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 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 condition would be circulated to the press. After a lifetime of being introduced as one of ‘Albert’s daughters’, Dolours was tickled to have achieved a notoriety of her own. She teased Albert about it, telling Chrissie, in one letter, to ask him ‘how does he like being called “Dolours and Marian’s father”?’
Nearly a year had passed since the bombings, and the sisters were still being force-fed, when the case took a bizarre turn. In February 1974, a seventeenth-century painting by Vermeer, of a young girl plucking a narrow guitar, was stolen from Kenwood House in Hampstead. A pair of anonymous typewritten letters arrived at The Times, demanding that Dolours and Marian Price be returned to Northern Ireland and threatening that if they weren’t, the painting would ‘be burnt on St Patrick’s night with much cavorting about in the true lunatic fashion’. As proof that this threat was sincere, one of the letters contained a sliver of canvas from the Vermeer. In a strange coincidence, on a trip to London two years earlier, Dolours had visited Kenwood House and had stopped to look at that very painting. In a statement, Chrissie Price appealed to whoever it was that took the artwork to return it unharmed. She noted that Dolours – ‘who is an art student’ – had made a special plea on behalf of the painting.
One evening in May, a suspicious package appeared in a churchyard near Smithfield Market, in London. It was wrapped in newspaper and tied with string. A squad of officers arrived at the Church of St Bartholomew the Great. In this atmosphere of heightened tension, the package could be a bomb. But it wasn’t: it was the painting, which had been returned, just as Dolours had requested.
During this same period, a second art theft was perpetrated in the name of the Price sisters. A collection of old masters worth millions of pounds was stolen from a house in County Wicklow, in Ireland. Among the paintings that went missing were a Velázquez, a Vermeer, a Rubens, a Goya and a Metsu. Once again, a ransom letter appeared, demanding that the hunger strikers be returned ‘at once to serve their sentences in Ireland’. These paintings, too, were later recovered.
In June, an elderly Irish earl and his wife returned to their home in Tipperary after a formal dinner one night to discover several strange men lurking in their driveway. One of the men pistol-whipped the earl. Then they dragged his wife across the gravel, shoved them into a vehicle, blindfolded them both, and drove away. The kidnappers informed the couple that they were being held as ‘hostages for the Price sisters’. They were confined for several days in a dark room at gunpoint, but the prisoners ended up taking a liking to their captors and came to regard the whole experience as something of an adventure. The kidnappers ‘could not have been kinder’, the earl said afterwards, adding that he had been well fed with a full Irish breakfast each morning and steaks and chops for lunch. The hostage takers had even supplied him with the racing pages. The earl and his wife were eventually released, because of a dramatic turn in the case.
In May, the British government had decided to stop force-feeding the Prices. Up to that point, the sisters had suffered through the procedure with as much dignity as they could muster. They did not want to show any fear. But at a certain point, it seemed that they had reached a stalemate: the force-feeding might be inflicting mental and physical trauma on them, but it was also keeping them alive. So, rather than endure the feeding in hostile submission, the sisters opted to change their strategy. One day, they offered ‘maximum resistance’, as Dolours recounted in a letter, ‘which involved the expected, undignified scenes of struggling, holding down, steel clamps, and – in my case – screaming, because believe me, that steel clamp hurts the old gums’. It was a battle. The sisters struggled so hard that it became difficult for the doctors to insert the tubes safely into their stomachs. They informed the doctors that they were giving them ‘the privilege of killing us’ if something went wrong. After a few of these fraught encounters, the doctors simply stopped, refusing to continue with the procedure, because it was just too dangerous. It was a clinical judgement, not a political one, that ended the force-feeding.
Just the same, it would fall to Roy Jenkins to explain the change in policy, and he announced that after carrying out the ‘distasteful task’ of artificial feeding for 167 days, the doctors at Brixton had stopped because ‘the minimal cooperation necessary for this process was withdrawn by the sisters’. Jenkins laid some blame on Albert and Chrissie Price, who, rather than discourage their daughters from a ‘slow suicide’, had instead ‘urged them on’.
