Their steady and insistent thrum almost drove him mad in the hours before he finally slipped into a coma and his family . . .

against his wishes . . . asked doctors to intervene to save him, after 52 days without food.

Almost 25 years later, in the last days of his life, the same continuous low murmur returned. He died three days after Christmas, at the age of 55, at the end of a long battle with stomach cancer, an illness that may or may not have had its seed in the 1981 prison protest. In a final twist to his life, he spent his last month on an enforced fast, too sick to allow anything to pass his lips for 32 days. The bees, he told friends at his bedside, were back.

Yet he clung grimly to life, right to the very end. The doctors told Geraldine, his partner and the mother of his four-yearold son, that he seemed to be railing against the inevitable. Then she remembered something he used to say. Throughout his battle with cancer, he swore that however and whenever the end came, he'd live long enough to see Margaret Thatcher die first.

So in his final hours, his family told him a white lie. Someone said that Thatcher had been taken to hospital and was seriously ill. It looked like she wouldn't last the night. That was the day the bees stopped. The day Matt Devlin finally gave up the fight.

At his funeral in his native Tyrone, Martin McGuinness said Devlin never fully recovered from the 1981 hunger strike that defined him forever in republican eyes. He might have been speaking about any one of the 13 men who stared death down during the most extraordinary political drama of the Troubles but lived to argue over its legacy and whether it was worth it.

To Thatcher, it was the IRA's "last card" and it failed, just as she vowed it would. To the IRA, the stailc and the election of two dying prisoners . . . Bobby Sands to Westminster and Kieran Doherty to the Dail . . . brought down the shaky edifice of British security policy in Northern Ireland, which was based on the hypothesis that the conflict was caused by a small rump of criminals who enjoyed no community support.

The events leading up to the protest began in 1976, when Britain's Labour government abolished special category status as part of a strategy to "normalise" the security situation in Northern Ireland. From the beginning of March, those convicted of offences committed in relation to the Northern conflict would no longer enjoy de facto POW status in the second world war-style compounds known as the cages. Instead, they were housed in eight, purpose-built, H-shaped blocks, where they were expected to wear uniforms and work like the regular criminal prison population.

More than 400 republican prisoners refused to wear the new uniforms, beginning the so-called blanket protest, which escalated into a no-wash protest, then a dirty protest and then two hunger strikes.

Twenty-three IRA and INLA prisoners took part in the second, which lasted 217 days, reaching well into the autumn of 1981. The images of the 10 who died stare out from the murals that bookend hundreds of republican homes in Belfast and Derry. They're remembered in the black flags and white crosses that line the roads in south Armagh. But the 13 who lived have become a mere parenthesis in the story; scratched from the scene in the popular imagination.

Devlin wasn't the only survivor to die an early death. Pat McGeown, who passed away in October 1996 after years of heart trouble, is often referred to as "the 11th hunger striker". Most of those who lived admit that the two deaths are a shadow on the x-ray of their own being.

They wonder whether the effect of starving themselves for up to 70 days has shaved years off the end of their own lives, whether nature will one day claim its forfeit.

Almost all of them were in their early 20s when they embarked on the strike.

Now, they're in their middle years. For some of them it shows in grey or thinning hair, or faces that look far older than their years.

Age may have softened the set of their features, even leavened their anger, but the hunger strike left the tracery of its shadow on them all. Some of those who were taken off the strike by their families were left with confused feelings. Some have suffered a lifetime of health problems, from strokes to failing eyesight.

Others report no problems at all, other than that of not being able to get work.

For most of them, their release from prison was the yeast of a new beginning.

With no war to fight, they settled down and started families, uncommonly late in life. Most . . . but not all . . . look back at the strike through the prism of the peace process and say it was worth it.

They are bound by the adhesive of a common experience but only a handful of them remain in touch with each other.

Some would prefer to forget it . . . but without forgetting it.

"We all made up our minds that we were going to die, " says Gerard Hodgins, one of the 11 men alive. "It's not the kind of thing you have a reunion for."

Laurence McKeown 70 days His life is a riot of activity, his head full of plans and schemes and jobs-to-do, jostling to get in lane, like motorway traffic. Right now, he's leading the campaign to have the prison where he served the best part of a life sentence reopened as a museum.

Then there's his work with Coiste na nIarchimi, helping hundreds of ex-prisoners fight their corners on a whole range of issues. Few have found it easy segueing back into ordinary lives, most finding it almost impossible to get jobs, mortgages, insurance and travel visas because they have criminal convictions.

In a way he's still fighting the same fight that took him to the brink of death in the summer of 1981.

"Our argument back then was that there was a difference between the ordinary prisoners in jail and us, " he says, "and that distinction was accepted in the Good Friday agreement, because people who were in jail for offences connected with the conflict were released early. But, once you get outside, you discover that there's no differentiation between a criminal and political conviction."

Then there's his work as a playwright and screenwriter. He has co-written two plays, with the late Brian Campbell . . . The Laughter of Our Children and A Cold House . . . not to mention the award-winning screenplay for H3, the definitive film about the 1981 hunger strike that counted Martin Sheen among its most enthusiastic reviewers. Four years after its original release, it again played to packed audiences at this year's Belfast Film Festival.

Drama, though, can only go partway to capturing the corporeality of a body being slowly starved to death. Some of his own most vivid memories are smells;

the most repellent of all, that of his body decaying. "As your other senses deteriorate, your sense of smell is heightened.

