IT'S LUNCHTIME on the Falls Road.

Jackie McMullan is shooting the breeze with a female friend who's studying for an MA in Irish at Queen's University.

He's forgotten his way around the language since he got out of jail, but with no job to fill his days, he's thinking of enrolling in the same course.

The standard is high, his friend says.

This morning they were given a passage of Kingsley Amis in Irish and told to write a detailed critique of the translation.

McMullan's eyes roll heavenwards.

"Och, you'd be well able for it, Jackie, " she says. "Put your name down."

"Aye, " he says, "maybe I will."

The rain is falling in heavy gouts, but he doesn't own an umbrella and it's a point of principle with him that he never, ever shelters from the rain. It's one of the ways in which prison marked him.

"During the years of the blanket protest especially, I'd sit in the cell looking out at the rain thinking, what I would give to stand out there under that.

"It's like when I got out of jail and I went back to stay in the family house and the brother and sister were living there . . . I couldn't understand how they could spend the whole night, from teatime right through, watching television. It seemed so pointless.

There's a big world out there. Seven nights a week, I was out, meeting people, talking. I constantly had to be moving."

He was 36 when he was released in 1993, after serving 17 years of a life sentence for attempted murder. He's bearing in on 50 now, with a partner who's a teacher in an Irish language bunscoil, an 18-month old son and a face that reveals, in its lines and contours, the undulating map of his life.

Twenty-five years after he stared death down for six long weeks, Jackie McMullan exudes a happy sense of what it is to be alive. "Being in jail reminds you what a great thing life is, " he says.

Being so close to death must do something similar. "I suppose so. But I've always made the point that the hunger strikers weren't the only ones who died in the Troubles. It wasn't just 10 . . . it was thousands. But there does seem to be something special about the hunger strikers. People always want to ask you what it achieved.

"I think in political terms, you can see the legacy. But I think it also steeled an awful lot of ex-prisoners. I think the whole republican movement came out of it with that sense that we're not going to be broken, we're not going to be beaten. That's why so many are so focused and so driven."

He still lives in Belfast, not far from where he grew up, his world circumscribed by the common staples of ex-prisoner life . . . support groups, Sinn Fein and voluntary community work.

"One of the groups I work with is called Healing Through Remembering, which is a broad, cross-community organisation . . . in touch with the different victims' groups . . . which looks at ways that we can reach an accommodation with the past, whether that be through a truth process, a day of reflection, or whatever."

He's reached an accommodation with his own past, he says. He was involved in the Troubles almost as soon as he was old enough to throw a stone. He remembers the schools in the area emptying out at half-three and the rioting starting straight away. He remembers the barricades being put up into Andersonstown and his father and the other men of the area working them in tandem shifts.

"At the same time you're watching it unfold on television. Catholics being put out of their houses in the Ardoyne, Clonard, Kashmir, Bombay Street, the Falls.

"The pogroms. Houses burning. You grew up with this feeling of being under siege, under attack. And the cops were the enemy. To us, the RUC and the B Specials were just a loyalist militia.

"There was a very definite sense of uprising, of a community solidifying.

Houses were getting raided. Ours was raided regularly. Then there was internment. So suddenly my older brother's in prison, all his mates are in prison, and there's no sign of any charges against them."

He joined the IRA in the mid-1970s but wasn't on the streets for too long afterwards, jailed for life in 1976 for his part in a gun attack on an RUC post in South Belfast. He'd been arrested nearby in possession of a revolver. It happened just weeks after the cut-off date for the phasing out of special category status.

After four-and-a-half years on the blanket protest, he put his name down immediately for the second hunger strike, knowing he would likely die on it.

He was picked to join the protest in August, between the deaths of Tom McElwee and Mickey Devine, the ninth and 10th men to die. He doesn't remember being conscious of the effects of not eating at the start.

"You were aware that you were skin and bones, but none of us was carrying much weight to begin with. We were only getting the bare minimum of food.

There were no fat people on the blanket protest. In terms of the effects, it was very slow, very gradual. You were lethargic. You were sleeping a lot.

"The one thing I'll never forget was the smell of the food in the cell. It was overpowering. It's like if you smoke and you go off cigarettes . . . you can suddenly smell one from 50 yards away. You could smell peas. The other one was cornflakes. I mean, who's ever smelt cornflakes? But most of the other boys remember that one as well.

"At some stage between the 20th and 30th day, they moved me to the hospital and I thought, right, this is another phase here."