Dolours and Marian were thrilled that the force-feeding had stopped. Almost immediately, they began to lose a pound a day. Dolours counted each pound as she shed it, weighing herself at intervals, marvelling at her control over her own body. ‘We are now reinforced by the fact that we no longer desire or crave food,’ she wrote to a friend. She began to see her own organism in the most clinical, mechanical terms. ‘I am now my own tool,’ she mused. ‘I am also the craftsman wielding the tool. I am carving away at myself.’
There was talk, in Brixton, of a place called the terminal ward. It had always sounded ominous to Dolours, but when she and Marian were finally moved there, it seemed positively luxurious. Now, rather than live in separate cells, the sisters could be in the same room. There was even a private toilet next to the room, so when they needed to urinate (because all they produced at this point was urine), they no longer had to rely on a chamber pot. ‘Getting nearer to Paradise by the minute!’ Dolours joked. There was a mirror in the cell, and she would stare at herself, her long nightdress hanging from her skeletal frame, and imagine that she looked like the ghost of some former inmate, haunting the wing.
By this point, in the assessment of one of the doctors treating them, the Price sisters were ‘living entirely off their own bodies’. They had become so weak that even walking across the room could leave Dolours fatigued, her heart thumping in her rib cage like a drum. They could not sit or lie in any one position for long or they would get bedsores from their bones pressing against their skin; to alleviate this, their beds were fitted with ‘ripple mattresses’ that had a thin cushion of circulating air.
‘Each day passes and we fade a little more,’ Dolours wrote to her mother. The sisters lay side by side in their beds, with three prison officers on constant guard. Dolours worried about Marian – worried that she was more anxious to die, more ready to accept it. Sometimes Dolours would be talking to her, reminiscing or gossiping, a valiant facsimile of their old animated chatter, and she would look across and see Marian, dreadfully pale and thin, her eyes closed, her lips parted, her fingers long and spindly from starvation. The sight of her sister frightened Dolours, and she would say, ‘Marian, wake up.’ Don’t go first, she would think. Don’t go first.
‘The likelihood that the sisters may end their lives must now clearly be envisaged,’ Jenkins warned in early June. He had considered going to see the Prices, hoping, perhaps, that he might be able to dissuade them from dying. But he decided against it, on the grounds that, as the person charged with deciding their fate, he had a duty to ‘stand back a little’ and be dispassionate.
Albert Price, after a visit to his daughters in the terminal ward, emerged and told the press that they were ready to meet their fate. ‘They are happy,’ he said. ‘Happy about dying.’ The Provisionals braced for violence, warning that if the sisters died, ‘the consequences for the British Government will be devastating’.
Reports in the press claimed that a priest had visited the sisters and administered the last rites. In a letter to a friend, Dolours wrote, ‘Well, please give our love to our family and all our friends.’ She concluded, ‘We’re ready for what is ahead.’
Then Britain blinked. On 3 June, another Irish hunger striker, Michael Gaughan, died in Parkhurst Prison, on the Isle of Wight. Gaughan was also an IRA volunteer, though he had played no role in the bombing mission. He was imprisoned for robbing a bank in London, and when he went on hunger strike, Dolours Price had been annoyed. She’d been striking since November when he started in April, and she felt that Gaughan was a Johnny-come-lately, ‘getting in at the heels of my hunt’. She was watching TV when the news was announced, and when she heard the words ‘One of the IRA prisoners on hunger strike has died,’ her stomach seized and she wondered if it was Hugh Feeney or Gerry Kelly. The authorities would claim that Gaughan had died of pneumonia, but his family suspected that his death had been precipitated by complications associated with force-feeding, a scenario that was hardly difficult to imagine.
Roy Jenkins was starting to have what he later described as ‘forebodings of menace’. He had been thinking, lately, of Terence MacSwiney and the huge wave of recrimination to which his death had given rise. What kind of reaction might ensue if the Price sisters died? Jenkins was loath to give the impression that he would make any decision under duress, but privately he began to fear that if Dolours and Marian succeeded, he himself could be a target for the rest of his life. This wouldn’t just mean that he would have to forgo holidays in South Armagh. The Irish were everywhere. Nowhere would be safe: if those damned girls delivered on their intention, he worried, ‘I might never again be able to walk in freedom and security down a street in Boston or New York or Chicago.’ Reluctantly, Jenkins decided that he had no choice but to capitulate.
