I knew, even though none of this was discussed around the
family table, that there was something wrong from an early
age, that things were not normal. You would have had to have
been very unaware of your surroundings if you didn’t
recognise by the time you were thirteen or fourteen that
there was a despondency attached to the place, a gloom, a
weight. I couldn’t have articulated it then but it was a sense of
victors and vanquished, in the way that everything was
arranged, in the way that even the news, sport, culture, was
presented on television. For many adults it was safer to live
with their head in the sand because the alternative meant
having to do something about it, and the prospects of bringing
about change were not only slim but came at a cost.
Rita O’Hare grew up in West Belfast, a community alienated from unionist one-party government, a people suffering decades of sectarian discrimination, with the threat of state violence as reprisal should they attempt to challenge their second-class citizenship.
As a mother of three young children she felt she could no longer ignore what was going on and made a stand by joining the Irish Republican Army. She was shot and grievously wounded by the British Army on an IRA operation, and was imprisoned three times.
She became Sinn Féin’s National Director of Publicity and was the party’s representative in Washington for almost twenty years, having played a prominent role in the peace process particularly as a Sinn Féin contact with the Irish government.
Rita O’Hare died on 3 March, 2023, after a long battle with cancer.
