The TroublesIn 1981 Bernie Sanders wrote Margaret Thatcher in support of IRA prisoners
Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont), a contender for the Democratic presidential nomination, wrote to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in 1981 to ask her to “‘stop the abuse, humiliation and degrading treatment” of Irish prisoners who were on hunger strike in a Northern Ireland jail. At the time Sanders was the mayor of Burlington, Vermont.
Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont), a contender for the Democratic presidential nomination, wrote to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in 1981 to ask her to “‘stop the abuse, humiliation and degrading treatment” of Irish prisoners who were on hunger strike in a Northern Ireland jail.
At the time Sanders was the mayor of Burlington, Vermont.
The Telegraph reports that Sanders’s letter asked Thatcher “to end [her] intransigent policy towards the prisoners before the reputation of the British people for fair play and simple decency is further damaged in the eyes of the people of Vermont and the United States.”
The letter, co-signed by Burlington alderman Terry Bouricius, added that they were “deeply disturbed by [the] Government’s unwillingness to stop the abuse, humiliation and degrading treatment of the Irish prisoners now on hunger strikes in Northern Ireland.”
The Telegraph notes that Sanders was also on the mailing list of the Vermont Committee for Irish Human Rights, and wrote a letter in November 1983 urging the reopening of the case of another hunger striker, Nicky Kelly, who was convicted of armed robbery in Dublin.
Sanders’s letters was found in a political archive held by the University of Vermont, which also revealed the strong influence of the Irish Republican movement in the region during the 1980s.
