Say Nothing

by Patrick Radden Keefe

  Both before and after she made the move to the Republic, Price was being monitored by British intelligence. Reports from this surveillance indicated that there was no evidence to suggest that she had ongoing involvement ‘with any illegal organisation or with any kind of terrorist activity’. In fact, one intelligence report noted that, not long after her release, she had been approached by her old IRA comrades and asked to take part in a mission, but she rebuffed them.

  Price had always been interested in the arts, and now she spent her days working on a book about her experience in Brixton. She talked about getting it published. According to a small item in the Irish Times in 1982, the book would explain ‘the development of Dolours’s thinking from her time as a member of the IRA to the point where she came to favour pacifism (and eventually resign from the movement while at Armagh prison)’. It may be true that Price had come to embrace nonviolence as a personal philosophy. But there is reason to be sceptical of any suggestion that she had renounced altogether the republican tradition of armed resistance. Such an item, discreetly placed in the press, was probably intended for the benefit of the British officials who were deciding how severely they should circumscribe Price’s post-prison life. Dolours gave her Brixton manuscript to Eamonn McCann, who found it dull – just a day-by-day account of her time there. But she managed to publish an excerpt in a Galway literary magazine, and it showed flashes of lyricism, recounting how the summer sun would warm the floor of the terminal ward, and how she could feel ‘the warmth of its memory on my bare feet’.

  It was after her release from prison that Price reconnected with Stephen Rea, the actor from Belfast whom she had initially met during her student days and had seen onstage in London on the night before the bombing. Rea, who was five years older than Price, had a scrawny, crumpled beauty and a gentle manner. He had a laconic air about him, but he shared with Price a mordant, rapscallion wit. He would avert his eyes as he was casually setting up a joke, then suddenly look right at you when he delivered the punch line.

  Rea had grown up in a house full of women, with his mother and father, his grandmother and three sisters. But whereas Price had been reared in a republican family in Andersonstown, Rea was a Protestant who came of age at a slightly earlier time, during the 1950s, and in a corner of Belfast where his cultural influences were more eclectic. ‘I grew up in a mixed area, with mixed neighbours and mixed friends and my father drank – rather a lot – with both sides because it was that kind of place,’ he once explained. In a children’s production of ‘Little Red Riding Hood’, Rea played the Wolf, and he decided, then and there, that he wanted to be an actor.

  First he would have to flee Belfast. He loved the city but felt that there was no space to operate there, no room to become anything different. He may have been Protestant, but he was sympathetic to the nationalist cause. After half a century of repression, he felt, it was inevitable that the Catholic community would produce some form of resistance. Rea ended up living in West Belfast for a time, and when he took the stage in the local community festival, his fellow Protestants saw it as a betrayal.

  Dolours Price and Stephen Rea (Colman Doyle/Courtesy National Library of Ireland)

  He attended Queen’s University during the 1960s and first met Price during the student protests. But as the Troubles took hold and Dolours was pulled into revolutionary activity, Rea was in Dublin, working as an actor at the famous Abbey Theatre. He felt dissatisfied there, too, concluding that ‘Ireland squanders talent,’ and he moved again, this time to London. While Price was hunger-striking in Brixton and staring down Margaret Thatcher in Armagh, Rea was becoming a well-known actor in London, with a series of high-profile roles at the Royal Court, the Old Vic and the National Theatre, as well as the odd part on British television.

  During those years, Rea faced a common dilemma for Irish actors on the English stage: To what degree should he soften the edges of his spiky Ulster accent and reinvent himself as an Englishman? As a gifted mimic, he could certainly ‘play’ English, and people advised him to do precisely that, in order to advance on the stage. But, like Price, Rea was headstrong, and he decided that he would rather be an unemployed Irishman than find work by sounding as if he had grown up in Surrey. After all, it was one of the great achievements of Irish civilisation to take the English language and adapt it, creating a different music. The Irish might have tended to lose in their political conflict with the British, Rea remarked, but ‘they have been triumphant in terms of the language’.

