Say Nothing

by Patrick Radden Keefe

  In letters to Fenner Brockway, Dolours indicated that she had also begun to reconsider the efficacy of violence. ‘Dolours, like her sister Marian, [has] become convinced that the violence of the IRA is all wrong,’ Brockway wrote to Humphrey Atkins, the latest secretary of state for Northern Ireland. ‘I have told Dolours, as I did Marian, that if they were released from prison on the grounds that they had repudiated their previous action they would probably be shot by the IRA, and are therefore safer in prison.’ But by that time, the Price sisters were grappling with an affliction that was more pressing and immediate than politics.

  ‘We didn’t ever have a normal relationship with food or eating,’ Dolours said later. The months of starvation and force-feeding in England had irrevocably complicated their relationship with nourishment. During a hunger strike, Dolours pointed out, ‘your body is telling you it wants food, and you’re telling your body, “No, you can’t have food … We will not win this struggle if I give you food.” So there you’re setting up a very difficult mindset, which has to be rock solid, or you will eat food. Because, you know, that’s what the body does. That’s what we do. We eat food and then we live.’ After that experience of self-abnegation, Dolours continued, the force-feeding only compounded the trauma, because ‘it further alienated us from the process of sustenance, the whole process of putting food into your body’. As a result, she concluded, ‘we both ended up with very, very, very distorted notions of the function of food and we both found it very difficult to re-establish a proper relationship with the process of eating’.

  There may have been some element of social contagion at play within the intimate confines of Armagh jail. Several other women in the facility had recently succumbed to anorexia. The sisters were no longer on hunger strike, but now they, too, stopped eating. Marian’s weight began to drop precipitously. A confidential government assessment eventually concluded that ‘to leave her in prison would be to leave her to die (for crimes through which no one was killed)’.

  On 30 April 1980, Marian was released from jail and went voluntarily, under an assumed name, to the Royal Victoria Hospital in Belfast. A government spokesman said that she had been receiving ‘intensive medical treatment for the past three years’ but that she could no longer be treated in Armagh. On 1 May, she checked out of the hospital. This news sparked an outcry. English tabloids implied that she had engineered a velvet prison break – that anorexia was simply the latest clever ruse by the IRA.

  Dolours was elated to see her sister walk free. Marian had been close to death, and now she would live. But deep down, she felt conflicted. ‘All along, a little part of me had always hoped and thought that because we’d been through everything together, that again this would be a together thing,’ she reflected later. The sisters had always been lumped together – as Albert’s daughters, as student protesters, as members of the Unknowns, and as prisoners and hunger strikers. Now, for the first time, they were uncoupled. To Dolours it felt ‘like I’d been separated from my Siamese twin’.

  Like Brendan Hughes, Bobby Sands had grown up Catholic in a Protestant neighbourhood. But when Sands was seven years old, his neighbour discovered that he and his family were Catholics, and they were ejected from their home. Eventually, Sands had joined the IRA. On 1 March 1981, he stopped eating. His last morsel was a prison ration orange. It tasted bitter. ‘I am standing on the threshold of another trembling world,’ Sands wrote on a scrap of toilet paper as he commenced his strike. ‘May God have mercy on my soul.’ Two weeks later, a second protester initiated a strike, and one week after that, a third, until eventually there were ten men on hunger strike at Long Kesh. There was no reason to think that Margaret Thatcher would be any more sympathetic this time around than she was during the previous strike. ‘Faced with the failure of their discredited cause, the men of violence have chosen in recent months to play what might be their last card,’ Thatcher said.

  But four days after Sands commenced his strike, a politician named Frank Maguire died, triggering a dramatic chain of events. Maguire was a nationalist who held a seat in the British House of Commons, representing Fermanagh and South Tyrone. His sudden death would necessitate a by-election. Initially, Maguire’s brother considered running to take over his seat, but he was approached by some republicans who urged him to reconsider. An improbable but possibly ingenious plan was being hatched: Bobby Sands would run for the seat, from behind bars. This would be a publicity stunt, to be sure – but a resonant one. What better way to garner attention and support for a hunger strike than to have one of the strikers run for office? If Sands were to win, it would dramatically upend the power dynamics of the strike: the British government might allow some unkempt blanketman to die in prison, but what about a Member of Parliament?

