Price’s aspirations for a writing career had not amounted to much. She never did publish her memoir. But for a time, she went back to school, enrolling in a law course at Trinity College, in Dublin. To the young students in the programme, Price cut an unusual figure, an older eccentric who wore brightly coloured hats and would sit in lectures with her head cocked quizzically to one side. She didn’t raise her hand before offering her own interjections, and she took pleasure in amiably heckling the lecturers.
One day, Price entered the women’s lavatories to discover a long line of students waiting to use the facilities. The bathroom was undergoing repairs, and several of the stalls lacked doors. ‘What are ye all waiting for?’ Price asked.
‘There’s no doors on those toilets,’ one of the women in the queue explained.
‘You’d know you had never been to prison!’ Price exclaimed, striding over to one of the doorless cubicles and attending to her business.
Price clung to her acid wit. She could seem, at times, to marinate in it. But there were signs, also, that she was haunted. She felt as though she spent a great deal of time rummaging around her own head, coming up with bits and pieces of her past. She was troubled by her experiences as a young woman – by things she had done to others, and to herself. Many of her old comrades were suffering from PTSD, flashing back to nightmarish encounters from decades earlier, waking with a start in a cold sweat. From time to time, when Price was driving her car with her sons in the back seat, she would glance up at the rearview mirror and, instead of Danny or Oscar, see her dead comrade Joe Lynskey staring back at her. One day, during a lecture at Trinity on political prisoners, Price stood up in a fury and began to rattle off the names of republican hunger strikers, before storming out of the classroom. She never came back.
To Price, the Good Friday Agreement felt like an especially personal double-cross. ‘The settlement betrayed what she had been born into,’ her friend Eamonn McCann recalled. ‘It had a more intense and deep-seated effect on Dolours than it did on many other people.’ She had set bombs and robbed banks and seen friends die and nearly died herself, in the expectation that these violent exertions would finally achieve the national liberation for which generations of her family had fought. ‘For what Sinn Féin has achieved today, I would not have missed a good breakfast,’ she said in an interview on Irish radio. ‘Volunteers didn’t only die,’ she pointed out. ‘Volunteers had to kill, as well, you know?’
There is a concept in psychology called ‘moral injury’, a notion, distinct from the idea of trauma, that relates to the ways in which ex-soldiers make sense of the socially transgressive things they have done during wartime. Price felt a sharp sense of moral injury: she believed that she had been robbed of any ethical justification for her own conduct. This sense of grievance was exacerbated by the fact that the man who steered republicanism on a path to peace was her own erstwhile friend and commanding officer, Gerry Adams. Adams had given her orders, orders that she faithfully obeyed, but now he appeared to be disowning the armed struggle in general, and Dolours in particular. It filled her with a terrible fury.
At a republican commemoration in County Mayo in 2001, she stood up and announced that it was ‘too much’ for her to listen to people say that they had never been in the IRA. ‘Gerry was my commanding officer,’ she exclaimed. This sort of outspokenness was not welcomed by Sinn Féin, and on more than one occasion, stern men came to tell Price to quieten down. But if Sinn Féin had a conspicuous devotion to message control, this only intensified Price’s anger. As the IRA moved towards a peaceful strategy during the 1990s, various armed splinter groups had formed, some of which were committed to further violence. Price occasionally attended meetings of these groups, but she was not a joiner. ‘What are you going to get out of going back to war?’ she would ask them.
Even so, she could not let go of the past. Her boys, Danny and Oscar, were not political. Price joked that when she spoke about the tumultuous events of her youth, it seemed as distant to them as ‘the stone age’. After a series of sectarian murders in 1998, Stephen Rea had remarked, ‘Everyone has become so used to the state of war that it becomes impossible for them to imagine anything else.’ Now Price was having trouble reconciling herself to peace. Mackers had started a magazine called The Blanket, which featured writing by disaffected republicans, and Price became a regular contributor. Her columns often took the form of poison pen letters addressed directly to Adams. ‘What Gerry Adams is saying, and saying gently so as not to panic the grass-roots, is, “They will go away, you know,”’ she wrote in 2004. ‘The IRA will disband … the guns will be sealed in concrete … A few will get the political jobs, others will get satisfactory jobs (community work and the like), some will get shops to run, taxis to drive, a racket here, a scam there. It is the way of the world.’
Like Brendan Hughes, Price was keenly attuned to the commodification of republican martyrs. She pounced on a suggestion, by Adams, that, had Bobby Sands only lived, he would have embraced the shift to politics. ‘Bobby, he told us, would be fully behind the Peace Process,’ Price wrote. ‘I often wonder who would speak for me had my circumstances in Brixton Prison reached their expected conclusion? What praises would I be singing of the Good Friday Agreement?’ (As it happened, Sands’s own family would come to resent Sinn Féin’s use of Bobby’s name and image for fund-raising, and ask the party to stop.) Price noted, bitterly, that when Adams was speaking before certain republican audiences, he would invoke the name of her sainted aunt Bridie. She often found herself reflecting on the Troubles in their entirety. Is this what we killed for? she would ask herself. Is this what we died for? What was it really all about? Occasionally, she saw Adams in her dreams.
Even so, she retained a ferocious pride in her own headlong personal history. When an American graduate student named Tara Keenan visited her in 2003, Price said, ‘I would like to think that what I did was to illustrate to the world the ability of any regular human being to push themselves to the limits and beyond, physically and mentally, because of some deeply felt belief.’ She spoke as if she had been some kind of endurance athlete rather than a paramilitary. ‘An ordinary person was able to react in a kind of extraordinary way,’ she continued. ‘It’s like a woman who can lift cars off her children. None of us know the limits of our ability.’