  On a Saturday in the autumn of 1983, Price and Rea were married. For the ceremony, they chose St Patrick’s Cathedral in Armagh, a short walk up the hill from Dolours’s former home in C Wing. The officiant was Father Raymond Murray, the chaplain at the jail, who had been active in lobbying for Dolours’s release. Mindful, perhaps, of the spectacle that might attend the union of the Old Bailey bomber and a well-known London actor, they opted to marry in secret, with only two witnesses in attendance. When an English tabloid reached Father Murray afterwards, he would furnish no details. ‘The couple have asked me not to discuss the wedding,’ he said. ‘I am sworn to secrecy.’

  Rea had also reconnected, during this period, with the playwright Brian Friel, in whose play Rea had performed on the night before the London bombing. In 1980, the two of them co-founded a new theatre company, Field Day. The troupe was inaugurated with the world premiere of a play that would come to be regarded as Friel’s masterpiece, Translations. Set in a school in Donegal in 1833, the play concerned a survey by the British Army that would identify local Irish place names and replace them with English translations or phonetic equivalents. The play opened at the Guildhall, in Derry. The building was a symbol of unionism, so much so that it had become a frequent target for the IRA. On opening night, scaffolding still clung to some parts of the building as workmen repaired damage from prior attacks. So there was something slightly arch about this choice of venue – but something hopeful about it, too.

  Friel and Rea decided that their new theatre group would produce one play each year and tour it around Ireland. The company came to include an illustrious assemblage of participants and supporters, among them the poets Seamus Deane and Seamus Heaney. The politics of Field Day were a sensitive matter. Friel had been brought up Catholic, and some observers regarded the company as a nationalist outfit; one critic described Field Day as the ‘cultural wing of the Provos’. But while there was often something obviously political about the plays that they performed, the politics tended to be oblique, and Rea stubbornly refused to be painted into any ideological corner. The work of Field Day was ‘political action in the widest sense’, he said. Part of the idea for the company, according to Rea, was that if everyone all over Ireland was hearing the same story, on both sides of the border in a divided country, it might have some cohesive effect. The board consisted of three Catholics and three Protestants. (‘All lapsed,’ one of them noted.) But there was not a unionist among them.

  What this meant in practice was that Rea spent some five months a year on the road, touring. And, having joined the circus, in effect, by marriage, Dolours Price often went with him. Price helped manage the books and the correspondence for the company, keeping track of miles travelled and money spent on petrol and taking the car in to the garage (‘the car hospital’, as she called it). They crisscrossed the island, north and south, touring parts of Ireland that had not seen a professional theatre company in thirty years. In some rural areas, tractors would pull up and farmers would dismount and amble over to a makeshift stage to see the play.

  Even so, a major career was beckoning Rea in London, and this posed an obvious problem for the relationship: technically, Price was defying the terms of her release by even living in Dublin and travelling with Field Day around the Republic. In England, a rumour circulated not long after Price and Rea were married that she was going to accompany him to London for the premiere of a new film. The British tabloids sounded the alarm: would the notorious ‘bomb girl’ have the t
emerity to revisit the very city she had bombed? Price did not make the trip, in the end, but privately she did plead repeatedly with the British government to cancel the residency requirement, or at least grant her permission to visit her husband in England.

  She was careful to post these written appeals from the Price family home in Belfast. But as it happened, the authorities knew that she was already violating the terms of her release, by living most of the time in Dublin. When the requests made their way to Thatcher, who had always perceived Price to be a manipulator, she wrote to her subordinates, ‘I think we are just being played along here. Should resist firmly.’

  Having defied Thatcher and prevailed in the past, Price now proceeded to defy her once again. In May 1985, a police officer in Folkestone, on the Kent coast, across the Channel from France, pulled a car over. Inside were Stephen Rea and Dolours Price. Asked where they resided, they offered an address in London. The couple had taken up residence in a flat in Maida Vale, around the corner from the BBC studios and just a few miles from the Old Bailey.

