In the transcribed tapes Sean McKenna accepts that he freely volunteered for the first IRA hunger strike in 1980 and that he again put his name forward for the second hunger strike in 1981, although he was still in hospital recovering from the first hunger strike at the time. Sean McKenna claims that it was the Prison Officers Association’s refusal to implement the ‘concessions’ offered by the British that created the conditions for a second hunger strike in which 10 Irish Republicans would die.