Forty years ago, on 5 May 1981, 27-year-old Bobby Sands, the IRA's leader in the Maze prison outside Belfast, starved himself to death. Peter Taylor, who covered the story at the time, says it marked a watershed in Northern Ireland's Troubles, helping to pave the way for the IRA's political wing, Sinn Fein, to become today the largest on the island of Ireland.
The seeds of the hunger strike had been sown in 1976, when the Labour government of Harold Wilson abolished the "special category" status that IRA prisoners had previously been granted, allowing them, among other things, to wear their own clothes.
The question of clothing was important to them because they claimed they were "political" prisoners, fighting to achieve the IRA's historic goal of a united Ireland; prison uniforms criminalised them, they argued.
So many responded to the Wilson government's withdrawal of the right to wear their own clothes, by wearing nothing.
