Christmas

Christmas in the narrative is measured by what is missing. After Jean McConville was taken, her children remained together in the flat, refusing the social worker’s recommendation that they be placed in care because they believed their mother would return. As other local children made Christmas lists, the McConville children were running out of food. Only Archie McConville had paid work, as an apprentice roof tiler; Michael McConville stayed out late to shoplift food, and at eleven was caught stealing chocolate biscuits with one of his brothers. He told police that the children had not eaten for several days. The season’s familiar signs of preparation and plenty make their hunger harder to overlook.

Christmas in the McConville flat

The neglect around the children extended beyond the empty cupboards. Neighbours complained to the authorities about the noise at night, while a local parish priest knew of their circumstances but was unsympathetic. The children’s need to remain at home, waiting for their mother, met a surrounding community that offered little help. Christmas therefore becomes more than a date in the account: the contrast between other families’ lists and the siblings’ hunger gives their isolation a sharp, ordinary measure.

The hunger strike and the holiday feast

During the Price sisters’ hunger strike in Brixton Prison, Christmas was turned into political rhetoric. A newspaper advertisement from the Provisional Republican Movement named a holiday spread of soup, turkey, ham, potatoes, Christmas pudding, and brandy sauce, then declared that Dolours Price was dying. The abundance of the menu made the striker’s deliberate deprivation its counter-image. The ad also presented the confrontation as a contest of wills, drawing on the history of the Irish Great Famine, when people starved while food was exported from Ireland. In this framing, hunger was not simply private suffering: it recalled a historical accusation of British responsibility and made the sisters’ threatened deaths part of a public argument.

Dolours Price understood prison as a test of an IRA volunteer’s allegiance and regarded her own body as a weapon in that test. The narrative places her hunger strike alongside the example of Terence MacSwiney, whose death in prison had brought publicity and support to the cause of Irish independence. Christmas’s promise of food thus sharpened the stakes of the sisters’ refusal to eat, while the remembered history of famine gave that refusal a political vocabulary.

Prison time and family observance

The account also sets imprisonment against family rituals tied to the religious calendar. After the sisters returned home, they were distressed to learn that Aunt Bridie and, four days after her funeral, their mother, Chrissie Price, had died while they were away. Their request for compassionate leave to attend Chrissie’s funeral had been denied, so they sent a wreath of Easter lilies instead. This later episode is distinct from the Christmas scenes, but it extends their contrast between public observance and enforced absence: seasonal symbols could be sent or invoked, while the people who wished to take part were kept apart from family and home.