DURING the war, there was so much that united them. Peggy O'Hara and Martina Anderson, two strong republican women from Derry, both paid a heavy price for opposing British rule. O'Hara lost her son, Patsy, on hunger-strike.

Anderson lost her freedom: she spent 13 years in jail.

Now, in peacetime, they are divided. Anderson is a strong supporter of the Sinn Féin leadership. She endorses the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) and forming a power-sharing government with the DUP. O'Hara still believes in smashing Stormont, opposing a "British police force" and asserting traditional republican principles. Next month, both women go head-to-head in the Assembly elections in Foyle.

"I'm standing for Patsy and his comrades in Derry, all the other wee fellows who suffered or died at the hands of the Brits, " says O'Hara, the independent republican candidate. "Patsy has no voice now, so I have to be his voice. He would never have approved of Stormont or the PSNI.

"My sons were beaten black and blue by police.

'Self-inflicted' I was told. When Patsy was 17, his face was burned with cigarettes at Ballykelly. He grew a beard to hide the scars. They can change the police's name and bring in more Catholics, but it's still imposing British rule."

O'Hara (76) is recovering from a stroke. While she will be out canvassing, she will rely heavily on her election team - a coalition of anti-Agreement republicans. She denies her age and ill-health are detrimental: "I'm not looking for a political career. I'm standing out of principle, not ego.

Besides, Ian Paisley is four years older than me!"

Anderson (44) a former beauty queen, is going places. She's a cert to be elected and will then be groomed to challenge Mark Durkan for his Westminister seat, although success there seems unlikely. Once, she would have wanted to blow up the House of Commons. She was part of the IRA team behind the Brighton bomb at the 1984 Tory conference, aiming to kill the Thatcher cabinet.

They escaped, but five people died.

Now, she sees constitutional politics as the way forward. Signing up to the PSNI and the criminaljustice system would "remove another pillar of the corrupt state from the enemy's hands", she said at last month's special ardfheis. "If war is the continuation of politics by other means, then this is the reverse." Despite several requests to speak to Anderson, Sinn Féin said she wasn't available for interview to the Sunday Tribune.

'Sacrifice and support' In Peggy O'Hara's living room is the gold crucifix Pope John Paul II blessed and sent her son before he died. Patsy left it to his parents, with a note thanking them "for the loving sacrifice and support you have shown me". He was 23. A painting of Patsy, a member of the Marxist INLA, hangs on his mother's walls - beside a dozen pictures of Padre Pio, the Blessed Virgin, the Child of Prague, and several popes.

O'Hara wasn't urging her three sons to war when trouble erupted in the North. "Somebody told me my eldest, Seán Séamus, was marching outside the Guildhall with a placard about civil rights. I went straight down and asked him 'Who gave you that?' 'Fionnbarr �? Dochartaigh, ' he said. So I took the placard off him, went over to Fionnbarr, strung it around his neck and hit him with my umbrella."

She began attending civil rights marches herself - just to keep an eye on her boys. "What I saw changed me - peaceful protestors beaten to the ground. I decided armed struggle was justified. I was proud my sons joined up, I was proud of all the lads."

Patsy joined the Fianna at 13 and Sinn Féin the following year. At 14, he was shot in the leg by the British army. At 16, he was interned. On release, he joined the INLA. The family home was raided regularly. O'Hara took her own revenge: "No matter how early the police came, 4am or 5am, I'd put on the bacon and eggs. The police could smell the lovely fry and my family would sit down to eat and the police wouldn't get a bite."

Like Patsy O'Hara, Martina Anderson joined the IRA as a Bogside teenager. Her father was a Protestant, her mother a staunch republican.

Their home, like the O'Haras', was regularly raided. After any incident, they "expected the door to be booted in and surrounded by British soldiers with guns", Anderson has said.

"It got to the stage that in the mornings, when the milk lorry would come across the street, my mother would jump out of bed in the belief it was a saracen." When it was a raid, her mother shouted a warning to her daughters before the soldiers smashed the door: "That allowed us to get out of bed and throw on dressing gowns and a pair of shoes to make ourselves a wee bit more modest!"

At 18, Anderson was charged with possessing a firearm and intent to cause an explosion. She jumped bail and crossed the border, living in a flat in Buncrana, Co Donegal, for several years before going to bomb Britain.

'I'll send you home in boxes' Whenever O'Hara's sons were arrested, she'd head to the barracks in Derry: "I brought Tony in custard and stewed apple because I didn't want him eating police food. But I decided to mix in a few sleeping tablets because there was only an oul board and no blankets in the cells and I thought he'd need something to help him sleep.

