Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland

Though the Price sisters achieved their goal of relocation to Northern Ireland, they suffered greatly in prison there. Fellow inmates in the all-female facility received Dolours and Marian as heroes, the staff was nonintrusive and generally laid back, and day to day life was hospitable. After their torturous two years in Brixton, however, “the Price sisters were ready to retreat, somewhat, from their posture of political activism” (177). By the end of the 1970s, Dolours resigned her IRA membership and reconsidered the value of violent protest, deciding that the IRA had gone too far. Marian agreed. Without their IRA commitment to ground them, both sisters began to mentally and physically unravel.

The prison first released Marian in April 1980 for more intensive medical care than they could provide. Her departure left Dolours without her sister by her side for the first time during the Troubles. The following year, Dolours’s condition was such that the prison released her and remitted her remaining sentence. She had nearly starved to death, not by hunger strike but by anorexia. Throughout Dolours’s steady decline, Prime Minister Thatcher refused to intervene on the woman’s behalf. This refusal characterized her engagement with IRA.