Amiddle-aged member of Sinn Fein said to me recently that he sometimes asks himself whether he would be as content with the Good Friday Agreement if he were still a 20-year-old.

In a similar vein, I sometimes wonder if hunger-striking is for the most part, an arena for younger men. There have been noted exceptions, such as Terence MacSwiney, but the determination and passion to live proud enough to die is found more often among the young than with their elders.

There was something very unnatural about a healthy young man dying on hunger strike. His body, too strong to surrender easily or quickly, gave up the fight for life slowly and reluctantly. Usually the body conceded defeat only after it had exhausted every option to hold on to human existence.

And if the physical aspect of passing was excruciatingly painful, the mental distress was equally difficult. With parents and siblings and spouse and children sitting around the hunger striker's bedside, he knew that the last thing he would do for them was to break their hearts and their happiness. They would remain proud of him through a lifetime, but they could never welcome his going.

To understand why men would suffer such hardship it is necessary to picture the circumstances of the period. It was not an accident either that twenty years ago, the H-Block hunger strikers were young men. They were from that part of a generation that flatly rejected the status quo in Northern Ireland and had still not come to accept that the state could be reformed. Most were too young to have ever known defeat and most were too young to have been forced by life to seek the type of accommodation with injustices that the middle aged and elderly often take for granted.

H-Block hunger strikers were not simply IRA or INLA men. They were also Blanket Men -- collectively the most nonconformist prisoners the British prison system had ever encountered. They didn't just refuse to wear prison uniforms. They refused to co-operate with the prison authorities under any circumstances. They refused to use prison serial numbers, prison furniture or prison ablutions, or to comply with prison body search procedures. At one stage they even refused to return their porridge bowls to prison orderlies.

They were this intractable because they held an incredibly strong conviction that they were right and that their captors were very wrong in attempting to defeat the republican cause by removing its political credentials.

Moreover, they encountered absolute intransigence. First from Labour's Northern Ireland secretary of state, Roy Mason and thereafter by the Tory prime minister, Margaret Thatcher. Their often stated desire to crush opposition in Ireland caused the prisoners to see themselves as republicanism's last line of defence.

The Blanket Men believed that to acquiesce in their loss of status would inevitably corrupt the republican struggle and lead to its collapse.

In their eyes the struggle for political status was a battle akin to that fought during the Spanish Civil War by the International Brigades before Madrid, by Horatius on the Tiber Bridge or by the Spartans at Thermopylae.

It is only when account is taken of the circumstances underlying and surrounding the protracted struggle for political status in the H-Blocks that it becomes possible to grasp one of the key facts of the time.

The hunger strikes provided protesting prisoners with the opportunity to transform a largely passive protest of defiance into a conflict in which they were proactive. The fast in effect allowed long sidelined fighting men to resume battle stations.

Tiocfaidh ar la (or more often in reality; beidh la eile ann) acted as an Irish republican version of no pasaran. Because of this uncompromising analysis, Blanket Men on hunger strike endured enormous pain and agony and mental distress before death took 10 of them and chance spared others.

Yet it wasn't a classic battlefield either. It was a prison struggle, where politicians rather than generals had power over life and death.

The concentration of those on hunger strike remained fixed on cabinet ministers rather than on enemy infantry. The hunger strikers' imprisoned comrades sat sullenly and despairingly waiting for word of an agreement that might save their comrades. While all the time that ominous apprehension of death and approaching death enveloped the H-Blocks' prison wings.

Survivors emerged when it ended as any group of veterans do after a major conflict. Some were broken, a few were stronger, many were numbed and all had been touched by the experience.

For quite a number it also signalled an end of their youth. Some felt old enough, perhaps, to look contentedly on a Good Friday type settlement.

Tommy McKearney is a former H-Block hunger striker