Free Marian Price!

Irish Republican and supporter of the 32 County Solidarity Movement, Marian Price was arrested and imprisoned in May 2011 at the behest of the Northern Ireland Secretary of State Owen Paterson, Tory MP and staunch supporter of the Royal Irish Regiment. Her “crime” was to have allegedly held up a piece of paper from which the “Easter message” of dissident Republicans was read out at a commemoration in Derry City cemetery. Marian Price, 57, has long been in the cross-hairs of the British state. In 1973 she was accused of being a member of the IRA unit that carried out the bombing of the Old Bailey. After being given two life sentences, she and other alleged members of the unit, Gerry Kelly, Hugh Feeney, and her sister Dolours, spent 200 days on hunger strike. Marian Price was brutally force fed for 167 of those days.

In 1980, Marian Price was released on licence and received a Royal Prerogative of Mercy shortly afterwards. Such a “Royal pardon” removes any constraints on her release being conditional on “future behaviour”. Now the Secretary of State has announced that this document has been “lost”, and that Marian Price’s re-imprisonment based on her “behaviour” is legal. And as if the vendetta were not blatant enough, she still remains in prison despite a magistrate in Derry granting her bail in May. This is internment in all but name.

In the eyes of the British state, and the Northern Ireland Orange statelet (currently jointly administered by the DUP and Sinn Fein), Marian Price’s real crime is her continued opposition to British imperialism in Ireland, including her vocal criticism of the Good Friday Agreement. As we have said many times, this imperialist-brokered “peace” deal is premised on the continued oppression of the Catholic minority under the heel of the sectarian Orange state. The fundamental nature of that state is today what it always has been: a heavily militarised, anti-Catholic, police state. As we said in an article titled “Defend Irish Republicans against state repression!” following the killing of two British soldiers at the Massereene barracks, and a police officer in Craigavon:

“We stand for the military defence of the Irish nationalist organisations in their conflicts with the British Army, the Northern Ireland state forces and Loyalist paramilitary groups. At the same time, we oppose and condemn communalist attacks by the Irish nationalist forces on the Protestant population as well as indiscriminate attacks on civilian targets in Britain and in Northern Ireland, such as the Omagh bombing in 1998. These indiscriminate actions are indeed crimes against the working class of these islands. Politically our programme is counterposed to the terrorism that is carried out in the service of the nationalist programme which cuts across the class unity of the workers in the struggle against their common enemy: the capitalist class.

Our perspective requires the internationalist unity of the working class throughout the British Isles in a struggle against British imperialism, the Irish clericalist state and the Orange state. Thus we call for British troops out of Northern Ireland as an integral part of our programme for an Irish workers republic within a federation of workers republics in the British Isles.”

— Workers Hammer no 206, Spring 2009