On 8 June, Dolours, Marian, Gerry Kelly and Hugh Feeney released a statement. ‘We went on hunger strike 206 days ago in support of our demand for Political Prisoner status and transfer to prison in Northern Ireland,’ they wrote. Roy Jenkins had assured them that they would be returned to Northern Ireland, they continued. So they had decided to terminate the strike. ‘Ours was never a suicide mission,’ they maintained, ‘since we did not set out to kill ourselves but only to secure just and indeed minimal demands.’
The transfer was not immediate. Instead of being shipped back to Ireland, Dolours and Marian were relocated to the women’s wing at Durham Prison. But one day in March 1975, at lunchtime, all the prisoners at Durham were ordered into their cells. Something in Dolours’s heart told her that this might be the day. She went to her cell and started packing. She put on her coat, gathering her few belongings. Then the governor walked in and announced that they were going home. ‘Or – not home. You’re going to Armagh.’
‘That’s near enough for me,’ she said.
Marian ran into her cell and they hugged each other so tightly they could hardly breathe. They shovelled the last of their belongings into bags, and the screws rushed them out into the hall. Dolours was so drunk with excitement that she hugged the prison governor.
The sisters were taken to an air force base. The flight took off, and England receded into the distance. On board the plane, a man in uniform made coffee. They had been flying over water for some time when Dolours looked out of the window and suddenly glimpsed green land below. She burst into tears.
‘That’s not Ireland yet,’ Marian said. ‘That’s the Isle of Man.’
They flew some more. Then Dolours looked out and saw green in the distance again. ‘Is that it, Marian?’ she asked.
‘I think that’s it,’ Marian said.
As the Price sisters disembarked, British Army photographers took their picture, the flashbulbs lighting up the early evening sky. The two women were overjoyed to be home, but distressed about the timing of their arrival. In February, Bridie Dolan, their aunt, had died. As a minor republican icon, she was treated to a big funeral; the authorities sent photographers to snap surveillance shots of the mourners. Four days after the funeral, Chrissie Price died of pancreatic cancer. Until very recently, it had looked as though the mother would outlive her daughters, not the other way round, and Dolours and Marian were distraught. They petitioned for compassionate leave to attend Chrissie’s funeral, but the request was denied. Instead they sent a wreath of Easter lilies. Four hundred people joined the slow-moving cortège from Slievegallion Drive to Milltown Cemetery. Albert walked alongside the coffin, his head bowed. The whole solemn procession was led by a young girl playing bagpipes. She wore the black beret and dark glasses of the IRA.
15
For weeks after their mother disappeared, the McConville children clung together, trying to hold on to the family home. They had to be there, in the event that Jean returned. But eventually the social welfare authorities intervened, and two cars arrived at Divis Flats to take the children into care. Helen McConville loaded her younger siblings into the vehicles, promising that they were going away only ‘’til Mummy comes back’. As the children piled into the seats, Helen looked up and saw their neighbours from Divis gathered on the concrete balconies, watching silently. ‘Fuck youse all,’ she muttered. Then they drove away.
The oldest child, Anne, was still in the hospital. Robert was still interned, Archie was old enough to work and take care of himself, and Agnes remained with Granny McConville. But Helen, Michael, Tucker, Susan, Billy and Jim were brought to South Belfast and up a long, curving drive to an imposing four-storey redbrick orphanage called Nazareth Lodge. It proved to be a wretched environment. Many of the children living there had been wards of the state since infancy and seemed numbly accustomed to institutional living. But the McConville kids had grown up in a home. They were haunted by their mother’s disappearance, and by their father’s death before that, and they had now been living wild for several months. The orphanage was run by an order of stern nuns who were legendary for their sadism. One former resident described the facility as ‘something out of Dickens’, a bleak, pinched place where beatings and harsh punishment were routine.
