Between 1917 & 1981, twenty-two Irishmen died on hunger strike. Now, for the first time, the stories of the hunger strikers are chronicled in one book, bringing to light previously hidden histories. From the deaths on hunger strike of Thomas Ashe in 1917 & Terence Mac Swiney in 1920, while imprisoned by the British government, to the death in 1981 of Michael Devine, the last republican prisoner to die on hunger strike, Pawns in the Game teases out the tangled mesh of the politics & psychology of those who adopted this radical protest of last resort & those who allowed them to die. It is a story of fanaticism, pride & injustice, & the indifference of former comrades when power in the Dail beckoned.