Gerry Kelly

Gerry Kelly was a young Irish republican who took part in the 1973 bombing operation in London and then joined a prolonged prison hunger strike with Dolours and Marian Price and Hugh Feeney. His story links two forms of confrontation: a campaign designed to make England experience the political conflict of Northern Ireland at home, and a prison protest that sought to prevent the state from defining its participants as ordinary criminals.

Identity and Recruitment

Kelly came from the Lower Falls in Belfast. When Dolours Price first met him at a call house where volunteers were being recruited for a dangerous operation, he was a handsome young man who had recently been on the run after escaping from prison. He had been serving a sentence for bank robbery. Price thought well of him, describing him as a grand lad; hers was a first impression of a recruit, not yet a portrait of the man he would become in the operation.

The volunteers assembled after Gerry Adams warned them that the mission would be dangerous and require them to stay away from home. He gave the larger gathering few details, emphasizing instead the risk of severe punishment. After those unwilling to proceed had left, roughly ten remained. They were mostly very young, and the operation’s leadership was assigned to Price, with Hugh Feeney and Marian Price as her lieutenants. Kelly was among the recruits, but the evidence does not assign him a command post. The team was sent across the border for intensive training in explosives and timers because none had experience operating behind enemy lines.

The London Operation

The Unknowns selected targets intended to raise particular political questions, then submitted their choices to the leadership in Belfast for approval. Kelly later explained the political logic: British audiences had grown accustomed to catastrophic reports from Northern Ireland, and the planners believed that bombs in central London could disrupt that distance and indifference. The operation was timed to coincide with a referendum on whether Northern Ireland should remain part of the United Kingdom. In Kelly’s account, the aim was to bring the reality of colonialism home to England.

The team prepared four cars for the journey. Stolen in Belfast, they were taken to the Republic of Ireland, repainted, and fitted with false number plates. Their concealed devices combined more than a hundred pounds of powder explosives, gelignite, and alarm-clock timers. Customs officers delayed one car at Liverpool, prompting the team to cancel the planned passage of two further vehicles; four cars ultimately went to England. The targets were a British Army recruiting centre in Whitehall, the British Forces Broadcasting Service on Dean Stanley Street, New Scotland Yard, and the Old Bailey. The plan called for telephone warnings before the devices detonated, with orders to avoid casualties in the wake of the civilian deaths on Bloody Friday.

The participants were meant to leave England before the bombs were discovered. At Heathrow, however, officials stopped members of the team as they were preparing to fly to Dublin. Price, Marian, and Feeney were separately intercepted by Special Branch officers; the evidence does not identify Kelly among those three. The subsequent trial ended in convictions for the remaining defendants, while Roisin McNearney was acquitted. Kelly’s participation therefore carried a consequence very different from the planned escape: imprisonment and a public dispute over the status under which the convicted volunteers would be held.

Conviction and Prison Protest

At sentencing, the court imposed maximum terms on the convicted defendants. The judge gave Price, Marian, and Feeney thirty years on account of their leadership roles, then announced a reduction for them to twenty years. The evidence does not specify Kelly’s individual sentence. The defendants responded by making political declarations in court, identifying themselves as Irish Republican Army volunteers and claiming prisoner-of-war status rather than accepting the criminal classification imposed by the state.

Soon after conviction, Kelly was held at a different prison from the Price sisters and joined their hunger strike, as did Feeney. The sisters had stopped eating before entering Brixton Prison, where they were segregated in individual cells and assigned new institutional identities; Price was Prisoner No. 286185. They intended to continue the strike until death if necessary. Their demand was for repatriation to serve their sentences as political prisoners in prisons in Northern Ireland. Kelly’s participation made the protest a shared action across separate prisons, not simply a refusal by the sisters to accept their confinement.

The British government feared that a death among the hunger strikers could provoke extensive retaliatory violence. On 3 December, officials forcibly fed Price after two and a half weeks on strike, restraining her in a chair and administering a liquid mixture through a tube. Afterward, she told Marian that she did not think she could endure the procedure again; Marian told her she could leave the strike. This episode belongs to the sisters’ experience, rather than to a documented incident involving Kelly, but it shows the physical pressure and political stakes within the protest he had joined.

Ending and Significance

On 8 June, after 206 days, Kelly, Price, Marian, and Feeney issued a joint statement announcing that they would end the strike. They said the protest had been undertaken to secure political-prisoner status and transfer to prisons in Northern Ireland, and that Roy Jenkins had assured them they would be returned there. They also rejected the characterization of the action as a suicide mission: their stated purpose, they said, had been to obtain what they considered just and minimal demands. The statement records Kelly’s place in the collective decision to stop, while the available account does not establish when or where he was subsequently transferred.

Kelly’s documented arc is concentrated in the operation, conviction, and hunger strike. It does not provide a later biography or describe his life after the protest. Within those limits, his trajectory clarifies the continuity between the two confrontations: the London mission sought to force political realities into public view, while the strike challenged the state’s authority to strip republican prisoners of political identity. His role was not only that of a participant in an armed operation, but also of one of four prisoners who publicly ended a 206-day protest on terms framed around status, transfer, and the meaning of their imprisonment.