It shocked him to see the condition of the other men when he got there. "I remember seeing Lorney (Laurence McKeown) . . . and I'd have been fairly close to him . . . and the change in his appearance was stark. It was like. . . like his head had shrunk. And it does hit you . . . that's where I'm going. But that wasn't going to put me off. I'd my decision made."

His family didn't try to dissuade him.

His father found it difficult to sit by while his son wasted away but he supported his decision, as, he's sure, his mother would have. She died the previous March, shortly after the hunger strike began, but had been an indefatigable voice on behalf of her son and the other blanketmen, even chaining herself to the railings of 10 Downing Street to highlight the prison protest.

"There was a group of them . . . all mothers, interestingly . . . who decided to take the issue right to Thatcher's front door. These women were extraordinary. They organised protests the length and breadth of the country, then took it abroad . . . America, France, Austria . . . generating publicity, drawing people's attention to the issues.

"My mother was amazing. She died the year of the hunger strike. I didn't even know she'd been in hospital because I'd no contact with the outside.

Then I was persuaded to take a visit in March 1980. The door opened and a priest came in to tell me she was dead.

So it was left to my dad. He supported what I was doing. And I can't imagine how hard that was for him, having already lost his wife."

He refused food for 48 days. By that point he probably had no more than a week left in him but the energy ran out of the protest first. Four families had asked the doctors to save their sons' lives, while Liam McCloskey, an INLA member, came off his fast voluntarily after being told his family would intervene once he passed into a coma.

The families of most of the six remaining hunger strikers said they would do likewise. On 3 October, the protest was called off.

"We got scrambled eggs on toast, as I remember, " he says. "Strangely, I don't remember having any difficulty getting it down. But I remember it being a massive emotional thing. These conflicting feelings. There was relief that you weren't going to die but then you had this sadness in you, which you'd probably suppressed up to that point, that the 10 boys had died and we were still no further on.

"The concessions didn't come until later, after we decided to go into the system and sabotage it. We were given our own clothes immediately. Then the loyalists locked themselves into their cells, obviously scared of these 500 madmen who'd been on protest for five years arriving into the blocks. That achieved segregation.

"Firebombs in the workshops settled the work issue. It was a gradual thing.

"But the day the strike ended, I certainly didn't see any of that ever happening. They hadn't restored political status. It hadn't worked out for us. That's what I thought then. It was our last shot and we'd failed."

PatSheehan 55 days WHO KNOWS what would have become of Pat Sheehan had there been no Troubles? Who knows what trajectory his life would have followed?

What heights he'd have soared? How we'd know him today?

He was a smart boy. And an outstanding Gaelic footballer, good enough to play senior club football between his two terms in prison, the first for bombing a cash-and-carry, the second for attempting to booby trap a security barrier in the centre of Belfast.

What if there had been no Troubles? With an honours degree in philosophy and politics, he knows there are no what-ifs . . . just reality and how you face it.

Someone told him recently that he'd had a very unlucky life. At the time of the interview, his wife, Siobhan O'Hanlon, a senior Sinn Fein figure and a key player in the peace process, is seriously ill with cancer and will die within days, leaving him to raise their six-year-old son alone.

"It's a tough time at the minute, " he says, "but I've always had the psychological strength to cope with any difficulties I've had to face. I've got a good family, good friends. So I've never considered myself unlucky. If anything, the opposite.

"I'm still here today. I survived the hunger strike."

When it was called off, he'd refused food for 55 days. Jaundice had set in and the doctors told him he might not survive even if he ate. Yet he escaped without any lasting ill effects. Today, he's a healthy 48, and he runs his own business, supplying fruit and vegetables to shops and restaurants. He's up at 4am most mornings. Some nights he's not in bed until 11pm. "There's some days you think, God, I wish I could go back to jail for a week, " he says.

He has a peaceful, easy-going manner, informed, in part, by his interest in neo-Aristotleism. "Yeah, it's something that made a big impression on me when I was studying philosophy, " he says, "especially the nature of what it is to be a good person. I'd apply it, for instance, to my business life. People say to me, why don't you go to that restaurant or that shop and undercut the guy who's supplying them. But I have this view that you should conduct your business affairs in the same way you conduct your personal affairs. It's the type of philosophy I think should be taught in schools."