"He didn't know what I'd done. After eating the food, he started to feel funny during interrogation, very drowsy and detached. He thought the police had added something to the water to help break him!"

In 1979, Patsy was sentenced to eight years for possessing a bomb. O'Hara herself was arrested leaving Long Kesh. She was interrogated for three days in Castlereagh about smuggling comms (communications) from the prisoners. "I didn't even know what a comm was, " she says.

O'Hara was dismayed when other mothers didn't take their sons off hunger-strike as they neared death. "I told Patsy, 'I don't care about Ireland or the world, I'm going to save you.'" On day 55 of his hunger-strike, a photo of him - taken in jail - appeared in the newspapers.

"The screws tortured him physically and psychologically for that. They moved him to Bobby Sands' old cell. The message was: 'You're going to die like Bobby.' Patsy went downhill rapidly. He had a heart attack. He was unconscious but then he'd drift back. He whispered to me, 'I'm sorry mammy, we didn't win. Let the fight go on.'" O'Hara honoured his wish. "Watching him die was wild. I'd sit beside him, moisten his lips, stroke his hair. I know every Derry mother says the same about her son but my Patsy was gorgeous. He had lovely dark eyes - in the end he couldn't see out of them. The day before he died, the screws wouldn't let his father in. I asked to sit with Mrs McCreesh [another hunger-striker's mother] for company. They refused. Sinn Féin has signed up to this prison system - disgraceful!

Many of the same screws from the hunger-strike are still in their jobs."

Four years after Patsy O'Hara died, Martina Anderson was arrested with Ella O'Dwyer and three male republicans. The women served 13 months in the all-male Brixton prison where they were repeatedly strip-searched. On their first day in the exercise yard, British male prisoners shouted obscenities.

The trial judge called Anderson a "hard, cynical young woman". She was sentenced to life imprisonment and moved to Durham jail. Initially, there was 23-hour lock-up in punishment cells for challenging prison rules.

"After about six months the governor called the two of us into his office, " Anderson has said. She claims that "he started to go on about how he was in the jail where Frank Stagg had went on hunger strike and he said, 'You know I don't care what you both do, I'll send you home in boxes if I have to. You aren't going to come in here and undermine my authority.'" 'I'm not going to give up' In prison, Anderson secured a first-class honours degree in social sciences. In 1989, she married Paul Kavanagh, an IRA prisoner also jailed for bombing England. They were transferred back to the North in 1994 and released under the terms of the Belfast Agreement in 1998. The peace process has benefited them.

The couple laughed at newspaper headlines which declared they'd never honeymoon "until 2020". Anderson's friends say she can be "a bit too serious but when Paul's around it's different, she's always smiling. Even up at Stormont, they held hands and canoodled like teenagers."

Working in Sinn Féin's Stormont office, Anderson initially confided doubts about being there, a friend says. However, these have since been allayed. Sinn Féin appointed her 'head of the department for unionist engagement'. Previously, she was head of 'the all-Ireland agenda department'. Anderson has been scathing of the 'dissident' alliance in Derry.

Back home, Peggy O'Hara fusses about her hair and make-up before the Sunday Tribune photographer arrives: "I was always well turned out going to the jail for Patsy. I'm not about to give up now."

Foyle (6 seats) 2003 ELECTION (elected in bold) Mark Durkan (SDLP) 6,806 .7%) William Hay (DUP) 6,101 0%) Mitchell McLaughlin (SF) 6,036 (14.8%) Raymond McCartney (SF) 3,679 (9.0%) Mary Nelis (SF) 3,499 Mary Bradley (SDLP) 3,345 8.2%) Mary Hamilton (UUP) 3,322 (8.1%) Pat Ramsey (SDLP) 2,826 9%) Eamonn McCann (SEA) 2,257 (5.5%) Gerard Diver (SDLP) 1,769 (4.3%) Annie Courtney (Ind) 802 (2.0%) Alan Castle (Alliance) 227 (0.6%) Danny McBrearty (Ind) 137 (0.3%) Ind All votes % change seats SDLP 14,746 (36.1%) -11.7% 3 SF 13,214 .4%) +6.4% 2 DUP 6,101 (15.0%) +2.5% 1 UUP 3,322 8.1%) -1.5% SEA 2,257 5.5%) Ind 939 (2.3%) Alliance 227 (0.6%) -1.6% Electorate: 65,303. Turnout: 62.49%. Total Valid Poll:

40,806. Quota: 5,830