All at sea, he stuck close to the familiar buoys of the GAA club in Beleeks and the local Sinn Fein cumann. Then he met Deirdre, who was working in a local bar. "We were together a long time and I thought, well, my chances of ever having children had gone. Then we ended up with two girls. It was a shock to the system.

They're still a shock to the system!"

He's an engaging man, quiet in conversation but with a loud and urgent laugh, a privet moustache and a pair of light-adjustable shades that keep the world at one remove. His eyesight was permanently damaged by the hunger strike and he's also spent many years on dialysis . . . as well as income support . . . for a kidney complaint and three years ago had a transplant. "That was a hereditary condition . . . it wasn't caused by the strike. The eyes was, though. The light hurts them and I can only look with one of them at any one time. The other eye's looking at nothing, " he says with the easy levity of a man who knows he shouldn't be here to tell his story.

To hear about his last hours before surrendering to a coma, it's a wonder that he is. A body starved of food eventually cannibalises itself. The onset of blindness was the first sign that it was feeding off the protein in the brain. Quinn had difficulty keeping down the eight pints of water the hunger strikers were advised to drink every day, which accounted for his quick deterioration.

"I remember . . . it would have been very close to the end . . . having this scraping going on in the back of my head, just this scraping and screeching sensation and the pain of it was unbelievable. And that was my brain just being eaten away, being eroded.

"I was hyperventilating, taking in too much oxygen and the blood was going around my body too fast. There was an MO [medical officer] there called Paul Lennon . . . a decent guy . . .

and he put a paper bag over my mouth to bring down my oxygen intake. And it eased and eased. But I'd started to hallucinate at that point and, when I saw this bag coming over my face, I thought someone was trying to strangle me. I got this thing into my head that I'd killed a couple of screws and their wives were trying to choke me.

"And I think what they done, while all this roaring was coming out of me, was they brought my mother within earshot, so she could hear the racket."

In his last lucid moments, he pleaded with her to let him die. "It's like this, " he told her, "you back me or you back Maggie Thatcher."

He woke up in Musgrave Park hospital, being fed through a drip. "My lips were sore and bleeding. I'd been chewing them while I was having convulsions. And I'd been ripping at them [he points to his testicles] as well. My foreskin was like a tube. And my eyes were sore, where I'm supposed to have been grabbing at them, trying to pull them out, to ease this pain in the back of my head."

But worse, he says, was the leaden dread of knowing that he was still alive. "I was angry, there's no doubt about that. The nurse said, 'Your mother's coming in to see you. Don't say anything this time, will you not?' I said, 'What?' and she said, 'You tore into her earlier for taking you off the hunger strike.' I had no memory of itf" His voice trails off and his eyes turn to the window.

It was out there, amid the stone walls and variegated fields of south Armagh that Quinn and Raymond McCreesh, his near-neighbour and the third hunger striker to die, fought a guerrilla war against the security forces. Quinn was of old republican stock, with an uncle who boasted a bullet wound in his neck that came from a shootout with the Black and Tans and a grandmother who had a whole repertoire of tales about the vainglories of the old IRA. He grew up on a 30-acre beef and dairy farm just outside Camlough with his younger brother, Seamus, and his widowed mother.

"I remember, around about 1969, this summer's day, working with a local farmer, who lived up on a hill a mile or two from Camlough. You couldn't quite see Belfast from there but you could see the smoke. Then you saw the images on television and it made you angry. The soldiers were supposed to be peacekeepers . . . to referee between two tribes, the British said . . . but it was obvious, long before Bloody Sunday ever happened, that they considered themselves to be at war with the nationalist people."

In his early 20s he was working as a draughtsman in a civil engineer's office in Newry. He was also an active member of the IRA. From the day he joined, he knew he was on a fast-track to prison. He and McCreesh were part of an active service unit caught redhanded preparing to attack an army observation post near Belleeks.

Quinn was convicted of attempted murder and in 1976 was sentenced to 14 years in prison. After four-and-ahalf years on the blanket, he volunteered for the second hunger strike, knowing that he would likely die on it.

