After a small eternity, the lorry began to move again and made its way towards the exit. Hughes knew exactly what to expect at this point: there would be two ramps, and then the lorry would make a right turn and leave Long Kesh. But just before they reached the ramps, it stopped again. Hughes lay very still. Then, suddenly, a giant spike plunged down through the refuse, just to the left of his body.
Apparently his intelligence had been off. Hughes lay there, frozen. Then a spike impaled the bags on the other side of him. Now he decided he would just stand up and shout, just surrender, because to lie still would be suicide. If the spike came down again, it would surely kill him. He pictured it: the spike running straight through him. What a ridiculous way to die, harpooned in the back of a dustbin lorry, covered in sawdust, with an orange in your mouth. Hughes had two young children back in Belfast. This was madness. He was just about to identify himself to the men above when, with a rumble, the lorry began to move again. It passed over one security ramp. Then it passed over the next. Finally, Hughes felt it make a right turn, and that was when he knew they had left the camp.
As the lorry moved along the open road, Hughes pulled out a small penknife he had brought with him and endeavoured to cut himself out of the mattress. But the knife was not up to the task, and the blade simply bent back. He clawed and kicked his way out of the mattress, knocking some rubbish onto the roadway in the process. He feared that the driver might notice it in the rearview mirror, but the lorry kept moving.
At the top of the Hillsborough Road, Hughes knew there was an area where they would make a sharp right turn, followed by a sharp left. This seemed like the optimal moment to jump out of the back undetected. So as the lorry made the turns, Hughes hopped down to the street. He watched the lorry as it drove off, nervous that the driver might have spotted him. But it continued in the direction of the dump.
Hughes stood there, caked in filth, one eye swollen shut. Gerry Adams had arranged for a car to meet him outside, but because the lorry had taken so much longer than expected on its rounds, Hughes had apparently missed the rendezvous, and the car wasn’t there. Nor was this the kind of town where Hughes might just pop into the local pub, like the Magnificent Seven after they escaped from the Maidstone, and expect the patrons to donate a change of clothes and a getaway car. On the contrary, Hughes now found himself in the middle of a loyalist area. Not only was this hostile territory, but he had not put enough distance between himself and Long Kesh. As soon as they realised he was missing at the head count, the whole surrounding area would be flooded with troops. He had to get to the Republic. He was now the most wanted man in Northern Ireland, and he didn’t have much time.
Michael Mansfield was sitting in the library on the top floor of the Old Bailey when the bomb detonated outside. A huge boom echoed below, and Mansfield was showered with broken glass. At thirty-two, Mansfield was an ambitious, slightly flamboyant English lawyer, with floppy hair and a sonorous voice. He had recently scored his first major legal triumph, in a months-long trial, at the Old Bailey, of the so-called Angry Brigade, a group of homegrown British anarchists who had tried to spark worldwide revolution by planting bombs in the homes of Conservative ministers. Mansfield’s client in that case, a young woman named Angela Weir, was acquitted. The case against her turned on handwriting evidence, and Mansfield was able, through his examination, to thoroughly discredit the government’s experts. He had become politically radical as a student, and found that he was drawn to cases in which difficult questions were raised, questions about the nature of authoritarian power and resistance. With the money he made from the Angry Brigade case, Mansfield bought a car – a little secondhand Triumph 2000.
Because of the rail strike, Mansfield drove to work on the day of the bombing. He was running late and was worried about finding a parking space, but he discovered that parking restrictions had been waived, so he thought he might be able to find a spot right by the main entrance of the Old Bailey. He was lucky: there was one empty space, not far from a green Ford Cortina.
Mansfield was not seriously injured when the bomb exploded, but the Triumph was ripped apart. Not long afterwards, Mansfield was asked if he would like to take on the case of the very people who had blown it up, the young Irish bombers Dolours and Marian Price. A long tradition existed in the legal profession of enterprising litigators taking on notorious clients, not least because the exposure often raised the profile of their practice. But the IRA bombing was considered such a deep affront to London that many established lawyers would not take the case, on principle.
