Unlikely as it may sound, two spots in Tehran, Iran pay homage to Bobby Sands, the IRA activist who died while hunger striking in the Maze Prison in Northern Ireland.

An elderly man in Cork was convicted and fined on Monday, after he told a non-national that “Bobby Sands did not die for the blacks.”

Sinn Fein veteran Francie Molloy, once a director of elections for Bobby Sands, has been elected to retain the Westminster seat of Mid-Ulster in succession to Martin McGuinness.

Oscar winning English actor Colin Firth has won the admiration of a surprising new constituency -Irish Republicans.

Secret Irish government files just released into the public domain claim that Bobby Sands offered to suspend his hunger strike just a week before his death.

The family of Bobby Sands, the political prisoner who died on hunger strike in 1981, have called for the release of Brendan Lillis from jail.

Not only was Michael Fassebender’s portrayal  of Bobby Sands mesmerizing in last year’s Camera D’or winning film “Hunger,”  his physical transformation for the role was equally impressive.

The critically acclaimed film “Hunger,” from debut director and celebrated artist Steve McQueen, will be released in the U.S. on March 20.

It's been 25 years since Bobby Sands and his fellow Irish nationalists launched their hunger strikes in 1981, which resulted in Sands's death after 66 days. That may seem like a long time ago, but as author Denis O'Hearn makes clear in his powerful new biography "Nothing But an Unfinished Song," the hunger strikes are still with us today in the fragile peace process still unfolding in Northern Ireland. O'Hearn's book, which is subtitled "Bobby Sands, The Irish Hunger Striker Who Ignited a Generation," follows Sands from when he was first arrested in the early 1970s. In '76, Sands and others went "on the blanket"; protesting their treatment as common criminals, they refused to wear uniforms and wore blankets instead, in an attempt to regain their previous status of political prisoners. Attempts to break the protest by brutalization of prisoners saw the escalation to the "dirty protest" of 1978 when repeated beatings during "slop-out" led to prisoners living in squalor by smearing excrement on the walls. Few knew such a gesture would escalate into a crisis for the likes of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, while captivating revolutionaries such as Fidel Castro and Nelson Mandela. (There had been an earlier hunger strike in the autumn of 1980, which had ended when the British government appeared to concede to prisoners' demands. When that strike was over, the governmentreverted to its previous stance.) O'Hearn's chronicle of Sands (who was quite a talented writer and musician) is powerful enough, but this book's strength is that it offers a broader view of English and Irish politics. An Irish-American professor at Queen's College in Belfast, O'Hearn argues that Sands's eventual death was the start of a process which brought Irish nationalists into the mainstream of political debate about the future of Northern Ireland. True, some readers might like to read more about how Irish America was inspired and outraged by the hunger strikes, but there is plenty of compelling new material in this book to move almost any reader with an interest in Irishhistory and politics. ($16.95 / 448 pages / Nation Books)