Political prisoner status

Political prisoner status was more than a label for imprisoned republican volunteers: it was a claim about the nature of their conflict, the legitimacy of their actions and the authority of the British state to classify them as criminals. Prisoners asserted that they were soldiers captured in a political struggle and should be treated accordingly; the government rejected that distinction. The dispute shaped their clothing, confinement and protest, and brought the prison itself into the wider contest over political power in Northern Ireland.

A political claim formed outside prison

The demand took shape against a background of political exclusion. Catholics in Northern Ireland faced discrimination in employment and housing and lacked access to executive power at Stormont. On 1 January 1969, student protesters gathered at Donegall Square in Belfast to march to Derry against that system. Some marchers believed peaceful protest could force change, but attacks along the route, including at Burntollet Bridge, helped discredit that hope for Dolours Price. In 1971 she joined the Irish Republican Army, regarding the decision as a return to her family’s republican commitments rather than a departure from them.

Price also rejected the prospect of being confined to an auxiliary role. When Seán Mac Stíofáin initially proposed that she join Cumann na mBan, she insisted that she wanted to fight as a full member. A special meeting of the Provisionals’ Army Council decided that women could join the organization as full members for the first time. Price’s experience illustrates how political identity and membership were contested within the movement as well as between republican prisoners and the state: she claimed the duties of a soldier, not a supporting role, and accepted the obligation to obey orders.

The Price sisters’ prison protest

After the London bombing operation, the captured team was taken to a police station, where clothing was removed for forensic testing. When offered prison uniforms, Dolours and Marian Price refused them. They regarded themselves as soldiers in a legitimate army, not ordinary criminals, and covered themselves with rough prison blankets instead. In the same spirit of discipline and solidarity, Dolours briefly crossed paths with her sister in an interview room and warned her, “Don’t say a word.”

At Winchester Castle, the defendants had maintained silence about their membership of the Irish Republican Army throughout the proceedings. After sentence was delivered, they made the political claim openly. Marian declared, “I consider myself a prisoner of war!” Friends and relatives in the public gallery applauded, while supporters called for no surrender. The judge insisted that the dock was a court of law, not a political arena, but the defendants’ declaration made clear that they did not accept the court’s criminal classification as the final account of their actions.

The sisters then announced that they would refuse food until they received political-prisoner status and were returned to Northern Ireland to serve their sentences. At Brixton Prison they were the only women in an overwhelmingly male institution, kept in separate cells and escorted by guards. Dolours was assigned the number 286185. The number and the prospect of long sentences represented the prison’s power to replace their claimed political identity with an institutional one; the hunger strike was their attempt to make that classification—and their demand for transfer—impossible to treat as merely administrative.

Hunger strike, force-feeding and transfer

The Price sisters intended to continue their strike to the point of death if necessary. Gerry Kelly and Hugh Feeney, held in other prisons, joined them. Their protest drew on a longstanding Irish practice of fasting as a means of dissent, but in Brixton it also confronted the government with the consequences of refusing their demands. Officials feared that a death in prison could bring major retaliatory violence, yet the government initially resisted conceding.

On 3 December, after Dolours had gone more than two weeks without food, doctors and nurses restrained her in a chair bolted to the floor and force-fed her through a tube. She vomited the mixture of raw eggs, orange juice and liquid Complan. Marian had not yet undergone the procedure; after Dolours told her she did not think she could endure it again, Marian told her she could leave the strike. The episode exposed the physical power the prison authorities could exert over a protester’s body even as the hunger strike challenged their control over its meaning.

The strike lasted 206 days. In a statement issued on 8 June, Dolours and Marian Price, Kelly and Feeney said that they had struck for political-prisoner status and transfer to a prison in Northern Ireland, and that they were ending the protest after Roy Jenkins assured them they would be returned. They said, “Ours was never a suicide mission,” describing their aim as securing their demands rather than killing themselves. The transfer did not happen immediately: the sisters were moved to the women’s wing at Durham Prison, and only in March 1975 were they told they were going to Armagh. The outcome secured their return to Northern Ireland, but the evidence does not establish that the government formally recognized the status they had demanded.

Criminalization and the Long Kesh protests

The wider prison dispute intensified after internment ended in late 1975. Suspects would now be charged and convicted as ordinary criminals rather than detained indefinitely as political prisoners. For the Irish Republican Army, the distinction was fundamental: to call volunteers criminals was to deny the political basis on which they had taken up arms. Under internment, prisoners had generally worn their own clothes and associated with their paramilitary colleagues. Under the new regime at Long Kesh, convicted prisoners were placed in individual cells in the H Blocks and issued the same uniforms as common-law prisoners.

In 1976 republican prisoners refused to wear those uniforms and began the blanket protest, wrapping themselves in blankets rather than accepting the prison clothing. Their demand for special category status would have treated them, in effect, as prisoners of war. Authorities refused. Restrictions and beatings during trips to wash or use the toilet drove prisoners to stop leaving their cells; the protest then developed into a dirty protest, with chamber pots emptied beneath cell doors and excrement spread on cell walls. Brendan Hughes, the prisoners’ commanding officer, suggested daubing the walls. The resulting filth, infestations and repeated efforts by guards to remove prisoners and clean the cells made visible the escalating struggle over who could define the prisoners’ status and impose the terms of their confinement.

From prison status to political strategy

The hunger strikes and protests made prison classification a public political issue, but the movement’s approach to power also changed. In 1981, Bobby Sands began a hunger strike at Long Kesh. After Frank Maguire’s death created a by-election, republicans arranged for Sands to stand for the seat from prison. The candidacy broke with a long tradition of abstentionism and used electoral politics to amplify the prisoners’ struggle. Sands’s campaign showed how the claim that prisoners were political actors could be carried beyond prison walls, even as the British government remained unsympathetic to the hunger strikers.

Dolours Price’s later activity likewise connected the dispute’s earlier armed and prison context with electoral politics. She abandoned violence as a means of pursuing a united Ireland, without abandoning republicanism, and canvassed for Gerry Adams in 1983. Adams pledged to boycott Westminster if elected, respecting the movement’s abstentionist tradition even while seeking an electoral mandate. Price campaigned for him and drove voters to polling stations; he won. Political prisoner status thus belonged to a larger argument about whether republican action could be recognized as political at all. The movement’s methods shifted from armed struggle and prison protest toward elections, but the original dispute over criminality and political legitimacy remained central to how those methods were understood.