Marian Price

Marian Price was a Provisional IRA member whose roles as explosives courier, operational leader, prisoner, and later supporter of dissident republicanism made her one of the most enduring figures in the Price sisters’ story. Her life repeatedly intersected with that of her sister, Dolours Price: they joined the movement, worked in the Unknowns, faced imprisonment and hunger striking together, and were eventually separated by illness and release. In later years, Marian’s continued commitment to armed struggle and an unresolved allegation about Jean McConville’s killing placed her past back under scrutiny.

Identity and Underground Activity

As teenagers, Marian Price and Dolours Price continued to attend school while disappearing at night and returning late. In West Belfast, families often did not ask where young people had been. Membership of the banned Irish Republican Army could itself lead to arrest, and secrecy extended even to parents. Marian’s early political life thus took shape in a setting where ordinary family routines coexisted with clandestine activity.

Marian joined the Provisional IRA and took on practical work that exposed her to the movement’s material risks. She and Dolours transported incendiary materials, learning that nitrobenzene, used in improvised explosives, smelled like marzipan. Materials were often prepared in the Republic of Ireland and smuggled north across the border. On one journey Marian, still a teenager and driving without a licence, encountered an army checkpoint in a car carrying explosives concealed behind a panel in the driver’s-side door. When a soldier reached for the handle, she opened the door herself and stepped out, distracting him. He waved her through without discovering the hidden payload.

Her work later included membership in the Unknowns, the unit responsible for transporting Joe Lynskey across the border to face a court-martial and likely execution. Dolours Price and their friend Hugh Feeney had joined the unit, and Marian Price joined as well. The sisters’ participation linked them to an organization operating under intense secrecy, with internal discipline extending to lethal decisions. The evidence identifies Dolours Price, rather than Marian Price, as the member specifically tasked with transporting Lynskey; Marian’s membership should not be mistaken for proof that she carried out that particular assignment.

Operational Leadership and the London Case

When the Unknowns prepared a separate operation, its head, Pat McClure, selected Dolours Price to lead it. She was appointed the operation’s officer in command, with Hugh Feeney and Marian Price as her two lieutenants. Feeney managed the operation’s money, while Marian’s position placed her among its senior organizers. Because the recruits had no experience operating behind enemy lines, McClure arranged explosives and timer training across the border. Marian’s trajectory had moved from courier work toward responsibility within a clandestine team.

The operation’s members traveled separately. Marian Price, Dolours Price, and Hugh Feeney were due to fly to Dublin from Heathrow at 12:30, by which time the rest of the team was expected to be airborne. Special Branch officers were waiting when the three arrived at the terminal. During questioning, Marian refused to provide information, including when detectives pressed her about the location of other bombs. She repeatedly put a locket in her mouth and chewed it anxiously. The interviewing chief inspector suspected it might contain poison and seized it, discovering that it was a crucifix. The episode captures both the pressure of the interrogation and Marian’s refusal to assist the authorities.

At trial, the remaining defendants were convicted. The judge imposed thirty-year sentences on Dolours Price, Marian Price, and Hugh Feeney, treating their leadership roles as grounds for a more severe penalty than that given to other members of the bombing crew. The sentence placed Marian’s organizational responsibility at the center of the case against her. It also began a prison struggle in which she and her sister would again be treated as a pair, even as the state sought to confine them separately.

Prison, Hunger Strike, and Separation

At Brixton Prison, Marian and Dolours Price were assigned numbers and closely supervised. The sisters refused food, taking only water, and intended to continue their hunger strike until death if necessary. Hugh Feeney and Gerry Kelly, held in other prisons, joined them. Their central demand was repatriation so that they could serve their sentences as political prisoners in jails in Northern Ireland. The protest made the classification of their imprisonment—not simply the length of their sentences—a central issue.

The prison authorities force-fed the sisters. Dolours Price described the feeding as a traumatic ordeal and told Marian Price that she did not think she could endure it again. Marian told her sister that she could leave the strike. The exchange shows the intimacy of their shared resistance, but also the strain that force-feeding placed on it. In May, the British government decided to stop force-feeding the Prices. Before then, both sisters had tried to resist the procedure; Dolours Price later described their struggle against the restraints and tubes, which made it increasingly difficult for doctors to feed them safely. Their resistance was not only to imprisonment but to a physical procedure that kept them alive while inflicting further trauma.

