Dolours and Marian Price: sisters who supported each other through imprisonment

Dolours Price and Marian Price were sisters whose closeness became a defining feature of their political and personal lives. They marched together against discrimination in Northern Ireland, joined the Provisional IRA, served in clandestine operations, and endured imprisonment and a prolonged hunger strike side by side. Their bond offered companionship through danger and confinement, but their shared identity could also make separation feel like a rupture: when Marian was released in 1980, Dolours was elated for her and yet grieved the end of their life as a pair.

Childhood and Early Bond

The sisters grew up together in West Belfast in a republican family. Marian was a few years younger than Dolours, but they were so often together that people could take them for twins. They shared not only a bedroom but a bed, and used affectionate names for one another: Dolours was Dotes, Marian was Mar. Around Andersonstown they were also known as Albert’s daughters, a shared public identity that reflected their father’s place in the family’s republican world.

Their closeness was visible in their manner as well as their living arrangements. On the 1 January 1969 march from Belfast to Derry, eighteen-year-old Dolours and her younger sister moved with the student protesters, talking animatedly and laughing as they walked. The march challenged systemic discrimination against Catholics, and the sisters joined a movement that looked to the American civil rights campaign and its example of nonviolent protest. At Burntollet Bridge, however, they were caught in the middle of an ambush: attackers threw stones, bricks, and bottles, then charged the marchers with cudgels, crowbars, and other weapons. The sisters clambered over a hedge as the assault continued. They had entered the march together; the violence they encountered would help redirect both of their lives.

From Protest to Secret Service

After returning to Belfast, both sisters were changed by Burntollet Bridge. Their father later said that they were never the same. Dolours came to believe that peaceful marches would not bring the change Ireland needed, and in 1971 she formally joined the Irish Republican Army at the family home. Marian joined the Provisional IRA as well. They continued attending school or college during the day and went out on operations at night, within a culture of secrecy in which even supportive parents might be kept uninformed for their own protection.

The sisters’ shared participation was not merely symbolic. They worked as couriers, carrying people, money, and munitions, and took advantage of the lower scrutiny often directed at women. Dolours crossed the border repeatedly using a false licence in the name Rosie; soldiers at checkpoints came to recognize her and greeted her without suspecting her role. Marian, still a teenager and driving without a licence, once transported a car containing explosives hidden behind a panel in the driver’s-side door. At a checkpoint she opened the door herself and stepped out, drawing a soldier’s attention to her miniskirt rather than the concealed payload. He waved her through.

They also took part in armed operations together. In the summer of 1972, the sisters and another female volunteer robbed an Allied Irish Bank branch while disguised as nuns. They joined the Unknowns, the secretive unit responsible for transporting Joe Lynskey across the border to face a court-martial and likely execution. During a brief ceasefire, Dolours enjoyed the respite and the sisters’ association with the unit continued. Later, as plans for a bombing campaign in London took shape, Marian was among the small group recruited for the dangerous operation. Dolours was appointed its leader, with Marian and Hugh Feeney as her lieutenants. The sisters’ roles were thus bound together even as Dolours held command responsibility.

Trial and Shared Hunger Strike

After the bombing team was arrested at Heathrow, the Price sisters refused prison uniforms. They regarded themselves as captured soldiers rather than ordinary criminals and draped rough prison blankets around themselves instead. Separated in custody, they briefly crossed paths in an interview room, where Dolours urged Marian to say nothing. The moment reduced their shared discipline to a few words between sisters, but it also showed how their bond operated within a larger commitment to republican silence.

At the London bombing trial, both sisters were convicted. When the court initially imposed thirty-year sentences on Dolours, Marian, and Hugh Feeney because of their leadership roles, Dolours called the penalty a death sentence. The judge then reduced their sentences to twenty years, but the sisters objected aloud. Before they were removed from Winchester Castle, they announced that they would refuse food until they received political-prisoner status and were transferred to Northern Ireland to serve their sentences. They were taken to Brixton Prison, an all-male facility, and began the strike together.

The hunger strike placed their relationship under physical as well as political strain. On 3 December, prison staff restrained Dolours and force-fed her a blended mixture of raw eggs, orange juice, and liquid Complan through a tube. Afterward, she found Marian in the exercise yard and described what had happened. Dolours said she did not think she could endure it again; Marian told her she could come off the strike. Dolours refused to leave Marian to continue alone, insisting that they would end the strike together or not at all. Two days later, Marian too was subjected to force-feeding. The procedure then became a daily ordeal for both sisters, with doctors and nurses arriving at ten each morning to restrain them and administer food.

After 206 days, Dolours and Marian, together with Gerry Kelly and Hugh Feeney, announced that they were ending the strike. They said the action had sought political-prisoner status and transfer, not suicide, and that they had been assured they would be returned to Northern Ireland. The transfer did not happen immediately. The sisters were moved from Brixton Prison to the women’s wing at Durham Prison, and in March 1975 they were sent to Armagh Prison. Their shared demand had secured a promise and ultimately a transfer, but not the immediate return they had sought.

Separation and Its Aftermath

Their closeness continued through years of confinement, but the sisters’ physical and emotional health became increasingly precarious. After the hunger strike, both struggled to re-establish a relationship with eating. At Armagh Prison, they stopped eating again; Marian’s weight fell sharply, and a government assessment warned that leaving her in prison could mean leaving her to die. On 30 April 1980, Marian was released and went under an assumed name to the Royal Victoria Hospital in Belfast for treatment. She left the hospital the next day, prompting claims in English tabloids that her illness had been a means of engineering a prison escape.

For Dolours, Marian’s release brought an immediate and profound relief: her sister had been close to death and would now live. But it also ended, for the first time, the sisters’ experience of being joined in every defining role—as Albert’s daughters, protesters, members of the Unknowns, prisoners, and hunger strikers. Dolours later described the separation as being parted from her Siamese twin. The image captures the double edge of their intimacy: Marian’s survival was cause for joy, while her freedom left Dolours alone in prison.

The sisters’ paths were no longer identical. In later years Dolours abandoned violence as a means of pursuing Irish unity, while continuing to identify with republicanism and supporting Gerry Adams’s electoral campaign in West Belfast. The available account places their shared life most vividly in the years when they acted and suffered together; Marian’s release marks its decisive break. Their relationship is therefore both a story of mutual endurance and a record of how a powerful shared identity could not prevent the painful consequences of separate outcomes.