you have all your demands,” short of that we wouldn’t have entertained it. It was all or nothing at that stage. The fact that so many people had died made us even more determined." "You're very sleepy and very, very tired and you're sort of nodding off to sleep but something's telling you to keep waking up. This was the thing that kept everybody going through the hunger strike in trying to live or last out as long as possible. I knew death was close but I wasn't afraid to die – and it wasn't any sort of courageous or glorious thing. I think death would have been a release. You can never feel that way again. It's not like tiredness. It's an absolute, total, mental and physical exhaustion. It's literally like slipping into death." Freedom McKeown was released in 1992. Before his release, he completed a bachelor's degree in social science from the Open University while in prison, and subsequently obtained a PhD in Sociology from Queen's University Belfast. In the mid-1990s he co-founded the Belfast Film Festival, and has written two books about Irish republican prisoners in the Maze Prison; Nor Meekly Serve My Time: The H-Block Struggle 1976–1981 (co-written with Brian Campbell and Felim O'Hagan) was published in 1994, and Out Of Time: Irish Republican Prisoners, Long Kesh, 1972–2000 was published in 2001. In 1996 he was an unsuccessful candidate in the Northern Ireland Forum election in South Antrim. In 2006 he appeared in a two-part documentary titled Hunger Strike, which was shown on RTÉ to mark the 25th anniversary of the 1981 hunger strike. McKeown also works as a Development Officer for Coiste na nIarchimí, an umbrella organisation of republican ex-prisoners groups. Writing McKeown and Brian Campbell co-wrote a film about the 1981 hunger strike called H3 which was directed by Les Blair, and premiered in cinemas on 28 September 2001. Before the death of Campbell in 2005, he and McKeown also wrote two plays together, The Laughter of Our Children which debuted in 2001, and A Cold House which debuted in 2003. McKeown's first solo play, The Official Version, debuted on 18 September 2006. He has continued to write drama, including Two Roads West which is a site-specific play set in a Belfast black cab, where the audience enters the cab with the two actors. The play was revived with an altered script for a