to secure her. She tried to struggle, but she was weak; she hadn’t eaten in more than two weeks. Once they had restrained her, she watched in terror as a pair of hands prised open her jaws. An object was shoved roughly into her open mouth. It was a wooden bit with a hole in the centre of it. Another pair of hands produced a thin length of rubber hose, then inserted the tip through the hole in the bit and began to slide this tube down her throat. She could not catch her breath as the tube snaked past her tonsils, and she gagged, nearly suffocating. She tried to bite the tube, but the wooden contraption prevented it. Several officials held her body back, and then she felt liquid coursing down the rubber coil and into her belly.
It took only a few minutes for the substance to slosh down into her, but to Dolours it felt like an eternity. Before they had even removed the tube, she vomited the food up. ‘The feed’, as she came to think of this forcibly administered diet, consisted of a combination of foods that had been whipped together in a blender – raw eggs, orange juice and liquid Complan, a concentrated blend of milk, minerals and vitamins. After the force-feeding, Dolours was released to the exercise yard, where she saw Marian, who had not yet been subjected to it. Dolours told her sister about the ordeal and said that she did not think she could go through it again. You don’t need to, Marian said. You can come off the strike.
No, Dolours replied. We’ll come off together or not at all.
Two days later, the prison doctors started force-feeding Marian as well. It became a gruesome ritual. Each morning at ten o’clock, the crew of doctors and nurses would arrive in their cells, tie them down, and pour the food down their throats. ‘We are learning to breathe a bit more easily when the tube is down,’ Dolours wrote in a letter.
Force-feeding was a controversial practice that had been used on another group of unruly women, the suffragettes. After being force-fed in Holloway Prison in 1913, one of the suffragettes, Sylvia Pankhurst, called it torture, noting that ‘infinitely worse than any pain was the sense of degradation’.
‘I don’t want the stuff forced down me,’ Dolours wrote in a letter. ‘And while I am not in a position to offer physical resistance, that’s not to say that I can’t mentally resist and reject the whole horrible happening.’ Sometimes one of the sisters would vomit while the tube was still down her throat and nearly choke to death. Some of their letters were published in the press, and there was a great outcry about the force-feeding. The Home Office responded, at least initially, with a claim that these measures were being taken simply in the interests of helping the strikers, and that British prison officials were not in the habit of allowing their inmates to kill themselves.
In January, Bernadette Devlin, the student leader from the People’s Democracy march at Burntollet Bridge, who had gone on to win a seat in Parliament at Westminster, paid a visit to the Price sisters. Devlin was shocked by the sight of Dolours. Her hair, which had been a rich dark red, ‘has lost colour to the extent that it is fair, and actually white at the roots’, Devlin said. Because she had begun to struggle with her captors during the feed, biting down on the wooden bit, Dolours’s teeth had started to loosen and decay. Both sisters’ complexions had grown waxy. They shuffled when they walked.
Some of the personnel who administered the force-feeding were cruel. One doctor mocked the sisters’ conviction, joking during feeding sessions that it was ‘all for the cause’. A female attendant made a comment about the Ulster Irish breeding ‘like rabbits’ and living off the English.
‘We built your roads!’ Dolours snapped back, not so enfeebled that she would shrink from an argument. ‘We were happy in our own country ’til you English took it away from us … The Irish are here because of youse!’
Other officials were more kind. The sisters had a good rapport with the prison doctor, a man named Ian Blyth. He called them ‘my girls’, and as the hunger strike progressed, he would challenge them to arm-wrestling contests. They gamely played along, knowing full well that the purpose of this pantomime was to register how rapidly their strength was dissipating. A psychiatrist