Michael Devine

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**Michael Devine**
**Mícheál Ó Duibhinn**

Paramilitary organisation	INLA
Date of birth	26 May, 1954
Place of birth	Derry
Hungerstrike started	22 June, 1954
Died	21 August, 1981
Days on strike	62

Michael (Mickey) Devine (Irish name: Mícheál Ó Duibhinn; May 26, 1954 - August 21, 1981) was an Irish Republican hunger striker and member of the Irish National Liberation Army.

He was a former member of the Official IRA who joined the INLA in 1975. In September 1976 he and two others, Desmond Walmsley and John Cassidy, were caught with rifles, shotguns and 3,000 rounds of ammunition they had stolen in Lifford, Donegal. He was convicted and sentenced to 12 years for the theft and arms possession charges in 1977.

In May 1981 he sent an open letter to Cardinal Basil Hume (Archbishop of Westminster and Roman Catholic primate of England) in which he responded to Cardinal Hume's assertion that the hunger strike was a "form of violence against one's own body."^[1]

He became involved the blanket protest in the Maze Prison and joined the 1981 Irish Hunger Strike on June 22, 1981. He died 60 days later, aged 27.

In some respects he was a rather atypical hunger striker as he had been involved in petty crime, breaking into shops for example, before he became involved in paramilitary activity.^[2] He had gone through a rather messy failed marriage, and was about to bring an action for divorce just before he went on hunger strike. He had a son, also called Mickey Devine, who some years later became politically active.