Days after Bobby Sands' electoral victory in Fermanagh/South Tyrone, Margaret Thatcher gave a television interview for Britain's Independent Television Network (ITN). When asked about the surprise result, Thatcher acknowledged that it ‘show[ed] just how sharp are the divisions between the two communities in Northern Ireland’. ‘Having said that’, added the Prime Minister, ‘I don't think the result of that election fundamentally changes the situation’.

By this time, republican prisoners Francis Hughes, Patsy O'Hara and Raymond McCreesh had already joined the hunger strike. Sands' health was deteriorating and his comrades had been without food for nearly three weeks or more. Though recent events had given the anti-H-Block campaign a ‘tremendous publicity boost’, it was acknowledged that ‘a massive task still … [lay] ahead if the lives of Sands and his three fellow H-Block Hunger Strikers … [were] to be saved, and if their rightful political prisoner status … [was] to be won’.

Within days of the Fermanagh/South Tyrone election, the National H-Block/Armagh Committee published a newssheet announcing ‘the first All-Ireland Rally since the beginning of the hunger strike’.