The IRA had doubts about whether Quinn had the wherewithal to see the strike through. Seamus, who was on the run in the Republic, had recently suffered a brain haemorrhage and was discovered to have the same kidney condition that killed their father.

"The doctors wanted to check me out to see had I the same thing, which was polycystic kidneys. I wouldn't let them. I was afraid they'd discover something and I wouldn't be picked for the strike. So I just refused to be tested.

"I went blind at some point between 30 and 40 days into strike. I remember this wee doctor . . . Dr Ross . . . a civil man, he'd be examining me every day and he'd be telling stories to try to get me to see what I was doing to myself.

He's say, 'Think of yourself as one of those big chimneystacks. And you're pulling the bricks out, one by one, day by day, until eventuallyf boom!'

"But it was a strange feeling because I wasn't scared of dying. The only way I can think of to describe it is to say it was like crossing a bridge. I felt good within myself. It's how I imagined it would feel to escape from jail."

Catherine Quinn's intervention, on the day that her son would almost certainly have died, was the hunger strikers' worst nightmare realised. The staggered nature of the protest placed an unspoken moral prerogative on each volunteer to follow his last comrade to the grave . . . her decision to take him off was the first break in the chain. Other mothers would follow her lead in the weeks ahead and the protest would run aground.

By the time he was properly conscious again, Kevin Lynch and Kieran Doherty had become the seventh and eighth prisoners to die and for a long time he felt guilty of a solecism by his survival.

"I went back to the prison, back to the wing, and there were men still on hunger strike and that was very hard.

Tom McElwee died, then Mickey Devine and, of course, the worst thing is, I'm still here, still livingf" Brendan McLaughlin 12 days In the jaded, early evening light of his livingroom in Derry, Brendan McLaughlin sits jack-knifed in his wheelchair, a knot of gathered anger, and snaps the filter off another cigarette. He hasn't been able to taste tobacco, or much else, since the stroke he suffered seven years ago, so breaks the tips off before smoking them . . . 40 a day . . . right down to his kippercoloured fingers.

Photographs and republican paraphernalia wainscot the walls of his council bungalow . . . photographs of volunteer graves, pictures of famous IRA men, a bodhran made in Portlaoise jail. But it's a pencil sketch of the 10 men who carried their protest right to the end that draws his eye.

"You see them boys up there?" he says. "They died for nothing."

He's angry about a lot of things . . .

Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness ("scum bastards"), the peace process ("a sell-out") and the Brits ("no business being here . . . never had, never will").

"They're all getting ready to sit in Stormont, " he says, "when there's still a war to fight."

Paralysed down one side, he's no longer capable of prosecuting that war, but it goes on in the theatre of his head.

"I haven't changed, " he says. To him, it's a badge of honour. "See the rest of them . . . all them other boys you're talking to . . . they have changed.

They're supporting what's going on.

McGuinness and Adams . . . accepting the 26 counties! Accepting the six!

They're sitting in Dail Eireann. Now they're sitting up in Stormont.

"The next thing they're going to do is go on the police board and you know what that means. They're following the same lines as Michael Collins and Eamon de Valera. It's Irish history repeating itself, that's what it is. What did Michael Collins do? He turned the gun on his own men in Dublin. De Valera . . . what did he do? He got into power and done the same thing in the '40s. IRA men killed. The same thing will happen when they go on this police board. You can take it from me."

His two teenage boys come in and out at regular intervals. He's separated from their mother, who lives just a few doors away.

"We still get on okay. I'm easy-going.

I try not to get down, " he says, anxious not to sound like an ornery old man trapped not only in a wheelchair but in a perpetual past.

To him, the Troubles were part of a long continuum that started eight centuries ago and will only end once the last British soldier has left and Ireland is unified. Ten or 15 years ago just about every republican he knew believed this. Now, all he sees is compromise and fudge. "Money, big jobs, big houses . . . that's all it's about, " he says.

In 1981, he was 29 and well into a 12year sentence for possession of a pistol when he was chosen to replace Francis Hughes, the second man to die, on the hunger strike. But less than a week into his fast he was rushed to hospital suffering from a perforated ulcer and internal bleeding.

