Hostage-taking of an Irish earl and his wife

The Hostage-taking of an Irish earl and his wife was a June kidnapping undertaken in the name of Dolours Price and Marian Price during their prison hunger strike. The couple were seized from their home in County Tipperary and held for several days; their release followed a dramatic turn in the case, as force-feeding of the sisters came to an end. The episode joined coercive spectacle to an outcome that, in the hostages’ own account, was unexpectedly humane.

Background and Stakes

The kidnapping took place against the sisters’ confrontation with prison authorities over force-feeding. In May, the British government had decided to stop the procedure. Before it ended, Dolours Price and Marian Price had changed their response to it: rather than endure it in hostile submission, they offered maximum resistance. Their struggles made it increasingly difficult for doctors to insert feeding tubes safely, and they told the doctors that they were giving them the privilege of killing them if something went wrong. After several such encounters, the doctors refused to continue because the procedure had become too dangerous. The account stresses that this was a clinical judgment, not a political one.

The hostages were explicitly told that they were being held as hostages for the sisters. Their seizure therefore made the prison dispute the stated stake of the abduction, though the narrative does not attribute the kidnappers’ decision to any named individual or describe a specific demand made to the authorities.

Seizure and Captivity

One night in June, the earl and his wife returned home after a formal dinner and found several unfamiliar men lurking in their driveway. One of the men pistol-whipped the earl. The kidnappers dragged his wife across the gravel, forced both of them into a vehicle, blindfolded them, and drove them away. They were then confined for several days in a dark room, under gunpoint.

The experience did not remain, in the couple’s recollection, a simple account of captors and victims. The prisoners took a liking to the men holding them and came to regard the ordeal as something of an adventure. The earl later said the kidnappers could not have been kinder: they fed him a full Irish breakfast each morning, served steaks and chops for lunch, and even supplied the racing pages. These details sharply contrast the abduction’s physical violence and the threat implicit in an armed captivity with the considerate treatment the earl described.

Release and Significance

The earl and his wife were eventually released after a dramatic turn in the case. The surrounding chronology places that turn alongside the end of force-feeding: the government had decided in May to stop it, and the doctors discontinued the procedure when the sisters’ resistance made it unsafe. The account connects the hostage-taking’s resolution to this change without claiming that the captors’ actions caused the doctors’ clinical decision.

The episode’s particular force lies in that contrast. A violent seizure was carried out under the banner of solidarity with the imprisoned sisters, yet the captives’ retrospective description complicates any straightforward picture of cruelty: they recalled meals, newspapers, and a growing fondness for their captors even as they had been taken at gunpoint and confined in darkness. Their release, following the turn in the force-feeding dispute, closes the incident without erasing either the coercion of the kidnapping or the unusual account of its human relations.