By electing this particular mode of protest, the Price sisters were invoking a long-standing tradition of Irish resistance. Dating back to the Middle Ages, fasting had been used by the Irish to express dissent or rebuke. It was a quintessential weapon of passive aggression. In a 1903 play about a poet in seventh-century Ireland who launched a hunger strike at the gates of the royal palace, W. B. Yeats described An old and foolish custom, that if a man Be wronged, or think that he is wronged, and starve Upon another’s threshold till he die, The common people, for all time to come, Will raise a
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