British Parliament

The British Parliament is presented as both a source of state authority over prisoners and an arena that republican politics gradually entered without fully accepting its conventions. Its most consequential role in the account is legislative: after the Price sisters’ force-feeding and a medical declaration against the practice, Parliament moved to make force-feeding impossible in British prisons. Later, Bobby Sands’s election campaign and Gerry Adams’s victory brought republican candidates into the parliamentary contest, even as abstention remained part of their strategy.

Prison policy and political status

The context for Parliament’s involvement was a change in the treatment of paramilitary prisoners. When internment ended, suspects were charged and convicted as ordinary criminals rather than held as political prisoners. At Long Kesh, convicted prisoners were placed in individual cells in the H Blocks and given prison uniforms, a regime that denied the distinction they claimed between political combatants and ordinary offenders. The British government’s refusal to recognize the conflict as a war formed part of that dispute over status; the account does not attribute the policy to a specific parliamentary vote.

The Price sisters’ hunger strike brought another dimension of state power into view. In Brixton Prison, Dolours Price was restrained by doctors and nurses and force-fed through a tube after more than two weeks without food. The immediate coercion was carried out by prison and medical personnel, but the practice became the subject of wider institutional scrutiny. The World Medical Association subsequently declared force-feeding unethical, and Roy Jenkins announced that hunger strikers would no longer be force-fed in British prisons.

Legislation after the Price sisters’ strike

The account links Parliament’s action to the change in policy that followed. It describes Parliament as rushing a bill through that made it impossible to keep prisoners alive by forcing a tube down their throats. The sequence matters: the sisters’ resistance had exposed the bodily violence of the policy, while the medical declaration supplied an explicit ethical challenge. Parliamentary action then gave the change a legislative form.

That outcome had consequences beyond the sisters’ release and the end of their own strike. Seven years later, Bobby Sands began a hunger strike at Long Kesh, followed by nine other men. The account draws a stark connection between the earlier policy change and the later deaths: because force-feeding had been stopped, the authorities could not use that intervention to prevent the strikers from starving. Dolours Price later wondered whether her own victory had made her, in some way, responsible for the circumstances in which the ten men died. Parliament’s response is therefore shown not as an isolated procedural measure but as part of a chain of consequences whose human costs remained contested.

Elections, Westminster, and abstention

Parliament also became a target for republican electoral action during the 1981 hunger strike. Four days after Sands stopped eating, the death of Frank Maguire, the nationalist MP for Fermanagh and South Tyrone, created a by-election. Republicans urged Maguire’s brother not to run so that Sands could stand from prison. The candidacy was intended to draw attention to the hunger strike and alter its political stakes: the government might allow a prisoner to die, but an elected Member of Parliament presented a different public challenge. Sands’s electoral success later became a precedent for the movement’s turn toward elections.

That turn remained in tension with republican abstentionism, the long-standing suspicion that participation in Parliament could compromise revolutionary aims. In 1983, Gerry Adams sought a Westminster seat representing West Belfast while announcing that, if elected, he would boycott Parliament and not take his place there. Dolours Price supported his campaign, canvassed for him, and drove voters to polling stations; Adams won. The episode captures the institution’s double significance in the account: it offered republicans a platform and a means of demonstrating popular support, while their refusal to attend could also register continuing opposition to its authority and conventions.