  This gambit marked a radical departure for the Provos. There had been moments in history when republicans ran candidates for elective office, but the movement had long been suspicious of the parliamentary process. For generations, many republicans had adhered to a tradition of ‘abstentionism’ – staying out of politics altogether. There was a sense that one’s revolutionary fervour could be diluted all too easily by the system. This had been part of the basis for the split in 1969 between the Official IRA and the Provisionals – a sense that the Officials had become too political and that politics would inevitably lead to accommodation.

  ‘It has been a tradition down the decades, at least in the North, for republicans not to vote,’ Gerry Adams would say. But as he began to argue for greater political organisation by the IRA and Sinn Féin, he saw, for the first time, the potential for a new mode of republican politics. ‘There will be a time,’ he vowed, ‘when Sinn Féin will be a power in the land.’

  To Adams, who had been thinking through ways in which the struggle could become more political, the Sands election represented an extraordinary opportunity. There were many people in Northern Ireland who might not support the violence of the IRA but would happily vote a republican hunger striker into elected office. Working with Danny Morrison, the editor of Republican News, Adams began to mould a new philosophy that, on the surface, seemed to embody a contradiction: Sinn Féin would run candidates for office while the IRA continued to bring a bloody war to the British. Morrison would eventually capture the strategy in a famous aphorism, asking, at a Sinn Féin gathering, ‘Will anyone here object if, with a ballot paper in one hand and an Armalite in the other, we take power in Ireland?’

  On 10 April 1981, Bobby Sands was elected to Parliament. He had not eaten for forty-one days. But even then, his demands were not met. Sands’s condition continued to deteriorate, and now Margaret Thatcher faced a crisis. On 25 April, she spoke with Humphrey Atkins, her Northern Ireland secretary. ‘Sands is clearly determined,’ Atkins told her.

  ‘He’s only got a few days,’ Thatcher said.

  ‘They are talking of two or three,’ he said. ‘But to be honest with you Margaret, they really don’t know.’

  ‘No,’ Thatcher said, with tart annoyance. ‘Because it’s not a position with which anyone has very much experience.’

  Atkins noted that, because the strikers were staggered, even if Sands died and they could weather the backlash and bad publicity, the next striker was likely to die a few weeks later. ‘One hopes very much that we can prevent the thing going on week after week,’ he said. ‘I think there is bound to be a weak link.’

  Thatcher speculated that the IRA leadership might not allow the strike to continue, ‘if one died and then a second one died and then a third one died and nothing happened’.

  ‘It doesn’t look very attractive,’ Atkins said.

  ‘No,’ Thatcher agreed. ‘It doesn’t.’

  Dolours Price followed the news of the hunger strike closely. But since Marian had left Armagh, she had started, gradually, to unravel. ‘I was lost without Marian,’ she recalled. Her weight was dropping rapidly, and she seemed increasingly isolated and unstable. At one point in May 1980, she swallowed a dozen sleeping pills. Whet
her this was a bona fide effort at suicide or a cry for help was not clear, but her stomach was pumped in the prison hospital.

  ‘I move as a clockwork doll,’ she wrote to Fenner Brockway, describing numb, empty days in which her only refuge was sleep. As her thirtieth birthday approached, she reflected that nearly all of her twenties had been ‘wasted’ in prison. She thought about having a child and noted that this ‘natural instinct’ might never be fulfilled. ‘It does hurt me deeply,’ she wrote, ‘and will scar the rest of my life.’

  Marian Price had visited Dolours only a handful of times since her release. When she prepared to leave at the end of these visits, Dolours would cling to her, unable to let go. Having pledged, years earlier, to serve her time without complaint, provided she could do so in Northern Ireland, she was now feeling more indignant. ‘It is not fair,’ she wrote to Brockway. ‘I will have served eight years in March, even murderers don’t serve that, I am doing life for causing an explosion.’ As a member of the Unknowns, Price had been involved in other operations that were genuinely deadly. But she hadn’t been charged with those actions, and she did not mention them now. Instead she pointed out that she no longer paid even ‘lip service’ to the IRA, and that she had been made ‘to feel an outcast, a traitor to their cause because I have declared it to be no longer mine’. Even so, she pledged her allegiance to the hunger strikers in Long Kesh. ‘I will be eating (as well as any anorexic can!) but mentally I will live and starve each day with them,’ she wrote.