Marian’s later release from Armagh followed severe illness and prolonged medical treatment. On 30 April 1980, she left jail and went under an assumed name to the Royal Victoria Hospital in Belfast. A government spokesman said she had received intensive medical treatment for three years and could no longer be treated in Armagh. She checked out the next day. English tabloids portrayed the release as a cunning prison escape and suggested that anorexia was an IRA ruse, turning a medical crisis into another battleground over the meaning of her protest.

Dolours Price was elated that Marian was free and would live, but Marian’s release ended the sisters’ shared confinement. They had been grouped together as Albert Price’s daughters, student protesters, members of the Unknowns, and prisoners on hunger strike. Dolours later described the separation as feeling like she had been parted from her Siamese twin. The image conveys how a relationship built around repeated collective action became unsettled when Marian’s illness took her out of prison while Dolours remained behind. Marian subsequently drew back from the republican movement, but the distance was not permanent.

Renewed Political Activity and Imprisonment

In later life, Marian Price remained publicly associated with armed republicanism. After a shooting at Massereene Barracks, police traced a telephone used by the Real Irish Republican Army to claim responsibility. The phone had been bought at a Tesco supermarket in Newtownabbey the day after the shooting. CCTV showed a woman in a heavy, dark coat purchasing it and looking directly toward the camera; investigators identified her as Marian Price. The footage connected her to the purchase of the phone, not by itself to the shooting. After two days of questioning, she was released without charge.

Eighteen months later, authorities detained her again. She was charged with providing property for terrorist purposes and with an offence connected to a dissident rally in Derry, where a masked Real Irish Republican Army member read a statement threatening police officers. Marian Price had maintained that armed struggle still had a place in the present and future. Her position contrasted with Dolours Price’s inability to commit herself to the republican splinter groups that continued the violence after the Good Friday Agreement.

Marian spent the next two years in prison, including long periods in solitary confinement. Her psoriasis worsened and she lost weight. At times, prison seemed to return her mentally to her earlier incarceration in England, as if the intervening decades—including marriage, children, and life beyond prison—had vanished. Dolours Price was distraught and joined the Free Marian Price campaign, which used letters and small rallies to demand her release. Supporters described Marian as a victim of psychological torture and internment without trial; the campaign’s resemblance to the earlier effort to free the Price sisters made the past appear to recur, though Marian was now an older woman in declining health.

Friends worried that younger dissident associates might be using Marian’s standing as a Price sister and a symbol of the earlier struggle to lend their cause credibility. In 2014, after two years in custody, she pleaded guilty to both charges and received a twelve-month sentence. The judge suspended it in view of her deteriorating health and the time already served. Frail and using a walking stick, she approached the dock for sentencing. The scene marked a sharp contrast with the young operative who had once led an underground team: her political convictions persisted, but age, illness, and imprisonment had narrowed the terms in which she could act.

Jean McConville and an Unresolved Allegation

Marian Price’s possible role in the killing of Jean McConville remains an allegation, not an established finding. The book’s author recounts that Marian declined to speak for the book, that her Belfast lawyer did not respond to approaches, and that one of her daughters politely asked not to be contacted again. The author had initially associated the case primarily with Dolours Price and had not considered that Marian might also have been involved.

The suspicion developed from the sisters’ shared history: both belonged to the Unknowns and reported to Pat McClure. The author reasoned that Marian might have been the third Unknown present at McConville’s graveside and might have fired the shot. This remained an inference. The author also considered whether Dolours Price’s fierce condemnation of McConville and insistence that the killing was justified reflected the strain of reconciling not only her own conduct but the possibility of more serious conduct by her sister. That interpretation is presented as a possible explanation, not proof of Marian’s actions.

The account preserves reasons for caution. The author noted that the Police Service of Northern Ireland possessed an unredacted version of the Boston College transcript and asked why Marian would not have been charged if Dolours Price had implicated her. In 2018, the author put the case for Marian’s involvement to Mackers and Carrie at a restaurant in Drogheda. Mackers would neither confirm nor deny that Marian was the shooter; Carrie recalled that Marian had been her maid of honour and raised concern for Marian’s poor health and adult children. The author later wrote to Marian’s lawyer asking whether she would deny the allegation and received no reply. The unanswered questions leave Marian’s suspected role unresolved, while the book’s final portrait remains bound to the tension between the sisters’ closeness and the possibility that their shared clandestine life concealed acts for which the surviving record cannot supply a definitive answer.