Michael Gaughan

Michael Gaughan appears briefly but decisively in the account of the hunger strike by Dolours and Marian Price: imprisoned for a bank robbery, he joined the strike months after them and died in Parkhurst Prison. News of his death made the possibility of the sisters’ deaths immediate for both the prisoners and the British government.

Identity and Imprisonment

Gaughan was an Irish Republican Army volunteer, although he had not taken part in the bombing mission for which the Price sisters and other members of their crew had been convicted. He was serving a sentence for robbing a bank in London and was held at Parkhurst Prison on the Isle of Wight. The account supplies little of his life beyond these details, locating him instead within the wider struggle over republican prisoners’ status and treatment.

Hunger Strike and Death

Gaughan began his hunger strike in April, after Dolours Price had been refusing food since November. She resented his later arrival, feeling that he had joined the protest only after it was already under way. Yet his death on 3 June changed the strike’s stakes. Price was watching television when the announcement came that an IRA prisoner on hunger strike had died. Her first fear was that the dead man might be Hugh Feeney or Gerry Kelly, who were striking in other prisons.

The authorities said Gaughan died of pneumonia. His family suspected that complications associated with force-feeding had contributed to his death. The narrative leaves that disagreement unresolved, but makes clear why the possibility of force-feeding-related complications was difficult to dismiss: Price herself had recently endured a forced feeding in Brixton Prison, where officials restrained her and passed a tube into her stomach.

Consequences and Narrative Significance

Gaughan’s death intensified Roy Jenkins’s concern about the consequences of allowing the Price sisters to die. Remembering the political repercussions after Terence MacSwiney’s death, Jenkins feared a wave of recrimination and violence; he eventually concluded that he had to yield to the demand for the sisters’ transfer to Northern Ireland. On 8 June, the sisters, Gerry Kelly and Hugh Feeney announced that they were ending their 206-day strike after Jenkins assured them they would be returned.

Gaughan was not one of the four prisoners who made that announcement, and the account does not say that his death alone determined the government’s decision. His place in the episode is narrower and more consequential: the announcement of his death turned a feared outcome into a recent precedent. The strike’s political pressure was no longer only a matter of what might happen if the sisters died; it was shadowed by the death of another prisoner already on hunger strike.