A well-dressed, articulate, middle-aged woman, Marian Price wouldn't look
out of place on a Sinn Féin negotiating team meeting Tony Blair or Bertie
Ahern.
But she'd face jail and hunger-strike all over again rather than take
part:"I would be ashamed to be on any delegation to Downing Street given
what's on the table. The only reason for going there should be to negotiate
the freedom of our country.
"If I went to agree to British rule, restoring Stormont, or signing up to a
partitionist police force, I'd hope at least to have the decency to hang my
head in shame."
The last time Price visited London was to blow it up. With her sister
Dolours and Gerry Kelly, now a Sinn Féin negotiator, she was part of an
11-strong IRA unit which in March 1973 planted bombs at the Old Bailey, New
Scotland Yard, Whitehall, and the British Forces Broadcasting Office.
They were arrested attempting to fly home from Heathrow Airport. A 200-day
hunger-strike and force-feeding regime made the sisters household names. "I
did what I believed in," Price says. "Nothing Provisional IRA or Sinn Féin
leaders do can denigrate that.
"But I'm very angry when I see so much has been sacrificed for so
little.All these lives have been lost - IRA volunteers, civilians,
policemen, British soldiers - and for what? If this is what they're settling
for, we all could have joined the SDLP back then."
Price (50) came from a staunch republican family in west Belfast. She
believes IRA membership is too often explained away as an emotional response
to events: "I made an ideological choice to join. It wasn't a reaction to
Bloody Sunday, internment or anything else."
Her childhood ambition was to be a nurse. She left school with a string of
'O' and 'A' levels and secured one of only five places on a course at the
Royal Victoria Hospital. She denies there was a huge contradiction between
IRA membership and nursing.
"One day, a wounded British soldier was brought into casualty. He was
wearing a dirty vest. He looked frightened. I felt very sorry for him. That
night, I told my comrades and one joked that I should have finished him off.
"I asked why on earth I'd do that. He was no longer a soldier, he'd been
taken out of the battlefield. He was a patient now, I'd have no difficulty
looking after him."
The bombing mission was the Provisional IRA's first to England. The idea and
planning came from the sisters. Price travelled on the Dublin-Liverpool
ferry with one of the four car bombs which was then driven to London.
Did she never consider the morality of planting bombs in densely populated
areas?: "The warnings given were twice as long as in Belfast. That was a
conscious decision because we knew the English lacked experience of
evacuation. We didn't want civilian casualties, from a moral or pragmatic
viewpoint."
Yet there were casualties. Two bombs were defused but those at the Old
Bailey and Whitehall exploded, injuring 200 people, mainly with flying
glass. Price expresses regret but says the injuries "weren't intentional".
"I've never had a sleepless night over anything I've done as an IRA
volunteer. Bombs are weapons of war. Western states have used them far more
brutally than we ever did.
"George Bush and Tony Blair send other people's sons out to die without ever
venturing onto the battlefield themselves. They drop far bigger bombs from
B52s on women and children and they don't give any warnings at all." Price
is an atheist: "When I look around the world, I think if there's a God, he's
a bad God."
After her arrest at Heathrow, she was interrogated for five days. "I was
stripped in the police station and given a grey blanket to wear. I was
embarrassed because there were a lot of policemen about and I was sexually
innocent.
"They used no physical violence but I wasn't let sleep once. The lights were
kept on in my cell and the police were there at all times. If I started to
doze off, they clapped their hands."
She remained remarkably unfazed: "I remember a detective saying to me, 'I
bet your mother will be proud of you' and I thought 'yes, she will be very
proud of me'. My father was on a bombing mission to England in the forties,
so it was a family tradition."
The sisters were charged and moved to Brixton prison. They were
strip-searched daily and locked 23-hours a day in cells where again the
lights were permanently on.
As a 19-year-old facing potential life imprisonment in England, wasn't she
depressed?:"It never entered my head. I'd known what I believed in and the
risks involved.
"My mother, her sisters, and my granny had been in Cumann na mBan. My Aunt
Bridie was badly injured lifting an IRA arms dump in the 30s. It exploded
and she lost her hands and sight. She was 26.
"When we were growing up, it was never a case of 'poor Bridie'. We were just
proud of her sacrifice. She came home from hospital to a wee house with an
outside toilet, no social worker, no disability allowance, and no
counselling. She just got on with it."
Price claims that during their 1973 trial, the bombers learned they had been
compromised by a high-placed informer in Belfast who knew all the details
but didn't take part in the operation.
"It emerged in court that customs at Liverpool realised one of the cars had
false number plates. They phoned Scotland Yard but were told to wave it
through.
"The authorities allowed the bombs to happen. They had details of the
operation in advance that could only have come from a senior figure in
Belfast. We learned that photos of Dolours and I had been circulated at
airports and ports across Britain nine hours before the bombs exploded,"
says Price.
She claims that during the trial they agreed it would be less damaging for
the IRA if they appeared "young, stupid and incompetent", rather than
publicly exposing an informer. She claims to know the identity of the
alleged informer whom, she says, remains in a leadership position.
The Price sisters, Gerry Kelly and Hugh Feeney went on hunger-strike in
Brixton prison in November 1973 as part of a campaign to be repatriated to
serve their sentences in Northern Ireland.
"Four male prison officers tie you into the chair so tightly with sheets you
can't struggle," says Price. "You clench your teeth to try to keep your
mouth closed but they push a metal spring device around your jaw to prise it
open.
