Armagh Prison was a Victorian women’s prison in the cathedral town of Armagh that became, during the Troubles, a crowded site of republican detention and a turning point in the lives of Dolours and Marian Price. The sisters arrived after a 206-day hunger strike in English prisons had won an assurance of transfer to Northern Ireland. At Armagh they encountered a larger community of imprisoned republican women, but the relative relief of arrival did not end the physical and political consequences of their protest. The prison became the setting for their gradual estrangement from the IRA, the worsening of their relationship with food, and the first separation of the sisters after years of shared struggle.

Setting and Transformation

The prison stood near the two cathedral towers that dominated Armagh’s skyline. Before the Troubles, it rarely held more than a dozen women at a time, many imprisoned for drunkenness, prostitution, or fraud. By the 1970s, when the Price sisters arrived, the number had risen above one hundred, many of them imprisoned for republican activity. Their transfer to a women’s prison prompted controversy: a unionist politician compared the arrangement to keeping a python in a paper bag, reflecting the reputation for danger that followed the sisters.

Armagh offered a sharp contrast with Brixton Prison, where the sisters had been the only women in an overwhelmingly male institution. At Brixton, they were isolated in individual cells and subjected to constant verbal attention as they walked the corridors or exercised in the yard. At Armagh, republican women gathered to welcome them with a homemade banner. Other prisoners had heard stories about the sisters and had prepared for their arrival; one later remembered expecting to see skeletons, but finding two women who seemed like film stars. The reception made their fame inside the movement tangible, even as the prison remained a place of confinement.

Prison Community and Daily Life

The sisters were introduced to Eileen Hickey, the IRA officer commanding inside the prison, whose authority was respected even by the guards. The atmosphere was less restrictive than the one Dolours had experienced in England. Guards sometimes lounged at a distance, leaving prisoners room to move, and a fellow inmate cooked potatoes that Dolours ate eagerly after years marked by starvation and force-feeding. The contrast brought a measure of ordinary pleasure into a life governed by imprisonment.

The women formed a close communal routine. From separate cells, they called to one another; some led the rosary in Irish, while others told ghost stories. Dolours likened the place to boarding school without the teachers. Photographs from the period showed the sisters posing with smiling fellow prisoners, appearing glamorous despite their surroundings. Such scenes suggest a community capable of companionship and ritual within institutional walls, though they do not erase the limits of prison life. Weeks stretched into one another, and Dolours became preoccupied with the small square of sky visible through her window.

Political Withdrawal and the Hunger for Food

The Price sisters did not join the dirty protest undertaken by some women in Armagh. Their distance from that campaign formed part of a wider, gradual questioning of the movement. The 1978 bombing of the La Mon House hotel, which killed twelve people and severely burned dozens more, forced Dolours to confront whether she could accept a campaign that might burn civilians to death. When the IRA ordered her to avoid women who had chosen not to take part in the protest, she resigned rather than obey. Although she and Marian had become legendary in the IRA for their sacrifices, Dolours thereafter described herself as a freelance republican.

Her political doubts developed alongside a bodily crisis rooted in the earlier hunger strike. Dolours later explained that refusing food as a political act had disrupted the ordinary understanding of eating as a condition of living; the force-feeding in England had compounded that estrangement from nourishment. In Armagh, where several other women had recently developed anorexia, the sisters stopped eating again despite no longer being on hunger strike. Marian’s weight fell sharply. A confidential government assessment concluded that leaving her in prison would leave her to die, even though she had been imprisoned for crimes in which no one was killed.

On 30 April 1980, Marian was released and went under an assumed name to the Royal Victoria Hospital in Belfast for treatment. The government said she had received intensive medical care for three years but could no longer be treated in Armagh. She left the hospital the next day, prompting an outcry and tabloid claims that anorexia was an IRA ruse for a velvet prison escape. Dolours was relieved that her sister had survived, but the release also broke a pattern that had defined their lives. They had been linked as Albert Price’s daughters, student protesters, members of the Unknowns, prisoners, and hunger strikers. Dolours had expected that their ordeal would end together; Marian’s departure felt to her like separation from a Siamese twin.

Illness, Separation, and Overlapping Loss

Dolours remained in Armagh as her condition deteriorated. In 1981, Cardinal Tomás Ó Fiaich wrote to Margaret Thatcher after visiting her in the prison infirmary, describing her as listless, scarcely able to walk, and in need of help on the stairs. He warned that she was dying and urged her release, while also fearing the violence that her death might provoke. Thatcher refused, saying that Dolours’s condition would be watched closely. In mid-April, Dolours was transferred from Armagh to the secure ward at Musgrave Park Hospital; she weighed seventy-six pounds when admitted. She hoped that Bobby Sands, whose hunger strike had become a focus of intense public attention, might arrive at the same hospital so she could offer him a final salute. He never came, and died on 5 May.

Armagh also brought together people whose lives were bound by losses they did not know how to interpret. After police found a gun during a raid on the home of Maria McKee, she spent several months in the prison and overlapped there with Dolours. Maria allowed Dolours to do her hair, unaware that Dolours had driven her son Kevin McKee across the border to be shot. The meeting joined domestic intimacy to concealed responsibility in the same prison space. Maria’s son remained missing when she died, and her extended family kept his name alive by giving it to new boys born into the family.

Across these episodes, Armagh was neither simply a refuge nor merely a backdrop. Its communal life could soften the isolation the Price sisters had known at Brixton, while its walls contained their political doubts, the consequences of force-feeding, and Marian’s near-fatal illness. It was also a point of contact between prisoners and bereaved families, sometimes without their knowing the histories that connected them. The sisters’ arrival there fulfilled their demand to serve their sentences in Northern Ireland; their years in the prison showed how little a change of location could resolve.