When Irish republicans in the Maze prison began organising hunger strikes in 1980 to secure political status for inmates, one of the first experts called in by the Northern Ireland Prison Service was the psychiatrist Dr Ian Bownes.
Though he was then only a trainee, it was his role to assess the mental state of those threatening to starve themselves to death – checking whether they had the capacity to understand that their lives could end and had effectively given their consent freely.