His life has been a journey of violent twists and shunts. He grew up on a largely Protestant street off the Springfield Road and remembers being called a taig for the first time some time towards the end of the 1960s. "I had to ask my mother what it was, " he laughs.

"Our family would have been nationalist in a very broad sense. My mother was a member of the SDLP. My father was involved in the GAA, as was his father."

He was often seen walking up and down the Springfield Road with a hurley in his hand. In the context of the time . . . with civil rights fervour spreading like a bacillus . . . it was considered an act of political defiance, even from a 14-year-old.

"One night I was out with my mother and this guy came to the door. My old fella answered it. The guy said, 'Is Pat in?' and my da was immediately suspicious. He said, 'What do you want him for?' He said, 'I just want to talk to him.' My da says, 'What do you want to talk to him about?' and your man started backing down the path, pulled out a handgun and fired a couple of shots at the old fella. Luckily he dived into the side, behind this partition beside the door."

He has little doubt he was meant to die that night. That incident, repeated petty harassment by British soldiers, and the memory of Protestant workers from the local metal foundry throwing bolts and rivets through the windows of Catholic homes on the Twelfth of July, he says, politicised him at a young age.

At 15, he joined Na Fianna, the IRA's youth wing. At 17, he became a member of the IRA. And at 19, he was heavily involved in the commercial bombing campaign, which was aimed at destabilising the Northern state.

"At that particular time, in the late 1970s, we didn't have access to large amounts of explosives. So what we were doing at the time was we were picking targets that we thought would burn easily. We went in, got the people out, then planted the bombs."

The woman on whose identification evidence Sheehan was convicted mentioned his politeness and said he had allowed her to retrieve her handbag, which contained tablets she needed. He received a commendation from the judge . . . and 15 years in jail.

"I spent two of those on the blanket and I remember thinking that the only way this is going to be sorted out is with a hunger strike. I suppose in my naivete I never imagined myself being on it.

"Towards the end of the first hunger strike, 30 men joined it in sympathy and I was one of them. It was only four days . . . no big deal. But when the second hunger strike was announced, I put my name forward and when I told my family that I was going on it they were very, very distressed.

"My sister, who was a year older than me, had been diagnosed around that time with leukaemia and she was given five or six years to live. So they were already devastated . . . and then to have another child go on hunger strike. . . .

And looking back now it was probably very callous of me. Self-centred, if you could describe going on hunger strike to the death as a selfish act.

"I remember getting a comm from Bik (McFarlane, the Officer Commanding the republican prisoners in the blocks), saying that there was a bit of a worry that psychologically I wouldn't be up to it because of the situation with my sister. I wrote back and said, forget about that, I've my mind made up. There's nothing will deflect me.

"That was the frame of mind you had to have. You couldn't go into it thinking, I'll try this for a couple of weeks and if I don't like it sure I can have a big feed."

Unlike some of the men, he had cravings throughout his time on hunger strike.

"I remember being up in the hospital and we had all these magazines lying about, the ones that come with the Sunday papers. And they were full of all these recipes, big colour photographs of roast chickens. The saliva was pouring from your mouth.

"I'd torture myself with these things.

And of course the food was in the cell 24 hours a day. They left your breakfast there, took it away when they left in your lunch, then took that away when they brought your tea. I think they hoped you'd take a wee nibble here and there."

He remembers one doctor aggressively lecturing him about the damage he was doing to his body. "He went on about how my vital organs were going to close down, one by one, and I'd be blind and vomiting and my liver would turn to mush. I was losing about a kilo a day in weight. I remember, every time before I went to see the doctor, I'd guzzle as much water as I could. It was a psychological thing.

If your weight's going up, you're not dying."

His body temperature was the barometer by which he judged his rate of deterioration. By the fourth week, he was constantly cold, even with eight blankets on his bed. Six weeks after first refusing food, he was watching television in the hospital one night and couldn't focus on the rolling credits. A couple of days later he had doublevision . . . another signpost passed.

"A consultant from one of the hospitals came in to examine me. I was lying in the bed and he stuck his finger under my ribs here and I nearly hit the ceiling with the pain. My liver had become enlarged. It was completely jaundiced. He said that even if I ended the hunger strike at that moment he couldn't guarantee that I'd survive."

His family were praying that he'd lapse into a coma before any of his organs failed, so they could ask the doctors to intervene.

"All of the families, I think with the exception of maybe Jackie's (the McMullans), had agreed among themselves that they were going to.

