered and published.

Then, three weeks ago, a researcher, Ciaran Cahill, working on the archive of the late Fr. Des Wilson in Springfield Community House, West Belfast, discovered negatives taken by a friend of Fr. Des, Leila Doolan, who is now aged 90.

Ciaran realised that they were photographs of the same march covered by Harlay and he then processed them.

They may well be the last photographs taken of Bobby Sands.

A close-up of one photograph (which the Trust has had digitally enhanced) as the march proceeds down the Andersonstown Road shows Bobby Sands at the bottom right of the frame (he is carrying the Leinster flag, just out of view).

Another photograph of the platform party in Dunville Park includes the following people: (left-to-right) Billy Donnelly (trade unionist), Bobby Sands, Kevin Carson (former prisoner), Jimmy Roe (deceased; former prisoner) and Geordie Bennett (deceased; former prisoner). Next is Máire Drumm, one of the speakers at the rally.

She was arrested shortly afterwards and imprisoned for 18 days for taking part in an ‘illegal procession’.

She was assassinated a few weeks later in the Mater Hospital by gunmen dressed as medical staff.

Next to Máire Drumm is Sinn Féin member Aindrias O'Callaghan from Dublin, one of the guest speakers, and who in October would give the oration at Máire Drumm’s funeral in Milltown Cemetery.

Next to O'Callaghan is the late Jimmy Drumm (husband of Máire) and next to him is the late Joe Stagg whose brother Frank had died on hunger strike in Wakefield Prison in February 1976.

Below Joe Stagg is my 23-year-old self, editor of Republican News, a role I had taken on in July 1975.

These photographs, from almost 50 years ago, are quite evocative, especially when one considers that Máire Drumm would be killed on October 28, two weeks after Bobby’s arrest, and that he would suffer five years later an excruciating death after 66 days on hunger strike.

Although Britain was to eventually fail in its objective of forcing the prisoners to accept criminal status, it was not before a heavy price was paid.

Those who suffered were the prisoners, their families, protestors and civilians on the outside including children and a mother killed by plastic bullets, a milkman and his son whose vehicle crashed into a lamppost during a nationalist riot, and prison officers and their families.

All of them were caught up in a clash of wills which one governor later described to the journalist Chris Ryder as "a battle for the false aim of criminalisation that was always going to fail". 

That the prisoners were political was, of course, recognised in their early release after the Good Friday Agreement.

All who came through that period knew that something profound had just taken place. Nothing like it had ever been experienced before.

The potency of 1981 has never waned, in my view.

And, of course, credit for the electoral rise of Sinn Féin and its adoption of an electoral strategy, leading ultimately to negotiations and peace, is directly down to the courage of the electorate of Fermanagh and South Tyrone who despite attempts to intimidate and frighten them voted in their thousands and made Bobby Sands their MP.