The funeral of Patricia McCann (Née McMahon) took place on Saturday 10 September at St Michael the Archangel church on Finaghy Road North. Patricia died peacefully aged 89 at the Royal Victoria Hospital and was a dear wife of Jim, loving mother of Jim, Damian, Patricia, Philip, John, Nuala, and the late Eamonn and treasured grandmother of eleven children and great-grandmother to five children.
A Hillhead woman, Patricia McCann was an active member of Relatives for Action, joining in the late 1970s and played an imperative part carrying communications from the H-Blocks to the public at that time.
Speaking with the Andersonstown News, Patricia’s daughter also named Patricia McCann, spoke about the remarkable and determined woman her mother was and the impact she made on the community.
PROTEST: Mothers of H-Block prisoners leading a march along the Falls Road in April 1981 during the hunger strike
“My mother always had a very strong sense of injustice and inhumanity. When we were children, and we turned our noses up at a particular dinner we were reminded compassionately of all the starving children in the world," she said.
“I moved to Canada in 1980. It (the prison struggle) started to get very good coverage in Canada from when Bobby Sands went on hunger-strike on the 1st of March, 1981. I remember watching the news all the time in Canada and I remember watching TV and there was a big protest, and, in the protest, I saw my mother and my sister walking towards me.
“I couldn’t believe it. I was on the other side of the world in a place nobody had ever even heard of. I felt so proud because she wasn’t that kind of person, she pulled out all her stops for her son who was in jail at that time. I really felt very proud.
“My mother was very good at the communication – the comms that were coming out of the jail. Some were sent to me to be published in papers to highlight things, they actually published one in the big newspaper where I lived on the 17th September which is actually my mother’s birthday in relation to the reason why the prisoners went on a second hunger-strike, which Bobby Sands spearheaded.
PRISON BATTLE: Mothers of H-Block prisoners protest in the RVH at the denial of medical care to their sons in the H-Blocks in August 1979. 
“As time went on and the hunger-strike was over there was still a great bond between everybody, all the relatives on the outside and the prisoners on the inside for communications. She would have gone the length and breadth of where she could, she drove to make sure that communication went to where it had to go to, if it had to be the Sinn Féin centre or other people’s relatives.
“She was very good at that. A lot of things would have come to the house, or they would have come directly from the jail, and she was the one who made sure that everybody got the communication that they needed to get and that was absolutely vital before, after and during the hunger-strike.”
5,000 DAYS: Patricia McCann's son Jim (Jaz) with his memoir of his H-Block ordeal
