Solitary confinement

Solitary confinement in the book is not one uniform policy but a recurring condition of institutional control: people are separated into cells, watched and moved under supervision, or confined alone as punishment. Its significance lies in how that separation is imposed on different groups, from republican prisoners to children in state care, and in the contrast between a cell’s enforced isolation and the relationships people struggle to maintain across its boundaries.

Individual Cells and the Prisoning of the Body

At Brixton Prison, shortly after their conviction at Winchester Castle, Dolours Price and Marian Price were the only women in an overcrowded facility otherwise populated by men. They were kept in separate individual cells. Their separation did not mean that they vanished from the prison’s social world: during half an hour of exercise each day, or while being escorted through the corridors, they drew remarks from male inmates. A rumour circulated that men sold seats at their windows to watch the sisters in the yard. The book emphasizes the oppressive presence of the men around them even as prison procedure kept the women apart in their own cells.

That separation was joined to close surveillance and the replacement of personal identity with institutional classification. The sisters had numbers, and an escort accompanied them wherever they went. Yet they were not entirely cut off from one another. After Dolours was forcibly fed during her hunger strike, she was released to the exercise yard, where she saw Marian and described what had happened. The scene makes an important distinction: individual cells and constant supervision shaped their confinement, but the sisters could still meet, communicate and sustain a shared protest.

The physical force used during Dolours’s feeding further clarifies how confinement extended beyond the walls of a cell to control of the body. After more than two weeks without food, she was restrained in a chair bolted to the floor while officials forced a tube through a wooden device in her mouth and down her throat. She vomited the mixture soon afterward. Marian’s response—that Dolours could leave the strike—shows that even in a tightly controlled institution, the sisters’ relationship remained a source of communication and choice. The episode concerns force-feeding rather than solitary confinement itself, but it belongs to the same account of a prison asserting control over movement, contact and bodily autonomy.

Individual Confinement and Collective Protest

The Long Kesh account places individual cells within a change in the status and treatment of republican prisoners. After internment ended, paramilitary suspects were charged and held as ordinary criminals rather than detained as political prisoners. In the new H Blocks, convicted prisoners were confined to individual cells and issued prison uniforms, irrespective of whether they were IRA volunteers or common thieves. The change was more than a different arrangement of space: it challenged prisoners’ claim to be soldiers and their demand for treatment as prisoners of war.

The resulting protest demonstrates why individual-cell confinement should not be confused with complete social isolation. Prisoners resisted the uniforms and wrapped themselves in blankets; they sought recognition as political prisoners, the ability to associate freely and the right to receive mail. When guards’ treatment of prisoners on trips to shower and use the toilet helped drive them to remain in their cells, the protest escalated into refusal to wash and then the dirty protest. Brendan Hughes, the prisoners’ commanding officer, advised them to smear their waste on the walls. Prisoners were naked, unwashed and filthy, while officials entered to remove them, hose them down and clean their cells. The inmates’ conditions were extreme, but their protest, leadership and demands were collective. The cell became both a means of separation and the setting from which they contested the prison’s classification of them.

Gerry Adams, though no longer imprisoned, remained in contact with Hughes through smuggled communications. That detail marks a further limit on the idea of isolation: the cell regime constrained prisoners’ contact, but it did not wholly sever political relationships or communication. The account presents confinement as part of a larger struggle over status, association and the terms under which prisoners could recognize themselves and one another.

Isolation Rooms and Institutional Care

The book also uses the language of isolation in its account of Lisnevin, a secure residential facility for boys to which Michael McConville was sent after repeated escapes from earlier placements. Lisnevin had rooms stripped of furniture, barred windows and used to lock errant children in solitary confinement. The grounds were enclosed by a high electrified fence with an alarm, making escape difficult. These details describe the institution’s capacity to isolate and contain; they do not establish that Michael himself was placed in one of the isolation rooms.

The contrast between Lisnevin’s security and Michael’s response complicates any single account of what confinement meant. He later joked that Lisnevin was the best home he had ever had. The book suggests that, despite the facility’s coercive features, its separation from some of the turmoil of the conflict may have offered him a place to settle and begin to heal. He avoided sectarian skirmishes and befriended Sister Frances, who looked out for him and kept in touch with his siblings after moving to America. The account therefore distinguishes the availability of solitary confinement as discipline from Michael’s own experience of the institution: a secure setting could contain him without the text saying that he was confined alone.

Later Accounts and the Costs of Separation

Later material in the book returns to solitary confinement through Marian Price’s imprisonment. A cited report records her account of seven months in solitary confinement. The surrounding references describe Dolours as distraught amid Marian’s illness and legal limbo, and include the characterization of Marian as a victim of psychological torture. The evidence establishes the reported duration and the distress surrounding the case, but does not supply a detailed account of the daily conditions of those seven months. That limit matters: the book’s earlier scenes describe cells, movement and supervision in close physical detail, whereas this later reference registers the consequences through the sisters’ continuing connection and the reporting of Marian’s experience.

Across the different institutions, solitary confinement appears in distinct forms rather than as a single interchangeable condition. Brixton’s separate cells coexisted with daily exercise and contact between the sisters; the H Blocks placed republican prisoners in individual cells while their protest and communications remained collective; Lisnevin possessed isolation rooms without the text establishing that Michael was held in one; and Marian’s later imprisonment is identified through a reported period of seven months in solitary confinement. The recurring image is separation administered by institutions, but the book also tracks the relationships that persist through it—and the different meanings that confinement acquires when imposed on political prisoners, a child in care, or a woman whose sister remains closely affected by her fate.