Policy prohibiting force-feeding hunger strikers

The policy prohibiting force-feeding hunger strikers took shape through a confrontation in which medical intervention kept Dolours Price and Marian Price alive while inflicting physical and psychological trauma. Their resistance led doctors to stop the procedure on clinical safety grounds, and the resulting change in British policy later became entangled with the deaths of hunger strikers in 1981.

The strike and the force-feeding regime

Shortly after their conviction at Winchester Castle, the Price sisters were held in Brixton Prison, where they were the only women in an overcrowded, overwhelmingly male facility. They had already stopped eating, taking only water, and intended to continue their strike until death if necessary. Hugh Feeney and Gerry Kelly, held in other prisons, joined them. Their demand was repatriation to serve their sentences as political prisoners in jails in Northern Ireland.

The British government feared that a death in custody could provoke major retaliatory violence, but initially refused the sisters’ demand. On 3 December, after more than two weeks without food, doctors and nurses restrained Dolours in a chair bolted to the floor and forced a tube through her mouth and down her throat. The mixture of raw eggs, orange juice and liquid Complan made her vomit. Force-feeding thus served two opposing purposes: it maintained the sisters’ lives, while subjecting them to a procedure they experienced as coercive and physically harrowing.

Resistance and the medical decision

The sisters endured the feedings for months, attempting not to show fear, before changing their approach. They offered what Dolours described in a letter as “maximum resistance”: struggling against the staff and clamps, making it difficult for doctors to insert the tubes safely. The sisters told the doctors that, if the procedure went wrong, they were giving them the privilege of killing them. After several such encounters, the doctors stopped force-feeding because continuing had become too dangerous. The account distinguishes this decision from a political concession: it was a clinical judgement.

Roy Jenkins subsequently explained the change in policy by saying that, after 167 days of artificial feeding, the Brixton doctors had stopped because “the minimal cooperation necessary for this process was withdrawn by the sisters”. He also blamed Albert Price and Chrissie Price for encouraging their daughters rather than discouraging what he called a “slow suicide”. The sisters welcomed the end of the procedure, but continued to refuse food. They began losing about a pound a day, and Dolours described herself as both the tool and the craftswoman, carving away at her own body. In the prison’s terminal ward, where they could share a room, she watched her skeletal reflection in a mirror.

From a prison decision to a wider policy

The cessation of force-feeding in the Prices’ case became part of a broader shift. The World Medical Association issued a landmark declaration that force-feeding was unethical. The account also describes the British Medical Council’s refusal to force-feed prisoners and says that the British Parliament rapidly passed legislation making it impossible to continue the practice. Roy Jenkins announced that hunger strikers would no longer be force-fed in British prisons. Together, the medical judgement at Brixton, professional opposition and parliamentary action turned the sisters’ immediate case into a change in policy.

This history is presented against a prison system in which republican prisoners disputed their classification as ordinary criminals and sought recognition as political prisoners. The end of force-feeding did not resolve that larger conflict over status or the right to hunger strike. It did, however, remove a means by which prison authorities had kept strikers alive against their will, leaving the refusal of food to carry a more direct risk of death.

The consequence remembered in 1981

The policy change acquired a grave later significance during the 1981 hunger strike. Dolours Price wrote that the sisters had been force-fed for a long time and that this meant they did not die. She linked the decision not to force-feed prisoners with the deaths that followed: by prevailing in Brixton in 1974, she believed, she had unwittingly helped create the circumstances in which ten hunger strikers could starve to death seven years later. After Bobby Sands died, the other nine followed, one by one, during that summer.

Price’s later anguish gives the policy a double meaning in the narrative. It was a victory over a procedure she and Marian had resisted, and a change grounded in medical ethics as well as the immediate danger to the sisters. Yet the protection won at Brixton also meant that later hunger strikers could die without being forcibly kept alive. Price wondered whether that consequence made her, in some way, responsible; the account presents this not as proof of individual causation, but as the lasting moral burden she attached to the policy’s unintended aftermath.