It's that time of year when newspaper columnists of a leftwards bent and Republicans of a black tinge like to recall the death of Bobby Sands, who starved himself to death in 1981 while in prison.

I prefer to recall some of the 65 or so other victims who died at this time, 36 killed by the IRA, the people who didn't have 100,000 turn out for their funerals.

There were Eric and Desmond Guiney, a milkman and his fourteen year old son, killed when a mob attacked their milk lorry on 7th May on the corner of the New Lodge Road and Antrim Road.

Philip Ellis, a policeman shot dead on the Duncairn Gardens in Belfast the day after Bobby Sands died.

A month before Sands died, a young census collector, Joanne Mathers, 25, was shot dead by the IRA.  The mother-of-one had taken the part-time job to earn some extra money.   On April 7, she had just gone to a house on Anderson Crescent in Derry when a man ran up to her, grabbed her clipboard with one hand, put a gun to her head with the other and fired.

Julie Livingstone, 14, was killed when she was hit in the head by a plastic bullet fired by soldiers during rioting.  Another schoolgirl, Carol Ann Kelly, 11, and widower and father- of-seven Henry Duffy, 44, died after being hit by a plastic bullets during violence.

RUC Reservist John Proctor, 25, from Derry, shot by IRA gunmen in the car park of the Mid-Ulster Hospital after visiting his wife and new born baby son.

The UFF shot dead Catholic civilian Paul Blake, 26, and 38- year-old father-of-one Patrick Martin as he lay in bed at home in Belfast.

Reference: Donna Carton, Sunday Mirror