  To Thatcher, Price’s return to London, in direct contravention of the terms of her release, was a thumb in the eye. After the incident in Folkestone, the secretary of state for Northern Ireland recommended that the government change the terms of Price’s release in order to accommodate the fact that she was already in England, and simply allow her to stay. But Thatcher would have none of it. In November, an aide wrote that Price was ‘still living in Maida Vale with her husband’. He pointed out that if she were to be locked up again, it would provoke an ‘immediate and adverse reaction’ among Catholics in Northern Ireland. Besides, he ventured, if they did throw her into prison again, Price would probably just stop eating, and then they would be right back where they had started. The aide acknowledged that, while it was possible in theory for the couple to live in Northern Ireland, ‘it would be difficult for an established actor to continue his profession there’. The only alternative, it seemed, was to change the terms of Price’s release. A report by Special Branch indicated that ‘on present evidence there is no real basis for regarding her as a threat to Great Britain’. But Thatcher would not change the terms. In fact, she would rather allow Price to flout the provision and simply pretend not to notice than acknowledge that she had been arm-twisted into altering her stance.

  Some civil servants worried that the ‘anomalous position’ of the couple ‘could well come to public notice and attract criticism’. But Thatcher would not waiver. ‘I do not think Mrs Rea should be allowed to live here,’ she wrote. ‘She was transferred to Northern Ireland on conditions and if she and her husband wish to be together they can live in Northern Ireland.’ In a prim flourish of wilful disassociation, she added, ‘If she were still in England she would be in prison.’

  The British newspapers, which had always taken such an interest in Price, soon worked out that she was in London and living the fashionable life of the wife of a well-regarded actor. Gleeful write-ups described the Old Bailey bomber ‘sipping champagne with the stars at the National Theatre’. There was a brief scandal when Stephen Rea was slated to perform in the musical High Society at the Victoria Palace Theatre, and the Queen Mother was due to attend the show. Would the convicted IRA terrorist be there? Would she shake the Queen Mum’s hand? ‘Dolours has indicated that she will not be attending either of the Royal Gala performances,’ Rea’s agent told the press. ‘It is a sensitive matter and entirely her decision but she has said she will be at home.’ For the purposes of propriety, the agent added that ‘home’ meant Belfast.

  Rea would later remark that his decision to marry a notorious ex-militant from the IRA had done nothing to hurt his career. ‘The people in my profession were enormously generous about it,’ he said. But inevitably, he was often questioned about his wife’s past, and when this happened, he tended to bristle. Rea wanted the press to focus exclusively on his work and not get caught up in his biography, much less the history or politics of his spouse.

  Nevertheless, he was obliged to give interviews to promote each new production, and he developed a reputation for abruptly terminating any interview that turned to the subject of the woman he had married. It became a joke among journalists covering Rea: Never, ever mention the missus.

  But Rea did himself no favours with his choice of roles. He often seemed to end up playing the part of a soulful gunman – frequently, a gunman from the IRA. ‘What I bring is an understanding of how decent, ordinary people got involved,’ he said, ‘and how that spiralled into something out of control.’ On the rare occasion when he did speak of his wife’s bombing raid on London, he emphasised that the one man who had perished that day did so from a heart attack.

  Once, in an interview for a documentary in 1988, Rea was asked how far he himself would be prepared to go in service of a political cause. ‘I could never be a soldier,’ Rea said. ‘I couldn’t do that. I mean I think what you’re asking me is would I be prepared to be violent and all that.’ He paused. ‘I couldn’t be, personally,’ he continued. ‘But I think the violence isn’t just a moral thing. It’s not just a moral choice at this stage. It’s a kind of reflex, and there’s a great deal of establishment violence, as well.’

  The interviewer asked him if political change could happen without violence.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Rea said. ‘Does it ever?’

