Michael Gaughan (Irish republican)

On 12 February 2006, a mural, dedicated to Stagg and Gaughan, was unveiled on the Falls Road in Belfast. In August 2020 a mural was erected on his behalf in the lane behind his home house of Healy Terrace.

On Saturday, his body was transported to Dublin, where again it was met by mourners and another IRA guard of honour who brought it to the Adam and Eve's Franciscan church on Merchant's Quay, where thousands filed past as it lay in state. The following day, his body was removed to Ballina, County Mayo. The funeral mass took place on 9 June, at St. Muredach's Cathedral, and the procession then led to Leigue Cemetery. Gaughan was given a full IRA funeral and was laid to rest in the republican plot, where Frank Stagg would join him after being reburied in November 1976. His funeral was attended by over 50,000 people and was larger than the funeral of former president Éamon de Valera the following year.

On 31 March 1974, Gaughan, along with current Sinn Féin MLA Gerry Kelly, Paul Holme, Hugh Feeney and fellow Mayoman Frank Stagg, went on hunger strike to support the fight of Dolours and Marian Price to obtain political status and to be transferred to a jail in Ireland. The prisoners' demands were as follows.

On 10 April 1974 Gaughan and Stagg were both transferred to the prison hospital for observation; force-feeding began two weeks later.

During his hunger strike, his weight dropped from 160 lb to 84 lb Gaughan was force-fed from 22 April and this occurred 17 times during course of his hunger strike. The last time he was force-fed was the night before his death on Sunday 2 June. After a hunger strike that lasted 64 days, he died on Monday 3 June 1974, aged 24 years old. Gaughan was one of 22 Irish republicans to die on hunger strike in the 20th century, the largest hunger strike was the 1923 Irish Hunger Strikes.

Gaughan's body was initially removed from London and on Friday, 7 June, and on Saturday, 8 June 1974, over 3,000 mourners lined the streets of Kilburn and marched behind his coffin, which was flanked by an IRA honour guard, to a Requiem Mass held in the Church of the Sacred Heart of Jesus.

Whilst in London, Gaughan became a member of the Official Irish Republican Army (OIRA) through Official Sinn Féin's English wing Clann na hÉireann and became an IRA volunteer in a London-based Active Service Unit. In December 1971, he was sentenced at the Old Bailey to seven years imprisonment for his part in an IRA fundraising mission to rob a bank in Hornsey, north London, which yielded just £530, and for the possession of two revolvers.

Michael Gaughan (5 October 1949 – 3 June 1974) was a Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) hunger striker who died in 1974 in Parkhurst Prison on the Isle of Wight, England.

Gaughan, the eldest of six children, was born in Ballina, County Mayo, in 1949. Gaughan grew up at Healy Terrace and was educated at St Muredach's College, Ballina, and after finishing his schooling, he emigrated from Ireland to England in search of work.

There are annual lectures and commemorations in honour of Gaughan, Frank Stagg and Sean McNeela (a Ballycroy IRA man who died on hunger strike in Dublin in 1940) at the republican plot in Ballina by both Republican Sinn Féin and Sinn Féin, which includes a march from the Humbert monument in Ballina to Leigue Cemetery. The Republican Sinn Féin cumann in Mayo is named the McNeela-Gaughan-Stagg Cumann.