was sent by the Home Office to examine them. He certified that the Price sisters knew exactly what they were doing. In summarising his diagnosis, Marian said, ‘The problem was we were too sane.’ The psychiatrist knew Roy Jenkins, the British home secretary, and Marian asked him if Jenkins might come himself to see them. Jenkins would never meet them face to face, the psychiatrist told her, because he knew that if he did, he would send them straight home.
For the government, this was an impossible crisis. Even as their bodies continued to shrink and wither, the Price sisters took on an iconic dimension. ‘They were the stuff of which Irish martyrs could be made: two young, slim, dark girls, devout yet dedicated to terrorism,’ Jenkins later recalled. He feared that the ramifications of ‘the death of these charismatic colleens’ would be incalculable. Privately, Jenkins regarded their demand for repatriation to be ‘not totally unreasonable’. But he felt that the government could not appear to be making any concessions under such duress. Terrorism was a ‘contagion’, Jenkins believed. Bending to the demands of the hunger strikers would only validate their methods and encourage others to adopt them.
But if the alternative was force-feeding, it was turning out to be a public-relations fiasco. Many members of the British public regarded the practice as a form of torture. According to their medical records, the Price sisters sometimes fainted during the procedure. On one occasion, when the sisters resisted the feeding, they were forcibly gagged, and a radio was turned up to cover their screams. Speaking at a protest outside the home of the British ambassador in Dublin, a psychiatrist decried the practice, likening it to rape. ‘The doctor here told us that he thought the first couple of times they force-fed Dotes they’d break her,’ Marian wrote in a letter to her family. ‘But it takes more than that to break our kid, some pup she is.’
Some parents, seeing their daughters, who were barely out of school, proposing to starve themselves to death, might try to prevail upon them to give up the fight. Not the Prices. ‘An awful lot of people come onto earth, eat, work and die and never contribute anything to the world,’ Albert Price told a reporter. ‘If they die, at least they will have done something.’
Their mother, Chrissie, sounded a similar note. ‘I raised them to do their duty to their country,’ she said. ‘I am heartbroken looking at them suffering, yet I am proud of them. I will not ask them to give up. I know they will win in the end.’
When Chrissie saw her daughters in prison, she kept a brave face, chatting animatedly about everything but the hunger strike until the end of the visit. Then, just as she was about to leave, she said, ‘What are you taking now?’
‘We’re taking water, Mum. We’re just drinking water,’ Dolours said.
‘Well,’ Chrissie said, with gruff composure, ‘drink plenty of water.’
There is a morbid but undeniable entertainment in watching a hunger strike unfold. As a test of the limits of human endurance, it can become a spectacle for rubberneckers, a bit like the Tour de France, except that the stakes are life and death. It is also a game of chicken between the strikers and the authorities. The case became hugely notorious. Bands like the Dubliners played benefit concerts in support of the Price sisters, Hugh Feeney and Gerry Kelly. There were regular protests outside the walls of Brixton Prison. Sixty women turned up at Roy Jenkins’s London home, chanting in support of the strikers. The father of a young girl who had been badly injured in the London bombing called for the sisters to be returned to Ireland. Even one of the loyalist paramilitary groups, the Ulster Defence Association, asked the British government to either return the girls to Northern Ireland or simply let them die. (Dolours was ‘amazed’ by that endorsement, she wrote to her family, adding, ‘It just goes to show that when it comes to the crunch, we’re all Irish together.’)
The sisters closely monitored their own coverage, listening to daily broadcasts about their condition. This was a strange experience for Dolours. She processed the stories of these two Irish girls on hunger strike as if they were about somebody else. She could never quite believe that they were talking about her. Nevertheless, she was well attuned to the propaganda value of such coverage, and she knew that the letters she wrote home about her