Jackie McMullan

Jackie "Teapot" McMullan (born c. 1955) is a former volunteer in the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) who took part in the 1981 Irish hunger strike.

McMullan was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, in the mid-1950s, the third eldest of a family of seven children. He studied at a boarding school in Athlone in the Republic of Ireland before returning to Belfast in 1971. Following the introduction of internment in August 1971, McMullan's home was raided several times and, in September 1971, his older brother Michael was interned. Later that year McMullan joined the IRA's youth wing Fianna Éireann:

In 1973, aged 17, McMullan joined the IRA's Belfast Brigade. In 1975 he acquired the nickname "Teapot" after the top of his ear was shot off during an attack on a British Army patrol. He was arrested in 1976 in possession of a revolver following a gun attack on a Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) base, and remanded to Crumlin Road Jail charged with attempting to murder RUC officers. At his trial in September 1976 he was convicted after forty minutes having refused to recognise the Diplock court; he received a life sentence and was sent to HM Prison Maze.

McMullan was the second person convicted after the withdrawal of Special Category Status for paramilitary prisoners, and he joined the blanket protest started by Kieran Nugent and refused to wear prison uniform. In 1978, after a number of attacks on prisoners leaving their cells to "slop out" (i.e., empty their chamber pots), the blanket protest escalated into the dirty protest, during which prisoners refused to wash and smeared the walls of their cells with excrement. As McMullan refused to wear a prison uniform he was not entitled to a monthly visit, and did not see his family until December 1979. McMullan described the visit in an interview:

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