Home Office

The Home Office was the government department involved in the response to Dolours Price and Marian Price’s hunger strike at Brixton Prison. As the sisters demanded repatriation to serve their sentences as political prisoners in Northern Ireland, the department defended force-feeding as a measure to keep them alive, arranged for a psychiatrist to assess them, and helped frame the eventual end of the practice. Its role shows how the government treated the crisis both as a medical emergency and as a political challenge to its authority.

Response to the Hunger Strike

The sisters had refused food before arriving at Brixton, taking only water, and intended to continue their strike until their demand for repatriation was met. After Dolours Price was force-fed on 3 December, Marian Price underwent the same procedure two days later. The Home Office initially presented the intervention as being in the strikers’ interests, maintaining that prison officials did not allow inmates to kill themselves. That account stood against the sisters’ experience: they were restrained and fed through tubes, sometimes vomiting while the tubes remained in their throats.

The practice became a public controversy as some of the sisters’ letters appeared in the press and reports described the physical effects of the feeds. Their deteriorating condition, including Dolours Price’s weakening teeth and the sisters’ waxy complexions, made the costs of the policy visible. The department’s stated language of assistance thus coexisted with a procedure the sisters experienced as coercive and degrading.

Assessment and Political Stakes

The Home Office sent a psychiatrist to examine the sisters. He concluded that they understood what they were doing. Marian Price later summarized the assessment by saying that the problem was that they were too sane. She also asked whether the psychiatrist could persuade Roy Jenkins, then home secretary, to visit them; he replied that Jenkins would not meet them face to face because he knew he would send them straight home.

The assessment brought the political dilemma into focus. The government feared the consequences if either hunger striker died, including the possibility of retaliatory violence, yet it also feared that granting repatriation under pressure would validate hunger strikes as a means of securing political concessions. The Home Office’s involvement therefore extended beyond medical oversight: the department was part of a government trying to keep the women alive without yielding to their demand.

End of Force-Feeding

In May, the government decided to stop force-feeding the sisters. Their resistance had become so intense that doctors judged it too dangerous to continue inserting the tubes safely; the procedure ended through a clinical decision, not because the government had accepted the demand for repatriation. Roy Jenkins then explained the policy change publicly, saying that the doctors had stopped after the sisters withdrew the minimum cooperation required for artificial feeding.

Jenkins described the task as distasteful and said the feeding had continued for 167 days. He also blamed Albert Price and Chrissie Price for encouraging their daughters rather than dissuading them from what he characterized as a slow suicide. The explanation located the immediate reason for stopping in the risks created by the sisters’ resistance, while preserving the government’s refusal to present its retreat from force-feeding as a political concession.

Institutional Significance

The Home Office’s actions reveal the limits of a policy that claimed to protect life while forcibly administering food against the prisoners’ wishes. Medical assessment and clinical judgment shaped the response, but they operated within a political dispute over whether the sisters would be recognized as political prisoners. When the doctors stopped, the department could explain the change as a matter of safety; the underlying demand for repatriation remained unresolved in the account.