The World: Ulster’s Price Sisters: Breaking the Long Fast

Each day passes and we fade a little more. But no matter how the body may fade, our determination never will. We have geared ourselves for this and there is no other answer.

Dolours Price, May 27 letter to her mother

Sometimes we can achieve more by death than we could ever hope to living. We ‘ve dedicated our lives to a cause and it’s supremely more important than any one individual’s life.

Marion Price, May 27 letter to her mother

Fate and politics have a way sometimes of cheating would-be martyrs. Belfast’s Price sisters—Dolours, 23, and Marion, 20—were sentenced last Nov. 15 to life in prison for their part in the March 1973 London car bombings that injured 238 persons and led to the fatal heart attack of another. In an effort to gain attention for their Irish Republican cause and force British authorities to return them to Ulster for the rest of their prison term, the sisters pursued a grim path toward self-imposed death: for seven months they systematically starved themselves.

At week’s end the British government announced that the Prices had ended their long fast after what appeared to be an eleventh-hour decision by Westminster to avert the risk of violent reprisals by the sisters’ Irish Republican Army supporters. As soon as their health permits, the pair may be transferred from London’s maximum-security Brixton Prison to jail in Northern Ireland.

Dolours and Marion are daughters of a former I.R. A. officer who once tunneled his way out of a Londonderry prison. The sisters were raised amid the revolutionary passions of Belfast’s working-class Andersontown district, an I.R.A. stronghold. As teenagers, they shared a liking for the Beatles and the Rolling Stones as well as for Irish folk dances. Both girls were and are devout Roman Catholics: a notebook that Dolours was carrying when she was arrested for the London bombings contained notes on the Virgin Mary along with details about her I.R.A. contacts.

According to their older sister Clare, 26, the girls showed little active interest in politics until 1968, when they joined the civil rights movement, which was dedicated to securing equal voting rights for Northern Ireland’s Catholic minority. The turning point in the Prices’ conversion to hard-line militancy came when they participated in the 1969 civil rights march from Belfast to Londonderry; Protestant hooligans ambushed and stoned the young marchers.

Dolours and Hugh Feeney, an I.R.A. comrade who is also in jail for the London bombings, formed the “People’s Democracy,” a militant offshoot of the civil rights movement, and took their cause to the streets. The sisters had been studying to become teachers. But they also began to investigate the revolutionary polemics of Che Guevara and Soledad Brother George Jackson. The girls learned the techniques of bombmaking and small-arms use in I.R.A. training courses across the border in the Republic. By the time they plotted the London bombings, both girls had become seasoned veterans of back-alley skirmishes with British troops and of slow marches behind the coffins of I.R.A. dead.

Friends and relatives of the Price sisters have claimed that the pair were unjustly prosecuted and tried: that they received no legal advice until four days after their arrest, that authorities purposely shifted the trial from London to the more conservative town of Winchester. Their supporters have also charged that prison officials brutalized the sisters by force-feeding them during their long hunger strike. Force-feeding —in which a person’s mouth is clamped open while a greased tube is inserted through his nose and a “complan” solution of iron, orange and milk-soaked glucose is poured directly into the stomach—usually causes acute vomiting.

The procedure can provide a starving victim with 1,750 calories a day, but it is an exhausting and frightening experience. Shortly before the government announced that the Price girls had ended their fast, their sister Clare reported that they weighed less than 98 Ibs. each, that their skin had turned waxen, their hair was falling out and their mouths were covered with sores. The prison dentist confirmed that the sisters’ teeth had been loosened under pressure from the mouth clamp. Last month, after doctors had said that the girls would probably die sooner from continued force-feeding than from fasting, officials halted the procedure.

At week’s end it was still uncertain how soon, if ever, the Prices would recover from their ordeal. Or whether, even if their flirtation with martyrdom has been happily aborted, they will be able to retain their heroine status once they are no longer a political cause celebre.