  Brockway was so moved by these letters that he made a direct appeal to Margaret Thatcher, arguing that the sisters had been ‘caught up in adolescent emotion’ when they perpetrated the bombing in London, and that they had assured him they took part in the operation only on the condition that ‘no human being would suffer’. Brockway described himself as ‘almost their spiritual adviser’ and said that both sisters had ‘become convinced that violence is wrong’. He assured Thatcher that if Dolours were released, she would dedicate herself, ‘despite the dangers’, to ‘urging her fellow Catholics to refrain from violence’.

  Thatcher was not so easily persuaded. ‘I recognise that you are convinced that Dolours has renounced violence,’ she wrote, delicately suggesting that Brockway may have been a bit too ready to take the wily Price sisters at their word. Thatcher wrote that she had made enquiries about Dolours’s current health and that ‘the doctors consider that she is a much tougher personality than her sister’. One thing puzzled Thatcher. In the margin of one of Brockway’s letters, she jotted, ‘I am amazed that Marian goes to see her so rarely. That itself must be disturbing for a twin.’ It was indicative of the closeness of the Price sisters that Thatcher erroneously concluded that they were twins. But even so, Thatcher pointed out that Dolours seemed to harbour republican ‘sympathies’, and, should she be released, ‘I doubt whether her old friends will let her alone.’

  As Bobby Sands stood for election, Dolours Price was declining rapidly. The writer Tim Pat Coogan, who visited her in C Wing at Armagh, was struck by her intelligence but thought she had a ‘lemur-like air’. She ‘counteracted the effects of the disease by dressing tastefully and attending carefully to her hair and manicure’, Coogan noted, but she had grown too exhausted for most activity.

  On 3 April 1981, an Irish cardinal, Tomás Ó Fiaich, wrote to Thatcher that he had visited Price and that she had been confined for the past month to the infirmary, ‘listless and companionless, scarcely able to walk and requiring help on the stairs’. The cardinal had visited Dolours before, prior to her deterioration, and he remembered her as a vivacious character. What she had become, he noted, was ‘a gaunt spectre, prematurely aged and deprived of any further desire to live’. He asked Thatcher to recognise ‘the stark fact that this girl is dying’ and pointed out that, were she to die, it could precipitate an explosion of recriminatory violence. The cardinal begged Thatcher to release Price, saying that ‘even next week may be too late’.

  Still, Thatcher would not relent. She wrote back to Ó Fiaich saying that she understood the ‘anxiety’ of the Price family but that she had no intention of releasing Dolours. ‘Miss Price’s condition will continue to be very closely watched,’ she said. In mid-April, Price was rushed from Armagh to the secure ward in Musgrave Park Hospital, in Belfast. By the time she was admitted, she weighed seventy-six pounds.

  Outside the hospital, Northern Ireland was once again engulfed in rioting. Street fights were raging in Belfast and Derry. Every day, people in the hospital would say that Bobby Sands would be there soon, and it seemed, for a time, as though Price would be joined in the secure wing by the young hunger striker with whom she felt such an affinity. Even in her wan state, this was something to look forward to. She hoped that she would be able to offer Sands one final salute.

  He never came. On 5 May 1981, Bobby Sands died. It was the sixty-sixth day of his strike, and just as Terence MacSwiney’s death had six decades earlier, the story made headlines around the world. Gerry Adams later recalled Sands’s death as having ‘a greater international impact than any other event in Ireland in my lifetime’. One hundred thousand people poured onto the streets of Belfast to watch his coffin being carried to the cemetery. There was an overwhelming upsurge of support for the republican cause on both sides of the border in Ireland. Thatcher showed no remorse over taking a firm line. ‘Mr Sands was a convicted criminal,’ she declared after his death. ‘He chose to take his own life. It was a choice his organisation did not allow to many of its victims.’