It was around this time that Michael McConville became a master of escape. From the moment he was removed from the flat at Divis, he would contrive ways to sneak out and run back to West Belfast. He was a restive, streetwise child – a child of the Troubles – and he was angry. At one point when he was dealing with the welfare authority, an official suggested that his mother had ‘abandoned’ the children. ‘That’s lies!’ Michael shouted.
In March 1973, the same month that Dolours Price was bombing London, Michael and Tucker were summoned to court in Belfast on a shoplifting charge, and a decision was made to move them out of Nazareth Lodge – out of Belfast altogether, in fact, to the De La Salle Boys’ Home, twenty-two miles away in County Down, near the village of Kircubbin. The drive to their new home did not take long, but as far as Michael was concerned, it could have been a hundred miles. The institution occupied a converted Victorian mansion nestled in the deep-green countryside, as well as a series of newer cottages where the children were housed. The property was vast – 250 acres – and it felt wide and wild and open after a lifetime spent in the brick-and-concrete confines of Belfast. The grounds included a school, a swimming pool, tennis courts and a football pitch. They even had a billiard table.
Kircubbin was, in the words of one person who resided there in those years, ‘a pure nightmare’. A subsequent government investigation revealed that a ‘culture of physical force’ had pervaded the establishment, and both monks and lay employees would resort to violence on the merest of pretexts. Children were pummelled with fists, strapped with belts, and lashed across the knuckles with a thin wooden cane that snapped down with such ferocity it felt as if it might sever their fingertips.
For all his grit and savvy, Michael was still just eleven years old. Tucker was nine. There were older children there, in whom this culture of abuse had already been well ingrained. They bullied the McConville boys without mercy. The Christian Brothers who ran the orphanage purchased clothing for their charges in bulk, so the children walked around in garments that did not fit – shirtsleeves that rode up past the elbow, capacious adult trousers that needed to be held up with a belt, urchin ensembles that compounded the sense that this was a storybook purgatory for Belfast’s misbegotten. The adults at Kircubbin put the children to work. Sometimes the staff would hire them out to neighbouring farms, as labour, to pick potatoes.
In the evenings, as everyone watched a programme in the darkened TV room, monks in their long robes would instruct certain children to come and sit on their laps. Sexual abuse was rampant at the home. Michael was never molested himself, but at night he would watch from under the covers as shadowy adults entered the dormitory with a torch and plucked sleeping boys from their beds.
Michael and Tucker ran away. They felt a duty to be back in Belfast in the event that their mother reappeared. But each time the boys ran off, they were returned, and each time they came back, they were beaten. The McConville boys ran away so frequently that eventually the staff at Kircubbin took their shoes away, on the theory that even if they managed to get off the grounds and as far as the country road where they might thumb a ride back to Belfast, it would slow them down if they were barefoot.
The authorities may simply not have realised at the time the kind of predatory behaviour that was happening inside the walls of Kircubbin, but if they did get any inkling of the environment at the home, it did not stop them from sending other children there. Eventually the twins, Billy and Jim, were reassigned from Nazareth Lodge to Kircubbin. As the car made its way from Belfast down the coast of Strangford Lough in the direction of the orphanage, the boys sat in the back, consumed by apprehension. They were seven years old. They became the youngest children at Kircubbin, and it was as if they had been fed to the wolves. They were physically assaulted by the older kids and Billy was sexually abused by the grown-ups. The boys could not turn to any of the adults for help, because so many of the staff were molesting children that the behaviour was silently tolerated. All the Christian Brothers, one former resident explained, ‘were in it together’. Some of the McConville children were so scarred by their experiences in the Catholic institutions of Northern Ireland that they developed a fear of priests in general. Even as adults, the mere sight of a man of the cloth could fill them with anxiety. (The De La Salle Brothers later admitted that widespread sexual abuse took place at Kircubbin during this period. The Sisters of Nazareth, who administered Nazareth Lodge, have also acknowledged a pattern of physical abuse at that home.)