Some of our people would still blame Father (Denis) Faul for that. He supported the hunger strike but believed that, once it reached a certain point, it was morally wrong to carry on with it. So he set about doing what he saw as his duty, which was to bring it to an end, and he worked on the families.

"But I think my family were quite amenable to that pressure. "On the Friday, I was giving myself maybe 48 hours to live. But we found out that day that the hunger strike was going to end and I knew I wouldn't die that night. In fact that was probably the best night's sleep I got during the whole hunger strike. I think there's something in that when people say they decided they're not going to die. I know Tom McElwee was going with a girl who was up in Armagh jail and he'd been asking for a visit and they wouldn't let him have one.

Eventually they let her go up and he died pretty much immediately after it. I think psychologically you can determine your rate of deterioration."

Like many of the surviving hunger strikers, he doesn't see the episode through some romantic scrim, but still believes it was worth it.

"That Bobby (Sands) stood and was elected opened up republican minds to electoral politics. It convinced people . . .

a lot of us maybe not soon enough . . . that everything has a shelf life. The hunger strike had a shelf life, so did the armed struggle. At some point it has to end.

"I would say that the hunger strike raised the whole nationalist consciousness in Ireland. One small example, the revival of the Irish language in the North . . . it's now the fastest growing sector of education here."

On St Patrick's Day he travelled to Dublin to see his club, St Gall's, play in the All Ireland club final at Croke Park.

"I bought The Irish Times and Tom Humphries had an article in it going through the history of the club. The piece said, 'And they even had a hunger striker who played for them.' So there you are, it's even mentioned in the context of a football match. It's not just relevant in the lives of republicans.

"But I think that historically we're still too close to it to know what the real effect of the hunger strike will be. In a hundred years' time I don't think anyone will deny it was a watershed in the history of this country."

John Pickering 27 days "WHAT you have to realise is that as each of the hunger strikers died, we weren't sitting in the cells crying about it. Well, maybe some guys were. A lot of us were sitting like that there. . . ." He makes a ball of his fist. Yes!

"That's what we were saying. Is that right? We'll last out longer here than you will. So there was no grieving going on.

You thought you'd get your grieving in at some later stage. But the dynamics of the struggle didn't allow for it. After the hunger strike came the segregation campaign. Then there was the big escape. Then after the escape there was more conflict within the prison. It never stopped."

With his full, healthy face and good humour, John Pickering seems unscarred by the experience of the hunger strike. But appearances deceive. In 2001, he was asked to speak at a series of events to commemorate the last significant anniversary of the protest.

It was like past-life regression therapy. "I didn't realise until then that there was some form of emotional damage there, " he says. "I stood in front of the microphone and no words would come out. That process of allowing the public to ask you questions about something you'd buried away in your subconscious. . . it brought out the demons, left, right and centre."

What kind of demons was he harbouring? "I'm not revisiting that, " he says. "But I discovered that it affected me in ways I wouldn't have believed.

Look, I've friends who are totally mentally scarred by that whole period.

Probably a lot of us still are. I think we experienced the same phenomenon that people who have been abused or bereaved go through.

"That thing that comes under the general umbrella of trauma." He's sitting back in an easy chair in the editing suite above the Culturlann, the Irish language centre on the Falls Road.

He's a smartly dressed man, with a distinguished grey look, and Che Guevara's image pinned to the lapel of his jacket.

He guards his anonymity jealously (no photographs was a prerequisite to agreeing to speak). Since his release in 1994 from a 26-year prison sentence, he's managed to keep a low profile, until three weeks ago, when the News of the Wo r ld took three facts . . . he was convicted of shooting dead an old age pensioner in 1976, he is a cousin of Mary McAleese and he is a script consultant on a new movie about the IRA, starring Rachel Hunter . . . and parlayed them into a dramatic 'Shame of President' double-page splash.

He dispatches it with a soft shrug of his shoulders. "If they think that's a story. . . ." It doesn't bother him, he says.

He gets far more animated on the subject of former Maze inmate Richard O'Rawe's highly controversial book, Blanketmen, which was published last year. O'Rawe, who served as public relations officer to the hunger strikers, claimed that an intermediary acting on behalf of the British government, had offered to meet almost all of the men's demands, four days before the death of Joe McDonnell, the fifth man to die. The IRA leadership, he claimed, prolonged the protest . . . with six men dying unnecessarily . . . because it wanted to retain Sands's old Fermanagh-South Tyrone seat in the second by-election.