Mansfield would. He was very curious to meet the sisters. When he did, he was struck immediately by their beauty and by the intensity of their commitment. They sat balled up on plastic chairs, hugging their knees, and told him about the abuses of Catholics in the North, about internment, about Bloody Sunday. They recalled being pummelled by the loyalist mob at Burntollet Bridge. Mansfield wasn’t that much older than they were. He prided himself on his radical politics, but he had chosen to pursue those politics through the less-than-revolutionary vocation of the law. It struck him that the Price sisters had chosen a different sort of life, a life that was truly ‘on the edge’.
Dolours and Marian were charged, along with the eight others who had been captured, with conspiring to cause ‘an explosion of a nature likely to endanger life’. Normally, there would be an obvious venue for such a trial: the Old Bailey. But the building was still being repaired after the bombing, and the government wanted to fast-track the proceedings. Besides, it might have been construed as prejudicial to try a group of defendants in a courthouse on charges of endeavouring to destroy that very courthouse. So the proceedings, which commenced in the autumn of 1973, were relocated to the Great Hall of Winchester Castle, an imposing thirteenth-century chamber of medieval stone, marble columns and stained glass. It was in this same room that Sir Walter Raleigh was found guilty of treason in 1603, for plotting to overthrow King James I. An enormous oak replica of the surface of King Arthur’s round table hung on one wall, with bands of green paint radiating from a Tudor Rose.
Mug shots of Dolours and Marian Price
The Price sisters and their co-defendants sang rebel songs on the prison bus to Winchester. Each morning throughout the trial, the defendants would be escorted in and out by a convoy of motorcycles and police cars. The bombings had occasioned such hysteria that the proceedings were marked by an extreme, almost theatrical devotion to security. A complete daytime parking ban was imposed on the whole surrounding area, to prevent car bombs. Police marksmen patrolled surrounding rooftops. (This may not have been entirely unreasonable: it would later emerge that republicans had tried to purchase a house directly across the street from the prison where the defendants were being held, with an eye to digging a tunnel under the street and directly into the cellblock, to spring them out. The plan was abandoned after the local woman who owned the house developed second thoughts about selling, for sentimental reasons.) As the bus drove into the complex under heavy armed guard, Dolours and Marian flashed V signs to the spectators outside.
The trial was a huge event, attracting widespread fascination. The actress Vanessa Redgrave volunteered to post bail for the defendants, and offered her own house in West Hampstead should any of them need a place to stay. (None of the bombers was released from custody to take her up on this magnanimous proposal.) The English public and press became particularly fixated on Dolours and Marian. They were dubbed the ‘Sisters of Terror’, and depicted as hugely dangerous. To The Times, Dolours became a paradigm of political radicalism and countercultural instability, with her ‘enthusiasm for the wider concept of violent world revolution and support for the diverse aims of Che Guevara, the Black Panthers and the Palestinian guerrillas’. She might have been the more dominant sister, the paper continued, but ‘Marian’s soft speaking voice and apparent innocence disguise a 19-year old well-versed in the arts of guerrilla warfare,’ whose ease with a rifle had earned her the nickname ‘the Armalit
e widow’. Detecting, in the sisters, evidence of a disturbing trend, the Daily Mirror noted that ‘the legend that women are passive, peace-loving creatures who want only to stay at home and look after children has been finally exploded in a thunder of bombs and bullets’. The tabloid drew a direct line from the Price sisters to Leila Khaled, the Palestinian hijacker, and diagnosed the violence of these women as a dangerous by-product of feminism – ‘a lethal liberation’.
