County Wicklow enters the account as the setting for a high-value art theft carried out in the name of Dolours Price and Marian Price. The stolen works and the ransom demand connected the theft to the sisters’ hunger strike and their imprisonment in Britain.

Setting in the account

The book places the theft at a house in County Wicklow, Ireland. It gives no further description of the house or its owners; the location matters as the scene of a second art theft attributed to the Price sisters during the same period as another painting-related ransom demand.

The stolen collection

The collection of old masters was worth millions of pounds. Among the missing works were paintings by Velázquez, Vermeer, Rubens, Goya and Metsu. A ransom letter demanded that the hunger strikers be returned at once to serve their sentences in Ireland. The paintings were later recovered.

Narrative significance

County Wicklow anchors a striking escalation in the campaign conducted in the sisters’ name: the demand for their return was made through the theft of a valuable collection, rather than through a direct appeal alone. The recovery of the paintings closes the episode materially, while the account leaves the theft’s precise circumstances and the identities of those responsible unspecified.