"They force a wooden clamp with a hole in the middle into your mouth. Then,
they insert a big rubber tube down that. They hold your head back. You can't
move.
"They throw whatever they like into the food mixer - orange juice, soup, or
cartons of cream if they want to beef up the calories. They take jugs of
this gruel from the food mixer and pour it into a funnel attached to the
tube.
"The force-feeding takes 15 minutes but it feels like forever. You're in
control of nothing. You're terrified the food will go down the wrong way and
you won't be able to let them know because you can't speak or move. You're
frightened
you'll choke to death."
Price was force-fed 400 times over six months. "I knew nothing about
force-feeding beforehand," says Price. "I thought it was like when you hold
a baby's nose and put a spoon in its mouth. Ignorance was bliss."
After the sisters went on hunger-strike, the British Home Office dispatched
eminent psychiatrist Peter Scott to examine them. "He said he'd been sent to
certify us so we could be force-fed. He left saying we knew exactly what we
were doing and the problem was we were too sane," Price says.
They built a good rapport with Dr Ian Blythe, the prison doctor: "He called
us 'my girls'. As the hunger-strike went on, he arm-wrestled with us,
pretending it was a game but really testing us to see how much we were
weakening."
Dolours was first to be force fed, three weeks into the hunger-strike. "I
met her in the exercise yard afterwards. She was in a terrible state. She
said it she couldn't go through that again. I told her she didn't have to,
she could come off the hunger-strike immediately, but I'd stay on.
"She said we'd come off together or not at all. She was much braver than me
because she was so much more afraid of force-feeding yet she didn't give
in." Two days later, Marian was force-fed.
While Dolours endured the procedure once a day, Marian suffered it twice
daily because she vomited so often afterwards. "I always threw up when they
pulled the tube out of my stomach. It was vile. I would be exhausted
afterwards but you couldn't even lie in bed in your cell in privacy because
the screws came in with you.
"Sometimes when they arrived to force feed me, I would struggle; other times
I didn't have the energy to fight. The low point was having no control over
your weight. But not for one minute did I think of giving up. They were
never, ever going to break me."
One day, a doctor put the tube into Price's lung, not her stomach, and water
flooded in. "I felt like I was drowning. I passed out. They carried me back
to my cell. The doctors were standing over me when I came round. If had been
food, not water in the tube, it would have killed me. The medical and prison
staff told the authorities they wouldn't force feed me again."
A fortnight after that incident in May 1974, the hunger-strike ended and a
deal was reached. The sisters were moved to Armagh prison the following
March.
The British Home Secretary, Roy Jenkins, was loathed by republicans for his
treatment of the hunger-strikers. Price says she doesn't hate him: "He was
caught up in the politics of the situation. He followed orders. I once asked
the psychiatrist Peter Scott who knew him to invite him to Brixton to visit
us. He said he wouldn't come because if he met us, he'd want to send us
home."
Price was freed after five years in Armagh jail, suffering from anorexia and
tuberculosis. Ten-and-a-half stone when she was arrested, she left prison
half that weight.
On release from jail, she says she was in no physical or mental state to
rejoin the IRA and had no interest in a Sinn Féin career: "I like politics
but not politicians. To be a politician, you must be a liar and a
hypocrite."
Still, she was initially positive about Sinn Féin's rise, believing it would
strengthen the IRA campaign: "I remember watching TV as Sinn Féin swept down
the stairs in Belfast City Hall with Tricolour ribbons and champagne after
an election victory.
"My father was disgusted. He pointed to Gerry Adams and said, 'I've been
around longer than you, that boy will sell you out'. I told him to give Sinn
Féin a chance. I was wrong."
From 1994, Price had "serious concerns" about the leadership's political
direction but "loyalty to the movement" kept her quiet. Eventually, she
spoke at one 'republican family' meeting in west Belfast, expressing doubts.
A senior IRA member visited her home: "He told me what I was saying wasn't
appreciated and he'd shot people for less."
She claims the republican movement underwent a transformation: "People began
to make financial gain from the movement. Those who had never worked a day
in their lives, now had better homes, cars, and holidays than their
neighbours.
"It used to be what you could do for the movement, now it's what the
movement can do for you. In the past, to be a republican brought financial
hardship. But that was okay because to be a republican was to be something
special. You knew you were right."
Price says that while the peace process has secured "a measure of equality"
for Catholics, a British withdrawal and the ending of partition is further
away than ever.
Five years ago, she joined the 32 County Sovereignty Movement which security
sources say is the Real IRA's political wing, a claim the group denies. She
says her military days are over but she won't condemn others "for doing what
I did myself".
She claims 'armed struggle' is morally justified "while the British occupy
part of this country". The Real IRA has proved itself incapable of waging a
sustained campaign against the state and lacks popular support. Physical
force republicanism has never been weaker in recent decades.
Price refuses to recognise 'armed struggle' is now pointless: "Sometimes
it's necessary to do something just to let it be known there are people out
there who don't accept the status quo.
"Being a minority of a minority is nothing new for republicans. You don't
join for an easy life or to be popular. As a child, I remember 50 people at
an Easter parade on the Falls Road."
Despite everything, she has no regrets: "Disappointments maybe. I'm
disappointed in Gerry Kelly. I expected more of him but I'd never detract
from the physical bravery he showed. Gerry Adams and I were once friends. We
certainly aren't now. He may have difficulty admitting his IRA past but I'm
very, very proud of mine."
