Ribcages as Blockades: Blue Niall, The Shan Vans, and the Scorched Verse of OCRAS
The stomach does not debate policy. It screams, then it whimpers, then it falls into a terrifying, hollow silence. In the administrative chill of the British remand system, silence is the state’s preferred weapon—a way to bury dissent under a sediment of "procedural delays" and "security protocols." But since November, that silence has been turned inside out.
Ocras. Hunger.
It is a word that carries the weight of 800+ years of occupied Irish soil and the scorched dust of Gaza. When conventional channels are obstructed, when the courts become a conveyor belt for a foreign genocidal regime, the body becomes the last available lever.
Whitehall spat out two billion pounds of blood-money like a rotten tooth. On 14 January, the Ministry of Defence blinked, stripping Elbit Systems UK of its training contract, a key demand of the strike. But don’t mistake this for a sudden outbreak of conscience. This was an extraction. Heba Muraisi, Kamran Ahmed, and Lewie Chiaramello didn’t win this with a petition; they won it by turning their own ribcages into a blockade for 73 days. They won it through a campaign of cruel, calculated neglect where ambulances were refused, and food refusal logs were "lost" in the grey machinery of the prison industrial complex.
Because the state aims to exhaust, the artists have built a counter-siege. The demo track Ocras is the engine and the lead for the OCRAS Hunger Striker Support Fund. Recorded and released by Blue Niall, Jake Óg of The Shan Vans, and Cathasach Ó Corcráin, the track and the fund are a single, cohesive unit of resistance. This is the material refusal of their exhaustion, an emergency infrastructure built to shield the families and the fighters from the procedural shrapnel of the state. It is the bread they deny, the legal steel required for an outstanding battle, and the sustenance for those surviving the physical wreckage of starvation.
This is the "colonial boomerang", tactics of empire tested in the occupied territories and brought home to silence. The repression isn’t abstract; it is a ledger, a line-item, a stamp on a withheld letter. It is the slow, grey murder of the mundane: six months to deliver a letter, a year to allow a book on Gaza or feminism. The OCRAS Fund exists to bridge this gap and to cover the costs of surviving a system designed to bankrupt the spirit and the bank account.
The track itself is a shiv. A raw, scorched transmission anchoring itself to the Bobby Sands mural and the monuments of Milltown, drawing a direct, jagged line from the H-Blocks of 1981 to the remand wings of 2026. These aren't new voices to us at The Zine UK; both The Shan Vans and Blue Niall are staples of the Zeenage Daydream playlists, the sonic landscape I curate to keep the rot at bay. Their presence here isn't a performance; it’s a continuation of the lineage of resistance.
Umer Khalid bravely continues his strike, on day 9 as I write this, and you can follow @prisioners4palestine to keep up to date, but do not mistake the end of the other’s fast for the end of the war.
The joy is anaemic; it is a thin, rattling thing paid for in flesh. Their strikes have concluded, but the battle has only just begun. We are moving from the weaponised body to the weaponised courtroom. We fund the recovery as we funded the strike; we sustain the body so it can survive the long, outstanding legal battle that lies ahead. The remand system remains, the state remains complicit, and our refusal remains absolute.
Listen. Fund. Resist.
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