Here is a documentary that needed to be made: a careful, well put together film about the IRA prisoners who went on hunger strike in 1981 to campaign for prisoner-of-war status, led by Bobby Sands, who became a global icon of anti-British protest during the 66-day ordeal which ended in his death and those of his comrades.

This has already been the subject of fiction features such as Terry George’s Some Mother’s Son (1996), Les Blair’s H3 (2001) and Steve McQueen’s Hunger (2008), and now there is Brendan Byrne’s documentary: clear-sighted and even-handed, interviewing Sinn Féin figures such as Danny Morrison and Gerry Adams, and also Thatcherite partisans Norman Tebbit and Charles Moore – and not omitting to mention the IRA’s campaign of violence that continued during the hunger strike, involving the murder of a census worker, Joanne Mathers.

Yet Sands is still an opaque figure by the end of this film. We have his sombre writings and journals but, interestingly, there are hardly any clear photographs, and we learn little about him as a human being. McQueen’s Hunger tried to get inside Sands’s heart and mind in a way that this doesn’t.

The documentary certainly makes a strong, persuasive case that Bobby Sands’s death was the crisis that broke the stalemate. At the end of it all, the British government quietly began to restore “special category” status: the first stirrings of a negotiation process which led to the Good Friday agreement. And the film correctly identifies the sensational and unarguable fact that Bobby Sands had democratic legitimacy by getting elected as an MP. The SDLP appeared incidentally to have withdrawn to give Sands a free run as the sole nationalist candidate in that election, and it might have been interesting to hear from someone such as John Hume about the discussions that preceded that. Sands’s ex-wife, Geraldine, is not interviewed and neither is his son, Gerard, who was an infant when Sands died, so their feelings about the hunger strike are unclear.

Byrne’s film is a salutary reminder of those grim and bitter days, when Northern Ireland was referred to as “the Province”, like an outpost of Ancient Rome.