At the opening of the trial, in September, the attorney general, Sir Peter Rawlinson, a debonair barrister with a mellifluous voice, whom the newspapers described as the ‘Laurence Olivier of the bar’, pointed out that the car bomb, while a novelty in London, was part of everyday life in Northern Ireland. ‘Those who place car bombs can walk away to safety,’ Rawlinson said. ‘When the bomb explodes, they are safe and sound many miles away. It is a very cowardly practice.’ As he laid out the details of that awful day, Rawlinson singled out Dolours Price as the leader of the group, ‘the girl who plays a major part in this operation’.
The sisters were resolutely defiant. Apart from one member of the team, nineteen-year-old William McLarnon, who pleaded guilty on the first day of the trial, all the defendants maintained their innocence. Dolours said that she had flown to London on the day before the bombing for a short holiday with her sister and their friend Hugh Feeney. She used the pseudonym Una Devlin because, as the daughter of a well-known republican, she was always getting hassled by the authorities, and offering a false name had become practically second nature. The girls were sassy and carefree in the courtroom, even upbeat. They chuckled when the prosecution showed a photo of Michael Mansfield’s wrecked Triumph. (Mansfield, less amused, pointed out to them that he could have been in it.)
For much of the ten-week trial, the defendants simply stonewalled. But there was a mountain of circumstantial evidence connecting them with the crime. Rawlinson spelled out the sequence of events leading up to the bombings and the particular charges against each individual, in a statement that took twelve hours, over several days. When Dolours was stopped by the officers at Heathrow, she had been carrying a black canvas shopping bag. Inside, along with a programme for the Brian Friel play and what was described as a ‘large quantity of makeup’, the police discovered two screwdrivers and a spiral-bound notebook. Some pages in the notebook were filled with idle jottings: theological musings about the Virgin Mary on one page, a list of foods with their corresponding calorie counts on the other. But investigators also noticed that some pages had been torn out. An expert forensic witness examined the remaining blank pages in the notebook and revealed for the jury the ghostly indentation of what had been written. It was a diagram of the timing device for a bomb.
This was a difficult turn for Mansfield’s defence. Despite his past success in discrediting evidence from handwriting experts, he was unable to blunt the force of the notebook. But even as he was contending with that incriminating exhibit, Mansfield was faced with a more daunting challenge: one of the defendants had decided to cooperate.
When Roisin McNearney, the typist from Belfast who was the youngest member of the team, was initially questioned by police in the hours after the bombings, she stuck to the same story as the other bombers, insisting that she was not a member of the IRA. ‘I don’t know what you are talking about,’ she said. ‘I am only over here for a holiday.’
But as the interrogation continued, small fractures began to show in her façade. ‘I believe in the united Ireland,’ she told the investigators. ‘But I don’t believe in violence.’ They continued to work on her, and finally she blurted, ‘I can’t tell you everything, or I will get a bullet in my head.’
She had joined the IRA only six months earlier, she said. Out at a pub one night, she was singing along to patriotic songs when someone approached her and asked if she was ready to do something for Ireland. She told the police about her role in the bombing operation but insisted that she was a minor, ineffectual figure, very much on the periphery of the gang. Notwithstanding her confession and cooperation with the authorities, McNearney pleaded not guilty. Though she had given a detailed confession after the bombing, the others did not realise until the trial began that she had betrayed them.
If the likelihood of an acquittal looked vanishingly small for the Price sisters and their fellow defendants, this did little to dampen their spirits. During the trial, Dolours and Marian sat at the end of the dock, and they would smile and wave to supporters in the gallery. When their old friend Eamonn McCann, the activist from Derry who had first encountered them on the Burntollet march, came to sit with their family in the spectators’ gallery, they winked and waved. Albert and Chrissie Price had flown to London to attend the trial, and McCann marvelled at the posture of the older Prices, ramrod straight and proud. It struck him that, behind their ferocious composure, they must have been suffering greatly to watch their daughters face a life sentence.
The defendants wore their own clothes for the trial, and Dolours selected eye-catching ensembles – smocks, pinafores, sweaters. She had always been attuned to performance, and there was an unmistakable sense that the trial had become a stage. As the proceedings dragged on, her red hair, which had been pixie short at the time of the bombings, gradually began to grow out.
