“The ultimate weapon”

The ultimate weapon names Dolours Price’s belief that a prisoner’s body could become a weapon of political resistance. In her account, the hunger strike was not simply an appeal to the British government: it tested an IRA volunteer’s allegiance to the cause and made the possibility of death part of the protest’s force.

Historical Resonance

Price’s framing drew on the Great Famine, when disease and starvation killed a million people in Ireland and another million or more were forced to migrate. The passage contrasts that suffering with ships carrying food from Irish harbours for export to England, and notes the view that British responsibility went beyond callous neglect. Against this history, using hunger as a weapon against the British became an act of reversal: a condition associated with Irish suffering was turned into a deliberate political tactic.

The Body as Protest

Price said she was ready to die and compared the hunger strikers’ possible deaths with those of volunteers killed on the streets of Belfast. She believed that the sisters might be the first women to die in this way and regarded that prospect as an honour. Her reference to Terence MacSwiney, who had died in Brixton Prison more than fifty years earlier, placed their protest within a history of Irish republican sacrifice. The body’s vulnerability was central to the tactic: its refusal of food made personal suffering visible and raised the political cost of allowing the strike to end in death.

Resistance and State Intervention

The British government feared that a hunger striker’s death could bring massive retaliatory violence, but it did not grant the sisters’ demands. On 3 December, after the strike had lasted two and a half weeks, doctors and nurses restrained Price and force-fed her through a rubber tube. The intervention exposed a limit within the idea of bodily resistance: the body could be made the site of protest, but it remained subject to physical control by prison authorities. The phrase therefore holds both defiance and peril together—the intended weapon was the protester’s own body, and that body could also be forcibly acted upon.