Pat Sheehan (Irish republican)

Pat Sheehan ( born May 28, 1958 in Belfast, Northern Ireland ) is a Sinn Féin politician in Northern Ireland and a former member of the IRA who participated from 1981 in Maze Prison in the Irish hunger strike.

Sheehan grew up in a mixed inhabited by both Protestant and Catholic Northern Irish territory on the Springfield Road in west Belfast. In 1970 his family was threatened by loyalists and violently attacked, after which she moved into the Falls Road, an inhabited area of Catholics.

Sheehan joined at the age of 16 years in the Fianna Eireann, a Republican youth organization, a. At 19, he was first detained. From 1979, he was held in the Maze Prison in the H-Blocks, where he participated in the blanket protest. According to An Phoblacht, the weekly newspaper of Sinn Fein, Sheehan was a quiet person in jail and was beaten up because of his self-confidence by prison guards. After the death of Kieran Doherty Sheehan went on a hunger strike on 10 August 1981. He was 55 days on hunger strike, as this was canceled on 3 October 1981. He then had problems with his eyesight was completely malnourished and was taken to a hospital. In 1987 he was released from prison; He was sentenced to a prison term of 24 years because of the filing of a bomb in a checkpoint in Belfast in 1989.

In prison, he studied philosophy and political science and graduated with a first class witness; He was released after the Good Friday Agreement of 1998. Sheehan was married to the well-known Republican Siobhan O'Hanlon, a close associate of Gerry Adams, who died in 2006. With it, he has a son.

On December 7, 2010, he was the successor of Gerry Adams a member of the Northern Ireland Assembly for the constituency of West Belfast. Adams had resigned his seat to take part in the Irish general election in February 2011.