Helen McConville was too old to be kept in care against her will but still too young to be legal guardian to her siblings, so she struck out on her own, staying with Archie or with friends. She found work at a company that made funeral shrouds, and as a waitress. During her stay at Nazareth, she had briefly met a boy her age named Seamus McKendry, who was working as an apprentice carpenter at the orphanage. After that initial encounter, they fell out of touch, but two years later, when Helen was waitressing, they crossed paths again – and fell in love. They married when she was eighteen.
There were times when it seemed that there was no home that could hold Michael McConville. Eventually, after escaping on one too many occasions, he was moved once again, sent this time to a ‘training’ school not far from the town of Newtownards. Known as Lisnevin, this school had recently been established, in spite of protest from the surrounding community, as a ‘secure’ residential facility for boys. Even calling the place a school was a bit of a euphemism: Lisnevin was a juvenile detention facility for kids who were too rough or too wilful for places like Kircubbin. Michael’s new housemates included serial escapees like him, along with a rogues’ gallery of misfit adolescents who had been arrested for burglary, assault and paramilitary activity. The main building was a converted mansion, the centrepiece of some once grand country seat. It now featured ‘isolation rooms’ – cells stripped of furniture, with bars on the windows, in which errant children could be locked in solitary confinement. The property was surrounded by a tall perimeter fence, which was electrified and equipped with an alarm that would sound if anyone should try to escape.
Lisnevin might have seemed like a gulag, but Michael loved it. He would later joke, wryly, that Lisnevin was the best home he ever had. The staff liked to say that the fences were for keeping people out, not keeping people in, and it may be that by sealing out some of the tragedy and mania of the Troubles, Lisnevin created a space in which a victim like Michael McConville could finally settle down and begin to heal. The facility was nondenominational, and there were regular sectarian skirmishes between Catholic and Protestant residents. But Michael steered clear of trouble. He got to know a kindly nun, Sister Frances, who looked out for him. She befriended his siblings as well, and for years afterwards, even after she moved away to America, she would send them cards every Christmas, with a dollar bill folded inside. It was a minor gesture, but to the motherless McConvilles, it meant the world.
Michael was eligible for weekend leave, like a furlough from prison, so he would go back to visit Belfast, staying with Archie or Helen. When they were together, the children never spoke about what had happened to their mother. It was too painful. But their sense of the family as a unit had begun to erode. Increasingly, they were each alone, fending for themselves in unforgiving territory. As soon as Michael turned sixteen, he left Lisnevin and set out in search of a job and a place to live – in search of a life. He had been living in institutions for nearly a third of his years. But this was how it worked: when you reached sixteen, they simply opened the door. They did very little to prepare you for this abrupt emancipation. Nobody taught you how to rent a flat or find a job or boil an egg. They simply let you go.
When Brendan Hughes returned to Long Kesh after being apprehended in his guise as a toy salesman, Gerry Adams was still there, doing time. Adams had tried, twice, to escape. But he was not the tactician that Hughes was, and he had been caught and given a sentence for his efforts. Adams had settled into life in Long Kesh. Compared with life on the outside – on the run, sleeping in a different bed every night, fearing the knock on the door, never knowing if you might be recognised on the street and shot on sight – he found the predictable routine of prison life relaxing. The wire enclosures surrounding the Nissen huts where the prisoners lived were known as ‘cages’, and each had a number. Hughes and Adams shared Cage 11. The two revolutionaries had been close before this stint in confinement, but now their bond grew tighter as they cohabited in the intimate confines of a cell. The hut was draughty and Spartan, and chill winds whipped through the camp. In the winter, they wore socks over their hands, like gloves, to keep warm.
They nurtured themselves on endless conversation. Adams, who had always had a scholarly bent, encouraged the men around him to harden their minds. The prisoners organised lectures and discussion sessions. They would meet at ‘the wire’ – the fences separating the different enclosures – and discuss politics, history, and the latest news from the war outside. A fresh-faced, headstrong young IRA prisoner organised cultural classes. He wrote poetry and would become the official press officer for the republican prisoners. His name was Bobby Sands.