‘Here is the next phase in the Bobby Sands story’

Brendan J Byrne's Bobby Sands: 66 Days begins with a smart Brechtian flourish. While we hear how the late republican's true character has become confused in endless iconography, we watch walls being erected for some new re-creation of his prison cell. This is the set Byrne will be using for 66 Days. The film has itself become part of the continuing conversation.

“Yes, that is right there in the pre-title as part of the introduction,” Byrne agrees. “We are saying: ‘here is the next phase in the Sands story.’”

It is 35 years since Bobby Sands, then detained in HM Prison Maze, began refusing his food. It is staggering to recall how much happened in such a short time. Sands was elected as MP for Fermanagh and South Tyrone less than a month before he died from starvation. Ten prisoners died in the fight for political status. Those old enough will recall the middle months of 1981 as a period of great anxiety and unease.

Those tensions have not wholly relaxed. Just last week, DUP MP Sammy Wilson was among those objecting to public funds being put the way of 66 Days. "I haven't seen the film, but my fear would be it will glorify someone who was in jail because he was a criminal," he said.

"I knew I had to create a degree of balance within the film," Byrne says. "Otherwise it would have been very easy to criticise. It's interesting seeing what that level of criticism has been. We have had a bit of stick from the Belfast Telegraph. The film has been described as 'deplorable', but they haven't seen it yet. This is the problem. This still happens."

Animated hero

Twas ever thus. A substantially sized, unpretentious man with a friendly Belfast accent, Byrne has delivered no sort of polemic. Represented by clever animation, his words spoken by Martin McCann, Sands is presented in faintly heroic terms, but the film seeks to balance republican voices with nuanced historical analysis. Fintan O’Toole opens the conversations. High Tory Charles Moore, sympathetic biographer to Mrs Thatcher, joins in later on. Prison officer Dessie Waterworth discusses living with the constant threat of assassination.

“It’s difficult to get people at the coalface to talk,” Byrne says. “The prison officer Dessie Waterworth was great. I couldn’t get others to talk. Why was that? It’s got to be because at some level, they are not necessarily proud of what they did. It was difficult to find Unionist voices who were inclusive and not just rabble-rousing. So, in the end, in relation to Thatcher, I went back to source and got Charles Moore.”

And Norman Tebbit. The former Tory cabinet minister, whose wife was left severely disabled by the Brighton bombing, is on characteristically combative form.

“He was very easy to deal with,” Byrne says. “He was tough. He talked about how he felt the hunger strike achieved nothing. Then he’d lean in and say: ‘I hope that was tough enough for you.’ He revels in his notoriety.”

Byrne “fell into the business” by a side entrance. A graduate in business, he was directed towards film by the predecessor of Northern Ireland Screen. He ended up, after taking a personality test, getting an interview for DBA Television. That brought him into contact with such luminaries of the documentary sphere as John T Davis and Sé Merry Doyle. He quickly realised he had a taste for the form and began producing and directing.

So, why did it take him until now to address the story of Bobby Sands? Why – to again quote Sammy Wilson’s ill-informed whinge – must he “keep on stirring the pot about the past”?

"I thought enough time had passed that we could discuss it without creating immediate debate," he says. "But really I just felt that it hadn't been done before. I am a big fan of [Steve McQueen's] Hunger, but we hadn't had a documentary like this. As somebody from a working-class nationalist background, Bobby Sands wasn't much more to me than a gable-wall image. He's somebody we think we know better than we do."

Absent voices

Some voices are conspicuous by their absence. Sands’s family rarely contribute to documentaries or news reports. His sister, Bernadette Sands McKevitt, wife of dissident republican Michael McKevitt, has never resigned herself to the compromises that led to the Good Friday Agreement.

“I met two of the sisters, Bernadette and Marcella, and his son Gerard. I talked to them at length,” Byrne says. “They recorded the conversation. I asked them to participate and they came back to me and very politely refused to participate. I had told them in my first meeting that others in republicanism told me they weren’t the easiest to deal with. That might not have been wise. They said: ‘Why are we the last person you’re coming to see?’ They weren’t. But I wanted to prepare the ground. They have politely declined a screening.”

Byrne goes on to explain that he feels they don’t want to contribute to a project over which they don’t have control.

“They don’t feel that mainstream republicanism has stayed true to Bobby Sands’s ideals,” he says. “Bernadette famously said: ‘My brother didn’t die for cross-border bodies with executive powers.’ That’s a powerful statement. I don’t think they wanted to appear beside other people who I’d told them were in it. I’m sure they will see it – maybe at the back of a cinema in Dundalk.”

A more general worry about 66 Days relates to the lack of female voices. Byrne talks to politicians, historians, pundits and experts on malnutrition, but none of them is a woman.

“Bobby’s mother and Bobby’s sisters would have been the obvious voices to fill that void,” he says. “I did interview Jennifer McCann, a well-known republican, who was in the last government and who was a friend of Bobby Sands. She never strayed beyond Sinn Féin speak. There is an inability sometimes of Sinn Féin people to do other than Sinn Féin speak. Without those voices, I didn’t want to be tokenistic. The women I wanted to be in the film I asked and they refused.”

Teasing strands

Byrne is not yet done with Northern Irish stories. Working with Alex Gibney, the absurdly prolific American documentarian, he is developing a project on the Loughinisland massacre. He is also producing a drama on the 1983 Maze prison escape. There are still so many strands to be teased.

“We’ll do that and then I’ll hang up my Northern Irish boots for a while,” he laughs.

We’ll see, shall we?

- Bobby Sands: 66 Days opens next week