The aim of the hunger strike was to crank up the moral pressure on the British government by way of a series of drawn-out, highly publicised deaths. A sick hunger striker was a liability. The doctors said that a combination of gangrene, blood loss and oxygen starvation to the brain would have killed McLaughlin within 48 agonising hours. The IRA took him off the protest.

"I'd have gone the whole way, " he says. "I'd have done it. They [the prison authorities] were putting the food in the cell every day, hoping I'd have a nibble. I was too f**king hard for that. I'd no fear of death. I've been around too many corners in my time."

Would he have gone on hunger strike had he foreseen where the republican movement would be 25 years on? "Probably not, no. It's sad that 10 men died. And for what? See, I knew the best of them boys. Joe McDonnell was in the cell next to me. I knew Bobby Sands as well. I think they'd turn in their graves, them 10 there, with the way things are now."

His voice rises an octave. "Hit them in England, that's what I say. Forget about this country. I said that over 30 years ago. Hit them in their own country, where it hurts."

Some of his old comrades, who ask about him and still think fondly of him, say that it's being largely housebound and cut off from the mainstream of republican thinking, that has him still thinking about the conflict in abstract terms.

"No, it's just that they've changedf and I haven't, " he adds, flashing a proud smile, then twists a cigarette in the bottom of the ashtray and lights another.

GerardHodgins 20 days From his flat in the republican heartland of Andersonstown, Gerard Hodgins can see south as far as the Mournes and west as far as the Sperrins. And of course less than a mile away, rising out of the earth like two rotten molars, are the twin peaks of Divis and Black Mountain. For 30 years, the Belfast hills were a no-go area, controlled by the British ministry of defence, which operated a listening post at the summit of Black Mountain and a rifle range on its slopes. Stripped of the ugly appurtenances of war, locals can now once again breathe the mountain air and get a new perspective on the city . . .

another small brick in the process of rebuilding this fractured community.

The Troubles ended for Hodgins in 1996. He'd served two prison sentences that accounted for almost all of his adult years. Then something happened when he got out on parole.

He went on a date . . . she was a friend of a friend. They hit it off and soon he had a choice to make.

Lorraine or The Cause.

"I knew I couldn't have both, " he says. "That was when I decided I'd done my bit."

There remains some small part of him that never really left prison. The three weeks he spent on hunger strike in the autumn of 1981 are always there, on the periphery. Seven years ago, he and Lorraine were in Italy, on a ferry between Sorrento and the island of Capri, when he had his first 'episode'.

"I sometimes get these flashbacks, " he says, "which are really vivid . . . really, really vivid. Something inside of me just flips and I'm back in my cell in H6.

And it's there . . . the walls, the door, the bars over the windows. And the only way I can describe the feeling that goes with it is pure horror. It probably relates to depression. I get the odd bit of it."

It's mid-afternoon and he already has a day's work behind him, as a career adviser at a local job assist centre. Somewhere in the background Jack Johnson is picking through the chords of a song. There's a handful of travel books . . . Vienna, Amsterdam . . .

open, face-down, on the coffee table.

"I was in jail from the time I was 17, " he says. "I'm catching up on life."

It's not difficult to imagine the couple picking up friends on their travels.

There's a warm openness about them, the kind of strangers you could imagine falling into easy conversation with.

There's something about Hodgins, too, that doesn't quite fit the popular profile of a hunger striker. It might be the black sense of humour that suggests itself in the grim reaper tattoo he had put on his forearm a couple of years after the strike, in what he remembers as his "death instinct phase".

A couple of years back he had a letter published in the Sunday Independent, pointing out that "Rev Ian Paisley" was an anagram of "Vile IRA Pansey". There's something about the laughter that offends the popular narrative of the hunger strike . . . of serious-minded young men martyring themselves in the same proud tradition as Thomas Ashe and Terence McSwiney. The reality was never like that, he says.

"I don't think any of us was motivated by notions of heroism. I remember getting this comm [communique] from the Army Council. It just said, 'You have put your name forward for a hunger strike. Be advised that in eight weeks' time you're going to be dead and eight weeks after that the only people who will remember you will be your family.' There was no, 'We're proud of you here', or, 'You're doing a good thing for Ireland'."

