Armagh

Armagh enters the sisters’ story as a hard-won destination: after a prolonged hunger strike and detention in English prisons, Dolours Price and Marian Price were sent there to serve their sentences in Northern Ireland. Years later, the city also became the setting for Dolours’s secret marriage to Stephen Rea, close to the prison wing where she had been held. These distinct associations make Armagh both a place of confinement and a point at which private life resumed around the history of imprisonment.

Prison and the transfer campaign

The Price sisters’ connection to Armagh followed their conviction at Winchester Castle and imprisonment in Brixton Prison, where they were the only women in a crowded, overwhelmingly male institution. They demanded repatriation to Northern Ireland to serve their sentences as political prisoners. Dolours Price and Marian Price had begun refusing food before entering Brixton, and their hunger strike continued there; Hugh Feeney and Gerry Kelly joined them from other prisons. The sisters’ demand linked the place they sought to leave with Armagh, the place to which they wanted to be transferred.

On 3 December, after the strike had lasted two and a half weeks, doctors and nurses restrained Dolours Price and force-fed her through a tube. She vomited the mixture soon afterward. When she later saw Marian in the exercise yard, she described the ordeal and said she did not think she could endure it again. Marian told her she could end the strike. The episode makes the transfer demand more than a question of prison geography: the sisters were resisting the conditions and status imposed on them, at a bodily cost that became central to their campaign.

A delayed return

The prisoners announced that they were ending the strike after Roy Jenkins assured them they would be returned to Northern Ireland. Their statement said they had struck for 206 days. The transfer did not happen at once: rather than being sent directly to Armagh, the sisters were moved to the women’s wing at Durham Prison. In March 1975, the governor told them they were going to Armagh. Dolours Price answered that it was near enough for her. The sisters embraced, packed their belongings, and were hurried out of the prison.

They were taken to an air force base and flown across the water. Dolours Price first mistook the Isle of Man for Ireland; Marian Price corrected her, and later thought the green land they saw was Ireland. Their return brought relief, but its timing carried grief. Their aunt Bridie Dolan had died in February, and their mother, Chrissie Price, had died of pancreatic cancer four days after the aunt’s funeral. The sisters had been refused compassionate leave to attend their mother’s funeral and had sent a wreath of Easter lilies instead. Armagh thus marks the destination of their return, but not a return untouched by loss.

The city and the former prison

In 1983, Dolours Price and Stephen Rea married in St Patrick’s Cathedral in Armagh. They chose a secret ceremony with only two witnesses. The cathedral stood a short walk up the hill from Dolours Price’s former home in C Wing of Armagh jail, placing the wedding close to the site of her imprisonment without making that history the public spectacle of the occasion. Father Raymond Murray, the prison chaplain who had lobbied for her release, officiated; afterward, he declined to give an English tabloid details of the wedding, saying the couple had asked him not to discuss it.

The two episodes give Armagh a compact but consequential role in Dolours Price’s life. In the transfer story, it was the promised alternative to continued confinement in England, reached only after a long strike and an additional stay at Durham. In the marriage story, the city held the prison memory in the background of a private ceremony. The distance between C Wing and the cathedral was short; the distance between imprisonment and married life was measured by years of struggle, separation, and return.