Pickering, like most of the former hunger strikers, was incensed by O'Rawe's suggestion that the IRA had used their lives as markers while knowing they were playing with a busted flush.

The truth, says Pickering, is that the outside leadership had little or no role in directing the course of the hunger strike. "The IRA were against it, but who were they to turn around to 400 prisoners . . . who'd been on the blanket protest for five years, who'd been through hell, who'd been basically tortured . . . and tell us not to do it? They agreed to pause the armed struggle on the outside to make sure the focus stayed on the protest. We were going to do this anyway.

"We were in charge of it, not the outside leadership. In his book, he's saying that it was decided at the beginning that only four men would be allowed to die, regardless of how it worked out. Who the hell was Richard O'Rawe to say it was time to come off the strike? You think he'd have told me?

Or Kieran Doherty? There were a lot of strong personalities in them blocks.

"There's been too much credence given to Richard's one-man version of things. He's set himself up as being a big player in the whole thing, which he never was."

Pickering joined the IRA as a teenager. There was no blinding flash on any road to Damascus, he says, just a slow accrual of incidents that "politicised and culturalised me".

"I was interned when I was 17 and released when I was 20. I was out of jail for about 10 months when I got caught red-handed on a bombing mission. I got 26 years for it. And while I was on remand they came and charged me with another bombing mission in which a man (77-year-old William Creighton) tackled Volunteers, was shot and died. I got done for it but I didn't do it. I'm totally innocent of it. But my attitude in them days was charge me with anything you like. Charge me with crimes during the second world war or the Korean War or Vietnam. We were blinkered like that. That was the whole point of the protest. We saw ourselves as prisoners of war. It didn't matter what the charge was."

He remembers voting against the idea of the first hunger strike, arguing that they should do another year on the blanket first. But he volunteered for the second and not even the IRA Army Council could have persuaded him off, he says. He was quite prepared to die.

"Every one of us would have gone the full way, without a shadow of a doubt.

"I mean, yeah, I did think about death, but not in any kind of self-pitying way. You didn't sit there wondering, what's it going to be like? Will I have more pains? And if you were that type, I think our leadership would have spied that about your character from other experiences and decided you weren't cut out for it.

"What's important to understand about our mindset is that we were combatants. We believed in what we were doing, 100%. We were morally right, 100%. We were defending our communities and defending our lands.

In prison our backs were to the wall, remember. We weren't going anywhere.

We had a stark choice . . . put on that uniform and do prison work like a criminal, or resist."

While he was prepared to see it through to the end, he knew his mother would have taken him off the strike in the likely event of him lapsing into a coma. It was a source of tension between them for a long time afterwards. "My mother didn't want me to die on hunger strike because of a mother's love for her son. Sin e.

"I discussed it with her. I'd be saying, 'Don't you intervene, ' but your ma's your ma. I knew rightly, though she never said it outright, that she'd have taken me off it. I knew her. I knew she held all the aces. I think it took me about a year to get over that aspect of it.

I held it against her for a long time.

"I even remember in the last meeting we had in the prison hospital when it looked like the whole thing was ending.

We had been discussing ways of bypassing the problem of our families by changing over our next of kin, taking it away from our parents. Clearerheaded people . . . Bik, really, who you know is a big, sensitive soul . . . said there was no way we could do that. Politically, it would have been disastrous. But that's how we were thinking. We were absolutely emotionally tied to this thing.

We were in warrior mode."

In a famous exchange, as the protest dragged through the summer of 1981, Margaret Thatcher asked Cardinal Tomas O Fiaich, "Why are they on hunger strike? I've asked so many people. Is it to prove their virility?"

When he looks back on the time now, across the expanse of a quarter-of-acentury, given what was lost and what was won, was their extraordinary act of defiance worth it?

"I don't think there's any question that it was, " he says. "You have to remember that before the hunger strike there was a silly notion going around that the IRA didn't have support out on the streets. Then Bobby got elected.

See, there was this battle going on for hearts and minds and it centred around terminology. They started using words like Bandit Country for South Armagh, and Godfathers for the IRA leaders.

The criminalisation of the republican struggle was part of that.

"And despite having an impeccable, formidable enemy in Thatcher, who I think most people now agree was a bit of a crazed person, we won. Because what they did in trying to criminalise us was they opened up our imaginations beyond anything they could have dreamt of. That's the legacy of the hunger strike."