Dolours Price—Marian Price

Dolours Price and Marian Price’s relationship took political form as well as familial form: the sisters moved together from protest into the Irish Republican Army and, after imprisonment in England, sustained a hunger strike whose demand was that they be returned to Northern Ireland as political prisoners. Their solidarity was not simply a shared background. In Brixton Prison, where they were held in separate cells, their determination to remain together became part of the strike itself: they would come off it together or not at all.

Shared political formation

On 1 January 1969, the sisters were among the student protesters who set out from Belfast for Derry to protest discrimination against Catholics in Northern Ireland. The marchers hoped that peaceful action could challenge entrenched injustice, and some believed that a violent response might expose the authorities as the televised crackdown at Selma had done. Its route through unionist villages brought taunts and obstruction; on the fourth day, the marchers were asked whether they would accept the possibility of being hurt. They answered yes. The risks they accepted were shared, but the later consequences were especially formative for Dolours and Marian.

After the attack at Burntollet Bridge, both sisters were changed by what they had experienced. For Dolours, the violence broke her confidence that peaceful protest could bring the change Ireland needed. She later understood joining the Irish Republican Army not as a departure from her family’s convictions but as a return to them. Marian joined the organization too. The sisters continued attending school by day, while their nighttime absences reflected the secrecy surrounding membership in a banned organization. Their shared decision thus developed within a family and community where silence could be a practical protection as well as a political habit.

Membership and equality

In 1971 Dolours approached a local commander and asked to join. Her induction took place in the front room of the Price home on Slievegallion Drive, where she swore to promote the organization’s objectives and obey orders from a superior officer. Her mother sat in the next room, apparently behaving as though she did not know what was taking place. Marian also joined the Provisionals, but the evidence gives particular attention to Dolours’s insistence that membership mean equal participation rather than auxiliary service.

When Seán Mac Stíofáin initially proposed that Dolours join Cumann na mBan, the women’s auxiliary, she rejected a supporting role. She wanted to fight as a soldier and perform the same work as a man. A special meeting of the Provisionals’ Army Council then decided that women could join as full members for the first time. Dolours believed that her ambition and republican family background mattered, while also speculating that the mass imprisonment of men may have made the change necessary. This opening was not evidence that she would receive special treatment. Soon after her swearing-in, she was ordered to clean a heap of dirty, mismatched, rusty bullets with steel wool. She disliked the menial task but obeyed: the order tested her commitment to the discipline she had accepted. The sisters’ shared membership therefore rested on a new formal possibility for women, but it exposed them to the same demands of obedience and service.

Brixton and the hunger strike

After their conviction at Winchester Castle, Dolours and Marian were sent to Brixton Prison. They were the only women held in the facility, an overcrowded, overwhelmingly male institution. Although each was segregated in her own cell, they encountered the prison’s gendered attention during their short daily exercise periods and movement through its corridors. Dolours was assigned the number 286185; institutional numbering marked an imposed identity, while the sisters’ political purpose remained their own.

They had already stopped eating by the time they entered Brixton, taking only water. Their demand was that they be repatriated to serve their sentences as political prisoners in jails in Northern Ireland. They intended to continue the strike even if it meant death. Hugh Feeney and Gerry Kelly, held in other prisons, joined them, so the action extended beyond the sisters; nevertheless, their shared resolve gave it a particularly intimate centre. On 3 December, after roughly two and a half weeks of the strike, officials restrained Dolours in a chair bolted to the floor and force-fed her through a tube. The mixture included raw eggs, orange juice and liquid Complan. She vomited it up, and afterward, in the exercise yard, told Marian she did not think she could endure the procedure again. Marian told her she could come off the strike. The exchange made support more than an insistence on endurance: Marian acknowledged Dolours’s physical limit, while Dolours’s eventual position was that the sisters would end their protest together, not separately.

Mutual resolve and what followed

The sisters’ shared condition was explicit in their reported declaration: “We’ll come off together or not at all.” The statement made their bond a political commitment as well as a personal one. It did not remove the bodily differences of the ordeal—Dolours had been force-fed while Marian had not yet undergone the procedure—but it refused to treat either sister’s decision as independent of the other’s. The strike’s danger was individual and immediate; the sisters answered it with a collective boundary.

On 8 June 1974, a statement by Dolours and Marian, alongside Hugh Feeney and Gerry Kelly, said they had been on hunger strike for 206 days. The figure records the duration as the strikers themselves presented it and shows how far the confrontation had extended beyond the initial weeks in Brixton. Their transfer was not immediate; the sisters were eventually taken to an air force base on the way to Durham. The account of the transfer preserves a moment of reunion and excitement: Marian ran into Dolours’s cell, and Dolours later recalled being overcome with excitement. After prolonged separation within the prison’s controlled spaces, seeing one another again carried the force of a small release.

The relationship’s significance in this history lies in the way it joins political choice to practical care. The sisters shared the transition from protest to armed organization, but their best-documented expression of solidarity came under prison pressure: separate cells, a demand for repatriation, a dangerous hunger strike, and a decision not to end it one at a time. Their closeness did not make the physical ordeal identical for both; instead, it shaped how they faced its unequal burdens and how they defined its conclusion.