‘Milk-snatcher’s name replaced by MP and IRA prisoner
Madrid has marked the 40th anniversary of the death of IRA hunger striker by naming a plaza after him.
Sands died in 1981 in the Maze or Long Kesh prison while on hunger strike against the removal of ‘special category’ status – basically ‘prisoner of war’ status – from Irish Republican prisoners. While on hunger strike, he was elected as MP for Fermanagh and South Tyrone.
And Madrid didn’t choose just any street to rename in Sands’s honour – the city covered the ‘Margaret Thatcher Plaza’ sign with one replacing the ‘milk snatcher’s name with that of Bobby Sands:
The move is reminiscent of the Iranian government’s decision to rename a street in Tehran after Sands, after the hunger strikes: the street on which the British embassy was located. Embassy staff had to move the building’s entrance to avoid having it as their address.
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