Durham Prison was where Dolours Price and Marian Price were held after their 206-day hunger strike ended, but it was not the Northern Ireland destination they had demanded. Relocated to its women’s wing rather than immediately transferred home, the sisters remained in limbo until an unexpected announcement in March 1975 sent them onward to Armagh. In the narrative, Durham is less a fully described prison than a place of delay: the setting for the gap between a political promise and its belated fulfilment.

A transfer that did not yet mean home

The sisters arrived at Durham after a prolonged campaign to be repatriated and to serve their sentences as political prisoners in Northern Ireland. At Brixton Prison, where they had been the only women in an overcrowded, overwhelmingly male institution, Dolours and Marian had refused food, taking only water. Their demand was not simply release from prison. They wanted transfer to Northern Ireland and recognition of their political status. Fellow prisoners Hugh Feeney and Gerry Kelly joined the strike, and on 8 June the four announced that they were ending it after 206 days, relying on Roy Jenkins’s assurance that they would be returned to Northern Ireland.

That assurance did not produce an immediate journey across the water. Instead, Dolours and Marian were moved to the women’s wing at Durham Prison. The distinction matters: the strike had ended, but the transfer it was intended to secure remained incomplete. Durham thus marks a change in the sisters’ immediate circumstances without yet resolving the central issue. They had left Brixton, where force-feeding had been used against Dolours, but they were still prisoners awaiting the promised destination. The account gives no extended description of their daily life or the conditions in Durham; what gives the prison its particular significance is the delay and the moment when that delay finally broke.

The announcement in March 1975

One lunchtime in March 1975, all the prisoners at Durham were ordered back into their cells. Dolours felt that this might be the day she had been waiting for and began packing her few belongings. She put on her coat, gathering what she could carry, before the governor entered and announced their departure. The news came with a correction: they were going home—or, more precisely, they were going to Armagh.

Dolours answered, “That’s near enough for me.” The reply registers the difference between a literal homecoming and the destination actually offered, while also showing how readily she accepted it after the long delay. The sisters had insisted on being returned to Northern Ireland; Armagh was close enough to make that demand feel fulfilled. The governor’s correction did not erase the distinction, but Dolours’s response gives the scene its turn: a qualified destination becomes, for her, a welcome one.

Marian ran into Dolours’s cell and the sisters embraced so tightly they could hardly breathe. They hurriedly put their remaining possessions into bags as prison officers rushed them into the hall. Dolours, overcome with excitement, even hugged the governor. The movement from a solitary announcement to a shared embrace makes the departure more than a change of institution. For the sisters, leaving Durham meant leaving behind a period of waiting together, with the next stage at last taking them towards Northern Ireland.

Departure and the view from the plane

The sisters were taken to an air force base and put aboard a plane. As it carried them over water, England receded behind them. A man in uniform made coffee during the flight; after they had been over the water for some time, Dolours looked out and saw green land below, bursting into tears. The landscape seemed to announce the return she had been promised, but Marian corrected her: “That’s not Ireland yet. That’s the Isle of Man.”

The glimpse gives Durham’s role a physical measure. The sisters had left the prison, but even from the air the journey home was not complete; the first green land they saw was not Ireland. Their movement from Durham to Armagh therefore unfolds in stages, and the flight preserves the same tension as the announcement at the prison: return is near, but not yet exactly what the sisters had expected. The Isle of Man becomes a brief interruption between departure from Durham and arrival at their Northern Ireland destination.

Narrative significance

Durham’s importance rests on its position between a promise and a journey. The government’s assurance had helped bring the hunger strike to an end, yet the sisters were not sent straight to Northern Ireland. Their eventual departure is rendered through small, concrete actions—packing a coat and belongings, embracing in a cell, hurrying into the hall, and looking down at green land from a plane—rather than through any account of prison routine. Those details make the delayed transfer legible as lived time: first the uncertainty of whether this is the day, then the governor’s qualification, then the joyful but incomplete sight from the air.

The prison is consequently a threshold rather than a final destination. Its place in the story links the hunger strike’s political demand to a personal scene of separation from the institution and the sisters’ closeness to each other. Durham does not end their imprisonment; it is where the long-awaited transfer becomes tangible, even as the journey itself still has distance to cover. The destination is not described as home, but Dolours’s answer makes clear why Armagh, after Durham, was near enough.