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Marion Price was one of the Price sisters jailed for her part in the IRA London bombing campaign of 1973. The Old Bailey and Whitehall army recruitment centre were damaged on March 8, 1973 with 200 injured and one man died of a heart attack.

She and her sister Dolours Price, along with Gerry Kelly and Hugh Feeney, immediately went on hunger strike in a campaign to be repatriated to a prison in Northern Ireland. The hunger strike lasted over 200 days, because the hunger strikers were force-fed by prison authorities.

In an interview with Suzanne Breen, Marian described being force-fed:

"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."

Marion Price resumed a private life, emerging only in the 1990s - as a vocal opponent of Sinn Fein's "peace strategy". Of the Good Friday Agreement she said: "It is not, certainly not, what I went to prison for ."

Price gave the graveside oration at the funeral of Joseph O'Connor , a member of the Real IRA in Belfast murdered by the Provisionals.

She is now a prominent republican and member of the 32 County Sovereignty Movement and spokesperson for the Irish Republican Prisoners Welfare Association.

External links

• Suzanne Breen interviews Marian Price
• "I have no regrets", The Guardian, March 2003
• Source material (2000 Eletronic Telegraph article)
• Interview with Marian Price, The Blanket, Winter 2002
• Who Killed Joseph O'Connor?
• Graveside Oration for Joseph O'Connor

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