  But while the world focused on her fatal contest of wills with Bobby Sands, Thatcher had quietly shown that she was capable of mercy when it came to Dolours Price. Two weeks before Sands died, Price had been released ‘on medical grounds’, and the balance of her twenty-year sentence had been remitted. The official explanation for this decision was that she was ‘in imminent danger of sudden collapse and death’.

  For years afterwards, Price would weep when she thought of that moment, in which Bobby Sands perished and she was set free. The Price sisters had stared down the British crown on two occasions, and in both instances, the damage they inflicted upon their own bodies was enough to make them prevail. Sands may have been less fortunate, in that he perished, but he was more fortunate in the sense that he achieved more in martyrdom than he ever might have had he lived. And Humphrey Atkins and Thatcher had been wrong when they speculated that among the ten strikers there must be at least one weak link. After Sands died, another nine followed, starving to death one by one throughout that summer.

  But the link that Dolours Price felt to Bobby Sands ran deeper still. ‘We were “force-fed” for a long time, it meant we did not die,’ she wrote years later. ‘Once the British Medical Council refused to “force-feed” prisoners, then the British Parliament rushed a bill through … making it an impossibility to keep prisoners by shoving a tube down their throats!’ Not long after the Price sisters concluded their strike, the World Medical Association had issued a landmark declaration finding that force-feeding was unethical. With the determination made to stop force-feeding Dolours and Marian, the policy had indeed changed in the United Kingdom, when Roy Jenkins announced that hunger strikers would no longer be subjected to force-feeding in British prisons. By triumphing in the particular manner that she had back in 1974, Dolours Price had unwittingly given rise to the circumstances that would allow ten hunger strikers to starve to death seven years later. In subsequent years, she would wonder if this did not make her, in some way, responsible.

  17

  Field Day

  When the news that Dolours Price had been released became public, it prompted an angry outcry. Ian Paisley, the fanatical loyalist reverend and politician, described the suspension of her sentence as an ‘outrageous scandal’, arguing that Price continued to pose a very real threat to society, because she had ‘murder in her heart’. Some observers suggested that Humphrey Atkins had been ‘taken for a sucker’ by the Price sisters – that Dolours and Marian were unrepent
ant terrorists who had deliberately cultivated eating disorders in order to secure their own release. Anorexia, which at that time was not widely understood, was described as ‘the slimmers’ disease’, as if what had instigated the affliction was not a hunger strike or force-feeding, but vanity. Paisley and others speculated darkly that Dolours might have been released as part of a secret deal associated with Bobby Sands and the other hunger strikers at Long Kesh.

  Years later, Dolours would describe what it was like for a person ‘who spent many years in prison and came out to a new world, a different world, a world they had to learn to live in all over again’. After more than eight years behind bars, she rejoined her family and began to recover. Slowly, she started to put on weight. Technically, she was released ‘on licence’, meaning that there were conditions attached to her freedom, and if she violated those conditions, she could be returned to prison at any time. One of those terms was that she was not to leave Northern Ireland. But several months after her release, she petitioned for permission to take a month-long summer holiday in the Republic. Margaret Thatcher personally reviewed the request, and ultimately the permission was granted.

  Price wanted more than a holiday in the South, however. She wanted to relocate altogether, to Dublin. The atmosphere in Dublin had always been looser, less pinched, and more culturally vibrant than in Belfast. With its cafés and canals, it could feel a world away from the conflict in the North, and it seemed like an ideal place for Price to pursue her new ambition: to become a writer. She found work almost immediately, writing freelance articles for newspapers. It was, in some ways, a natural vocation for her; she had always possessed a gadfly personality, and this would allow her to remain tangentially involved with political issues while keeping well away from the paramilitary front lines. In December 1982, a year and a half after her release, she published a story in the Irish Press about anorexia, in which she noted that as an illness it was really all about control, and that well-known women such as the Princess of Wales and Jane Fonda had suffered from it. She suggested, erroneously, that anorexia was correlated with a ‘higher than average IQ’.