A History of Ireland in Song

Frank Stagg and Michael Gaughan

Frank Stagg was born in the village of Hollymount, County Mayo, in 1941. He worked with his uncle as a gamekeeper before emigrating to England, where he was employed as a bus conductor and later qualified as a bus driver. He joined Sinn Féin in Luton in 1972 and shortly afterwards was accepted into the IRA.

Michael Gaughan, the eldest of six children, was born in Ballina, Co Mayo, in 1950. After finishing his schooling, he left Ireland for England in search of work. Whilst in England, he joined the IRA and became an active Volunteer in a London-based unit.

Stagg was arrested in Coventry in April 1973 and was convicted in November of conspiring to commit arson, for which he received a ten-year sentence. At his trial the following October with six others, including Rev. Patrick Fell, he was described as commanding officer of the Coventry IRA unit. There was little or no evidence to connect him with the charge. He began his sentence in Albany Prison on the Isle of Wight. Due to his insistence that he be treated as a political prisoner, and his refusal to do any prison work, he spent most of his time in solitary confinement.

Michael Gaughan was captured during a fundraising mission, and convicted of arms possession and conspiracy to rob £530 from a London bank. He was initially sent to Wormwood Scrubs, where he spent two years before being transferred to Albany Prison. In Albany, Gaughan requested political status. Prison officials responded to his request by placing him in a solitary punishment cell. Eventually, he was transferred to Parkhurst prison.

At Parkhurst, four of the Belfast Ten were on hunger strike for political status. On March 31st, 1974, Michael Gaughan, along with Frank Stagg, Paul Holme, and Hugh Feeney, joined the strike.

Their demands were simple:

A guarantee that he would not be returned to solitary confinement;
The right to educational facilities and not to do prison work;
The setting of a reasonable date for a transfer to an Irish prison.

Michael Gaughan suffered the brutal procedure of force-feeding seventeen times in the course of his hunger strike. The last time was on 2nd June, the night before his death. Michael Gaughan died in Parkhurst Prison on 3rd June, 1974, the sixty-fifth day of his hunger strike, from injuries inflicted during forced-feeding. He was 24 years old. His was the first hunger strike death of the contemporary troubles. He is buried in his native Mayo.

Michael Gaughan left a final message for his comrades and his country:

I die proudly for my country and in the hope that my death will be sufficient to obtain the demands of my comrades. Let there be no bitterness on my behalf, but a determination to achieve the new Ireland for which I gladly die. My loyalty and confidence is to the IRA and let those of you who are left carry on the work and finish the fight.

Following Gaughan's death, the remaining hunger strikers ended their fast after assurances from the prison authorities that they would be transferred to a prison in Ireland. The British authorities however, pursued a policy of seeming to concede to prisoners' demands when they were on hunger strike only to renege once the prisoner came off protest.

And so, at the end of 1975 Frank Stagg embarked on another hunger strike, his fourth in two years. This time, there was to be no turning back. Volunteer Frank Stagg died on 12th February 1976 after fasting for 62 days. In his final message to his comrades in the Republican Movement he wrote:

"We are the risen people, this time we must not be driven into the gutter. Even if this should mean dying for justice. The fight must go on. I want my memorial to be peace with justice."

To ensure that he would get a Republican funeral, Frank Stagg stated in his will that his body should be entrusted to Derek Highstead, then Sinn Féin organiser in England. The Wakefield coroner, evidently an honourable man, complied with this request. However, Frank Stagg's funeral was disrupted by the government of the Irish Free State in an act so shameful that even the British never attempted it. The Fine Gael/Labour coalition government under Fine Gael Taoiseach Liam Cosgrave hijacked Frank Stagg's body, and after a farce of a Requiem mass which was boycotted by almost all the relatives, interred it at Ballina, in a grave some 70 yards from the Republican Plot in Leigue Cemetery. In order to prevent any reinterrment by republicans, the Special Branch afterwards poured six feet of concrete on top of the coffin. On 6 November 1976, Frank Stagg's remains were removed by IRA volunteers and reinterred beside the remains of his comrade, Michael Gaughan, in the Republican Plot.

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