  The authorities were correct to judge that Dolours Price no longer posed a threat. She had abandoned violence as a means of fighting for a united Ireland, at least for her own part. But this was not to say that she abandoned republicanism. She canvassed for a Sinn Féin candidate for Belfast City Council. Though she came from a hard-line republican background, she adapted to the shift to electoral politics, and the strategy of the Armalite and the ballot box. In 1983, her old officer commanding, Gerry Adams, entered politics himself. A decade had passed since Adams sent Price to bomb London, and now he was seeking a parliamentary seat at Westminster, representing West Belfast. Adams trimmed his hair and gradually replaced the casual jumpers of his guerrilla days with a wardrobe of corduroy and tweed. With his silver tongue and his analytical mind, he had always had a touch of the professor about him, and now he looked professorial. He even smoked a pipe. Adams’s decision to embrace an electoral strategy had grown, in part, from the success of Bobby Sands in standing for election, even if Sands had died before he could ever take his parliamentary seat. In a nod to the traditional abstentionism of the IRA, Adams announced that, if elected, he would boycott Westminster and would not actually attend Parliament. Price supported him and took to the campaign trail. ‘Vote Sinn Féin!’ she cried. ‘Vote Gerry Adams!’ On election day, she ferried voters to the polling stations. And Adams won.

  18

  The Bloody Envelope

  The spring of 1988 was a season of funerals in Belfast. On 6 March, Mairéad Farrell was shot dead, along with two associates, on the streets of Gibraltar. A slim, dark-haired thirty-one-year-old woman, Farrell had been a prisoner alongside Dolours and Marian Price in Armagh jail. But unlike the Price sisters, when she left prison, she returned to active service. Farrell journeyed to Gibraltar as part of an IRA team. They had travelled to the British territory on the southern tip of Spain with the intention of launching a bombing mission. But before they had a chance to carry out the attack, they were walking along, unarmed, one day when they were approached by plainclothes British commandos and executed, in what some would claim was an expression of a secret ‘shoot-to-kill’ policy by the army. The bodies of the three volunteers were transported back to Northern Ireland with great fanfare, and a massive funeral procession bore their coffins through Belfast, trailing thousands of mourners.

  Father Alec Reid would help officiate at the graveside. Reid was fifty-six, with a long, lined face and small hooded eyes. He had grown up in Tipperary, and, while still in his teens, he had joined the Redemptorists, an order of Catholic priests who dedicated themselves to the salvation of the poor and abandoned. Reid moved to Belfast bef
ore the outbreak of the Troubles, in the early 1960s, and joined Clonard Monastery, a great old Gothic structure, erected at the end of the nineteenth century, that straddled a line between the republican Falls Road and the loyalist Shankill. The founder of the monastery had come to regret this location, reportedly remarking, ‘I doubt if ever a more troublesome piece of property was acquired.’ But it gave Father Reid a vantage point from which to witness the Troubles up close.

  He did more than pay witness. Some clergymen, Reid noticed, had a tendency to hide behind the scripture. But he was a priest ‘on the streets’, he liked to say, always in the thick of things, a ghetto diplomat, quietly mediating in disputes. Occasionally he would find himself in the middle of a paramilitary feud. This could be dangerous, but, as Reid said to one fellow priest who questioned the wisdom of inserting himself into such dicey situations, ‘In for a penny, in for a pound.’ Reid possessed an unerring faith in the power of dialogue: if you could just get people to talk, he believed, the most bitter antagonists could discover common ground.

  On regular visits to Long Kesh during the 1970s, Father Reid had grown close to Brendan Hughes and Gerry Adams. Adams, who lived near Clonard, had grown up going to the monastery once a week for religious instruction. After Adams was released from prison, Reid would shuttle messages between the young leader and his comrades, like Hughes, who were still locked up. Reid seemed so often to be engaged in one intrigue or another that Hughes gave him a nickname: ‘Behind the Scenes’.