Aunt Bridie

Aunt Bridie was Chrissie Price’s sister and a former participant in the Irish republican struggle. An explosives accident left her permanently blind and without hands, making her dependent on others for the rest of her life. She nevertheless never expressed regret for her part in the cause of a united Ireland. Through the children’s encounters with her, the book sets the ideal of sacrifice beside the practical, lifelong demands of caring for a severely injured relative.

Identity and Background

Bridie had taken part in the struggle in her youth. In 1938, while helping to move a cache of explosives, she was caught in an accidental detonation. She was twenty-seven. Her injuries were catastrophic: she lost both hands, was disfigured, and became permanently blind. The account establishes her not simply as a symbol of republican commitment but as a person whose political past shaped the circumstances of an entire life.

Her survival defied her doctors’ expectations. The accident did not end with her recovery from the immediate injuries: because she was so incapacitated, she would need assistance for the rest of her life. The consequences reached into ordinary routines, including changing clothes and blowing her nose. The contrast between the political ideal for which she had accepted risk and the daily dependence that followed gives her story its particular weight.

Life and Care

Bridie sometimes stayed for extended periods at the Price family home on Slievegallion Drive. After returning from hospital, she lived in a tiny house with an outside toilet, without a social worker or a pension. The account makes clear that survival brought neither independence nor adequate support. Her circumstances turned care into a continuing practical necessity rather than a brief aftermath of the accident.

When Dolours Price and Marian Price were young, Chrissie Price would send them upstairs to talk with their aunt. Bridie sat alone in a bedroom, and her hearing was so sharp that she could detect Dolours approaching even when the child tried to tiptoe. From the age of eight or nine, Dolours was tasked with lighting Bridie’s cigarettes and placing them between her lips. She disliked the responsibility and found it repellent, even as she scrutinised her aunt’s face and registered the extent of her injuries.

Relationship with Dolours Price

The children’s visits brought affection, discomfort, and blunt questions into the same room. Dolours was talkative and inclined to say whatever came into her mind; at times, she asked Bridie whether she wished she had died. The question exposed a child’s direct encounter with suffering rather than a polished lesson about courage. Dolours could see the consequences of the accident, but she could not reconcile those consequences with her aunt’s continued life and refusal to regret her sacrifice.

Physical gestures sharpened that intimacy. Dolours held Bridie’s shortened wrists in her own small hands and stroked the skin, comparing the stumps to a cat’s paws. On another occasion she saw a tear emerge from behind Bridie’s dark glasses and run down her cheek. The detail stayed with her as a question: how could someone cry without eyes? The moment does not resolve the child’s confusion; it registers how closely she watched her aunt and how difficult it was to understand another person’s pain from the outside.

Political and Narrative Significance

The Price family regarded Bridie’s willingness to give everything for an ideal with admiration, even when pity was present. Her own lack of expressed regret coexisted with the concrete costs of her injuries, her dependence, and the absence of social provision. The book therefore presents devotion not as an abstract declaration but as a commitment with lasting consequences for both the person who makes the sacrifice and the relatives who care for her.

For Dolours Price, Bridie was an early and intimate encounter with that cost. The cigarettes, the bedroom visits, the dark glasses, and the tear give political sacrifice a domestic scale: it appears not only in public commemorations but in repeated acts of assistance and a child’s uneasy attention to an injured body. Bridie’s presence helps explain how the language of sacrifice could carry admiration within the family while remaining inseparable from care, discomfort, and questions without easy answers.