Thomas Ashe was a member of the Gaelic League, the Gaelic Athletic Association, the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) and a founding member of the Irish Volunteers.
Ashe was one of a number of republican prisoners who went on hunger strike the previous week in a bid to secure political status. Their protest would have exchoes of the hunger strikes of 1981.
Thomas Ashe died in the Mater Hospitals from being force fed in Mountjoy Prison.
