Roy Jenkins's decision to end force-feeding Dolours Price and arrange repatriation

Roy Jenkins’s relationship with Dolours Price was defined by a crisis he could neither safely concede nor allow to end in her death. As British home secretary, he confronted the Price sisters’ demand to serve their sentences as political prisoners in Northern Ireland, while Price made her body the instrument of that demand. The government’s resort to force-feeding prolonged the standoff and intensified public opposition; its eventual end came through the sisters’ physical resistance, followed by Jenkins’s assurance that they would be transferred north.

The demand and the government’s dilemma

After their conviction at Winchester Castle, Dolours and Marian Price were imprisoned at Brixton Prison, where they were the only women in a crowded, overwhelmingly male institution. They had already stopped eating and would take only water. Their demand was repatriation to serve their sentences as political prisoners in Northern Ireland. Hugh Feeney and Gerry Kelly, held elsewhere, joined the strike. For Price, prison was where an IRA volunteer’s allegiance was truly tested: she presented the possibility of death not as a retreat from the cause but as a continuation of it.

Price connected her protest to a longer Irish history of hunger, resistance, and political sacrifice. She invoked Terence MacSwiney, who had died on hunger strike in prison, and argued that the British Empire had failed to learn from its past. In her account, the hunger striker’s own body was the ultimate weapon. This made the government’s predicament unusually stark. Officials feared that if either sister died there would be massive retaliatory violence, yet they also worried that meeting the demand under pressure would validate hunger strikes as a tactic and encourage others to use it. Jenkins privately considered repatriation not wholly unreasonable, but believed that appearing to yield to terrorism would carry its own consequences.

Force-feeding and the widening crisis

On 3 December, after the strike had lasted two and a half weeks, doctors and nurses entered Price’s cell and forcibly fed her. They restrained her in a chair, used a wooden device to hold her mouth open, and passed a rubber tube down her throat. The blended feed of raw eggs, orange juice, and liquid Complan made her gag; she vomited after the tube was removed. Marian Price was subjected to the procedure two days later. Thereafter, the medical staff arrived each morning at ten. The intervention kept the sisters alive, but it also turned the government’s response into a repeated, visible act of coercion against prisoners whose central weapon was refusal.

The sisters sometimes vomited while the tube was still in place and nearly choked. Their letters reached the press, prompting public outrage. The Home Office initially defended the intervention as care intended to prevent the prisoners from killing themselves. Yet medical records noted that the sisters sometimes fainted during feeding, and on one occasion, as they resisted, they were gagged while a radio was turned up to cover their screams. Some members of the British public regarded the practice as torture. The more forcefully the government tried to preserve the strikers’ lives, the more force-feeding threatened to discredit its position.

The physical cost became increasingly apparent. When Bernadette Devlin visited in January, she described Dolours Price’s formerly dark red hair as pale and white at the roots; her teeth had loosened and begun to decay as she bit down on the wooden mouthpiece. Both sisters looked waxy and walked with difficulty. Price nonetheless insisted that physical weakness did not amount to mental submission. Her resistance was not a claim that the feeding did not hurt: rather, she distinguished the government’s control over her body from her refusal to accept its meaning as defeat. Jenkins, meanwhile, never met the sisters. A psychiatrist sent to examine them concluded that they knew what they were doing. According to Marian Price, he said Jenkins would not see them because a face-to-face encounter would lead him to send them home.

Resistance changes the balance

By May, the sisters had endured force-feeding for months. The procedure had become a stalemate: it inflicted physical and mental trauma while also preventing the hunger strike from reaching its intended outcome. The sisters therefore changed their strategy, resisting so strenuously that the doctors could not safely insert the tubes. Dolours Price described struggling, being held down, and having steel clamps used; she screamed as the clamps hurt her gums. The sisters told the doctors that they were giving them the privilege of killing them if anything went wrong. After several such encounters, the doctors stopped the procedure because it had become too dangerous to continue. The immediate cause was clinical judgement, not a direct political concession.

Jenkins nevertheless had to account for the policy change. He said that the doctors had performed the distasteful task of artificial feeding for 167 days and had stopped because the sisters had withdrawn the minimal cooperation it required. He also blamed Albert and Chrissie Price, arguing that they had urged their daughters on rather than discourage what he called a slow suicide. The explanation exposed the government’s bind: it could present force-feeding as an effort to save lives, but the method depended on a degree of cooperation that the sisters could withhold, and its continued use carried mounting reputational and political costs.

From stalemate to transfer

The sisters’ decision still did not immediately settle the strike. On 3 June, Michael Gaughan, another IRA hunger striker, died in Parkhurst Prison. Hearing the announcement on television, Dolours Price feared that it might be Hugh Feeney or Gerry Kelly. The authorities said Gaughan died of pneumonia; his family suspected complications associated with force-feeding. His death sharpened the stakes for Jenkins. He later recalled forebodings of menace and thought of the reaction that had followed Terence MacSwiney’s death. He feared not only a wider political backlash if the Price sisters died, but that he himself might never again move safely through public life. Reluctantly, he concluded that the government had to capitulate.

On 8 June, Dolours Price, Marian Price, Gerry Kelly, and Hugh Feeney announced that they were ending a strike that had lasted 206 days. They said Jenkins had assured them they would be returned to Northern Ireland. Their statement distinguished their purpose from suicide: they had sought political-prisoner status and transfer, not death. The assurance ended the immediate confrontation, but fulfilment was delayed. The sisters were moved first to the women’s wing at Durham Prison. In March 1975, the governor told them they were going to Armagh. Dolours Price welcomed the destination as near enough to home, and the sisters embraced as they prepared to leave.

The outcome was therefore neither a simple victory for Jenkins nor an uncomplicated surrender by the government. The doctors’ refusal to continue feeding followed the danger created by the sisters’ resistance; Jenkins then provided the assurance that allowed the hunger strike to end, while the actual transfer took months. Their exchange remained mediated by policy, medical decisions, public pressure, and fear of what death might unleash. The episode shows how an effort to control the prisoners’ bodies came to strengthen the political force of their refusal—and how Jenkins’s eventual assurance resolved the immediate crisis without erasing its cost or delay.