Hodgins was an unlikely recruit for the IRA, having grown up alongside mostly Protestant neighbours in middle-class respectability on the Springfield Road. His father had developed asbestosis, a disease of the lungs, through his work as a pipe fitter in the shipyards and bought the house with his compensation payout.

"I had this crazy, mixed-up life. I went to a Catholic school . . . St Paul's secondary school . . . and for the last six months of my first year, I stopped going, because of bullying. Because I lived in a mixed area and knocked around with fellas who were Protestants, I was deemed an Orange lover."

The Troubles slowly insinuated itself into life on the street. The family was ordered to leave. An attempt was made to burn the house with his father still in it. "I was 11 or 12. I got interested in republicanism from there, joined the IRA at 16 and that was me."

Within a year he was arrested in Downpatrick, in possession of a pistol, and sentenced to 14 years in jail. His father died very shortly afterwards.

He doesn't think he'd have understood him joining the hunger strike.

"I think he would have had a very Catholic attitude about the sanctity of human life. My mother was devastated when I told her. I remember a few conversations where I said I didn't want her to intervene, that if I woke up from a coma I wouldn't be a happy person. She promised me she wouldn't have but a lot of mothers said the same thing until they were in the situation of sitting watching their sons die."

His last food before the fast was a salad . . . a slice of spam, a slice of cheese and a hard-boiled egg. A unionist salad, they used to call it, because there were no greens in it.

Some of the hunger strikers say they had no cravings once they'd fixed their minds on not eating. He thought about food constantly. He noticed for the first time how often it was mentioned in books and magazines. He wasn't fond of spicy food but he craved curry for the entire duration of the strike, his mother's stuffed pork and Fray Bentos steak and kidney pies.

"After a week of no food, your sense of smell becomes really intense. I could smell cornflakes from across the cell."

By the time he joined the protest in the middle of September, the momentum was already running out of it. The family interventions . . . the IRA blamed "cleric-led demoralisation" . . . forced an end to the hunger strike on 3 October, when Hodgins was one of six men still refusing food.

"Confusion, I suppose, was my main feeling that day. On the one hand, you're glad you're not going to die. On the other hand there were feelings of guilt that you survived and 10 others didn't. And at the same time we didn't get what we set out to get.

"We got our demands eventually but back then we were questioning ourselves. The lads who were dead, did we let them down? How could you look their families in the eyes?"

He was released from jail in 1985, he admits, "full of hatred". He got out at 10am and by noon had reported again for active service. He was told to "go away, get yourself drunk for a couple of weeks and get it out of your system".

"The blanket protests, the hunger strikes, were very vivid in my mind and that's what motivated me, the desire for payback. I didn't see my dad before he died. I was told I was getting parole to see him when he was bad. I put the prison uniform on to go from my cell to the reception area. I sat there for half an hour waiting. Then I was told it was a clerical error, they're not letting me out at all.

"Like, ha, ha, ha. I think it was understandable coming out of jail hating those bastards."

And it was inevitable that he'd end up back there. In January 1990, the RUC kicked open the door of a house in west Belfast and arrested Hodgins, Sinn Fein publicity director Danny Morrison and seven other men who were holding an IRA informer. He was jailed for eight years for false imprisonment.

"My life, I suppose, was a learning curve, " he says, looking back. "You mature. You come to a point where you start questioning yourself. You realise it's not about who you want to attack. You ask is what you're doing right? Is it morally justifiable? It there just cause? Is there another way?

"I'd still consider myself a republican. But the great thing about not being involved in politics now is that you can have an opinion without thinking, 'What's the party line on that?' If you think something's crap, you can say it's crap."

He's happy to have been a hunger striker, though. "I suppose, on balance, it was worth it. Sometimes you don't see it. You tend to dwell on the human cost. And I'm not just talking about the 10 men who died. There were 50 or 60 people killed as a direct result of trouble related to the hunger strike. But it was a necessary stage for us to go through. We realised that there was a broad constituency out there who were supportive of republican ideals and objectives but who didn't agree with armed struggle and people being killed.

"But you're constantly asking was it worth it. It's important to always question yourself."

It's that little part of him that will never escape H6.