And you start to become conscious of this one particular smell, which is . . . it's like no other smell in the world . . . rotting flesh. It's hard to describe it. It's not like food going off. It's live meat . . . your body . . .

rotting."

He lived without food for 70 days . . .

longer than eight of the 10 men who died . . . and escaped with nothing more serious than ulcerative colitis (an inflammation of the bowel) and nystagmic (involuntarily twitching) eyes. He only recently got his first pair of glasses, at the age of 49.

He sometimes wonders about the reason for his robust good health. At the time of the strike, Bik McFarlane, the OC of the republican prisoners in the blocks, suspected that his rate of deterioration was being controlled . . . by way of vitamin boosters in his drinking water . . . to suit some unknown political agenda.

Earlier in the summer, Kieran Doherty had been given 48 hours to live, but rallied unexpectedly in the days leading up to the wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana and died four days afterwards, 73 days after first refusing food.

"What's interesting is that last year I applied to the Northern Ireland Office to get my medical records from that time. I just got word back this morning that they were destroyed in October last year . . .

after I applied for them.

"I suppose I'll never know. I do think it would have been difficult to organise, though, involving a collaboration of a lot of people, including prison guards. But stranger things have happened in the North."

His parents were devastated by his decision to join the hunger strike, though his mother came to understand it quicker than his father did. The McKeowns were an ordinary Catholic family from a mixed neighbourhood in Belfast, where electricity, running water and indoor sanitation remained a thing of the future. They were nationalist with a small 'n', voted SDLP and listened with excitement to the speeches of Bernadette Devlin, John Hume and Gerry Fitt, as civil rights fervour swept across the North.

"For me, the turning point was the creation of the UDR. People who I knew and who knew me were suddenly stopping you in the street and asking your name and where you were born. And then that slow realisation that there are two communities here. One is armed. And they could do whatever they wanted with you."

He'd started work as an apprentice quantity surveyor at 16 . . . around the same time he joined the IRA. From there it was a quick hop-skip to life imprisonment, found guilty of causing explosions and the attempted murder of an RUC man in an attack on a jeep. He CCONTINUED FROM PAGE 1 joined the prison protest in its innocent early days. At 19, he was one of youngest of the so-called blanketmen.

His memories of the time all feature graphically in H3, from the stomachcurdling expedient of rubbing his faeces into his cell wall . . . "decorating" . . .

to the daily ritual of picking maggots out of his Amish-style beard.

He has another memory of sitting in a bath. With no flesh left on his frame, it felt like the bones would break clean through his skin if he moved too suddenly. It took every amp of his energy just to sit up in bed. He was tired but wouldn't close his eyes for fear of never waking up. His eyesight had all but gone. Then his bowels suddenly opened . . . the final indicator that death was near.

"The last thing I remember was my family being allowed in to say goodbye. My father was there and my brother and sister. They all asked me to come off the hunger strike. I said no."

His mother never asked him to break the strike, but he remembers looking at her before he lapsed into a coma. Her face was configured to make a decision. "She said to me, 'You did what you had to do, son. Now I'll do what I have to.'

"I came around in the intensive care unit of the Royal Victoria hospital. I could hear a voice and I tried to open my eyes but all I could see were shapes and bright lights. But the voice, it was a woman's voice . . . a nurse . . . and I remember feeling I was in caring hands now."

Was he angry with his mother for asking the doctors to intervene?

"At first I didn't feel anything. I wasn't happy. I wasn't sad. I was alive but too exhausted . . . physically, mentally, emotionally . . . to care one way or the other. I know she was very much afraid that I'd hold it against her. But I think I made sense of what she said at the bedside. The way she rationalised it was that if I died suddenly, from maybe heart failure, then that was God's will. But if I lapsed into a coma, then God had put it in her hands."

How much she suffered during the years of the prison protest he only discovered later. In 1978 she had a heart attack but kept it from him. "I can see now when I look at photographs of her from 1980, then I see ones from 1982, there's like a 10-year difference between them. My being on hunger strike aged her."

She died in 1983. His father died too, four years before his son's eventual release, in 1992. By then they'd at least mended the fissure between them.

"With my mother dead, he was sole parent and he'd have come up to see me regularly. And the way we ended up, I suppose we never did see eye to eye politically, but we had a very good, amicable relationship.

"It probably helped that I decided to go into education. [He got a BA Hons in Social Science while in prison and, later, a doctorate from Queen's University. ] The political situation was changing too, I suppose. He would have seen the respect that the nationalist community had for the hunger strikers and I think that changed his perspective.

"That, I suppose, is the legacy of the hunger strike. Well, there's a whole pile of legacies. Some people say it was the start of the peace process, though I think sometimes there's too much read into that. But it did change a whole lot of people's perceptions on the outside of what the struggle was all about."

Paddy Quinn 47 days Amid a vast tableland of fields and pastures at the heart of south Armagh is a nondescript farmhouse where Paddy Quinn today enjoys the quieter beats of an ordinary life. The kitchen bristles with the sound of children's voices. Deirdre, his wife, is taking their two young daughters shopping in Newry. He waves them off as the car trails slowly down the road, through the countryside . . . a salad of spring colours . . . until it's a speck in the distance.

He never imagined himself having a family at 50. Socially, he felt like a misfit for a long time after he got out of jail. It was 1976 when he went in and 1985 when he came out and, the way he tells it, it was like waking from a cryogenic sleep.

"It was like a different world, " he says. "The time I went in, I had a three-piece suit, with flared trousers, which was the height of fashion in the '70s. So I arrived home in this and after a while somebody said to me, nobody wears suits anymore, Paddy.