But if there were moments when Dolours seemed to take the process lightly, she could also show flashes of fiery resolve. When Peter Rawlinson asked her if she supported the ‘aims and principles’ of the IRA, Dolours replied that she might, ‘provided Sir Peter’s interpretation of “aims and principles” are the same as mine’. When he asked her to elaborate on what she thought those aims were, Dolours said that, in her view, the IRA regarded ‘the long-term aim to be the reunification of Ireland with full civil religious liberties for all’.
The judge, Sebag Shaw, interjected to ask whether she believed that violence should be employed in furtherance of these aims. ‘I did not say that,’ Price said – she had been speaking of objectives, not of the means that might justifiably be employed to achieve them. She jousted in this manner with both the prosecutor and the judge, unflustered by their bewigged solemnity, unintimidated by the grandeur of the surroundings or the phalanx of security personnel or the gravity of the charges against her. As the trial wore on, Price and her fellow defendants began to openly heckle Judge Shaw, refuting the moral authority of the court, mocking the witnesses, and revelling in their shared contempt for the whole proceedings.
On the November day that the verdict was to be delivered, Dolours Price dressed in a green sweater and tied a pink ribbon in her hair. Security was tight at the courthouse, with everyone who entered frisked at the door. As they were escorted up to the dock, the defendants were accompanied by fifteen prison officers, who crowded into seats behind them. To Michael Mansfield, it seemed that all the security had been designed to establish ‘an atmosphere of guilt’. Throughout the trial, a bodyguard had sat, unseen, just behind Judge Shaw’s seat, but today he sat out in the open, right next to the judge on the bench. There had been a series of bomb scares at nearby department stores, and the public gallery in the makeshift courtroom was crowded with rowdy Irish people who had come over to support the defendants. When the all-male jury filed in to deliver the verdict, four rows of plainclothes detectives came in and sat behind them. As the proceedings were about to get under way, guards took one final security precaution, bolting the doors to the courthouse.
Before sentencing Price and the other defendants, Judge Shaw announced that the jury was acquitting Roisin McNearney. Addressing McNearney – a small girl with pencilled eyebrows, in a white shawl and a pink blouse – Shaw said that he hoped she had learned ‘not to dabble in murderous enterprises’. Referring to her decision to betray her comrades, he said, ‘I do not know when you leave this court what other dangers may confront you.’ As McNearney was ushered out of the hall, the other defendants began to hum a tune, in ominous unison. It was ‘The Dead March’ from Handel’s Saul, a standard feature of the musical repe
rtoire at funerals. Hugh Feeney reached into his pocket and came out with a coin. He hurled it at McNearney, shouting, ‘Here’s your blood money!’ She rushed out of the courtroom, sobbing.
The remaining defendants were convicted. When it came time to sentence them, Shaw delivered the maximum penalty – a so-called life sentence, which for five of the bombers would mean twenty years, in practice. For Dolours and Marian Price and for Hugh Feeney, Shaw handed down a more severe punishment, on account of their leadership role: thirty years. Dolours said, audibly, ‘That’s a death sentence.’
Seeming to shy away, himself, from the harshness of this penalty, Shaw announced that he would reduce the sentence for the Price sisters and Feeney to twenty years. But the defendants were making their displeasure known. A flustered Shaw ordered them to keep quiet in his courtroom. ‘No!’ both Price sisters replied.
Having refused to say a word throughout the proceedings about their membership of the IRA, the defendants now all began to talk at once, making shrill political speeches as their relatives and friends applauded from the public gallery. ‘I stand before you as a volunteer of the IRA!’ Marian Price announced. ‘I consider myself a prisoner of war!’
‘Up the Provisionals!’ the spectators shouted. ‘No surrender!’
‘You must not regard the dock as a political arena,’ Judge Shaw cried. ‘It’s a court of law!’ But now that the sentence had been delivered, nobody was listening.
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