When Mackers told Price about the Belfast Project, she agreed to participate. They would meet at her house and talk for hours. With Mackers’s recorder rolling, she spoke about her proud republican lineage, about her radicalisation as a teenager during the civil rights movement, about the bombing mission to London and the years in prison and on hunger strike.
Before one of their interviews, Price said that she wanted to talk about the role she had played in the disappearance of Jean McConville. The whole reason that Mackers had been selected to conduct the Boston College interviews was that he was anything but objective. He came from the same community as the people he was interviewing. Price had become his dear friend. She attended his wedding to Carrie, dressed in a gown of shimmering gold, and posed for a photograph with her arms around Brendan Hughes. When Mackers’s son was born, Price agreed to be his godmother. Now, as Price announced that she was prepared to unlock one of the most awful secrets of the Troubles, Mackers found himself hesitating before turning on his recorder. ‘As an historian, I would love to get this,’ he told Price. ‘But as a friend, Dolours, I have to warn you. You have children. If you commit to being involved in the McConville disappearance, your children will bear the mark of Cain.’
When Mackers pressed RECORD, Price chose not to tell the story. When he sent the recordings and transcripts of the Dolours Price interviews off to Boston College, marked with her alphabetical cryptonym – ‘H’ – they did not contain a single reference to Jean McConville.
‘I was disappointed,’ Mackers reflected later. ‘She took my advice.’
23
Bog Queen
Geoff Knupfer stalked the moors. Knupfe
r was a retired English detective. He had penetrating blue eyes and a clipped moustache, and when he came to Ireland in search of bodies, he wore a high-visibility coat of vivid orange. It made him pop out in the landscape of heather and mossy green, like a beacon. For three decades, Knupfer had served as a detective in Manchester. He had worked on robberies and homicides and eventually retired as detective chief superintendent. But along the way he developed a morbid talent for the recovery of human remains.
One of the most notorious cases in the history of Manchester was the so-called Moors Murders, in which a couple of deranged lovers, Myra Hindley and Ian Brady, killed five local children over a two-year period, starting in 1963, and buried them in the countryside. Initially, only two of the bodies were discovered. But in 1986, more than two decades after the murders, Geoff Knupfer was introduced to Myra Hindley. She was serving a life sentence in prison, but she agreed to help him search for the body of another victim, and she was flown in a police helicopter to the moors. Overweight and in poor health, Hindley was unsteady on the rough terrain. But Knupfer took her hand, guiding her across the windswept mire, and his team eventually discovered the unmarked grave of Pauline Reade, who had been sixteen years old and on her way to a dance when Hindley and Brady murdered her. Trapped for decades in dense peat, her body had remained eerily preserved. But the moment it was exposed to the atmosphere, Knupfer recalled, ‘she began to deteriorate before our eyes’.
With this grim qualification, Knupfer would eventually become involved in the search for the disappeared in Ireland. In April 1999, as part of the peace process, the governments of the United Kingdom and Ireland created a new binational entity, the Independent Commission for the Location of Victims’ Remains. Dating back to the Iliad, ancient Egypt and beyond, burial rites have formed a critical function in most human societies. Whether we cremate a loved one or inter her bones, humans possess a deep-set instinct to mark death in some deliberate, ceremonial fashion. Perhaps the cruellest feature of forced disappearance as an instrument of war is that it denies the bereaved any such closure, relegating them to a permanent limbo of uncertainty.
‘You cannot mourn someone who has not died,’ the Argentine-Chilean writer Ariel Dorfman once observed. In Chile, more than three thousand people were disappeared during the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. In Argentina, the number may have been as high as thirty thousand. In tiny Northern Ireland, the figures were much smaller. The commission ultimately identified sixteen individuals who had been disappeared through the whole course of the Troubles. Even that was a reflection of the extraordinary smallness of the province: in some other countries, there were debates about the aggregate numbers of people who were buried in unmarked graves. In Northern Ireland, you could list the victims on the back of an envelope: Joe Lynskey, Seamus Wright, Kevin McKee, Jean McConville, Peter Wilson, Eamon Molloy, Columba McVeigh, Robert Nairac, Brendan Megraw, John McClory, Brian McKinney, Eugene Simons, Gerard Evans, Danny McIlhone, Charlie Armstrong, Seamus Ruddy. But to name the dead was one thing. To find them was another.
Investigators drove down small country lanes and met local people. Ex-gunmen. Barmen. Farmers. Priests. Their plea was simple: Tell us what you’ve heard, tell us what you remember, help us find the bodies. The legislation that established the commission specified that anyone coming forward with information would receive a limited grant of immunity from prosecution. One morning in the spring of 1999, scarcely a month after the legislation to form the commission was passed, a pair of Catholic priests escorted police officers to a medieval graveyard outside Dundalk. Under a rhododendron bush in a quiet corner of the cemetery, the officers discovered a new coffin, which had been hastily deposited above ground. It held the remains of Eamon Molloy, who was twenty-one when he was killed by the IRA in 1975, for being an informant. It appeared that Molloy’s remains had been dug up and placed in the coffin, then left in the graveyard overnight.
When Molloy’s family recovered his body, they held a funeral and reburied him. Not long afterwards, they were approached by a priest who had heard about the discovery on the news and said that he had a story to tell. His name was Eugene McCoy, and he recalled one night, a quarter of a century earlier, when he was startled by a knock at the door and summoned by a group of men to a mobile home in a remote area of County Louth. There, he found a young man tied up on a bed. It was Eamon Molloy. The men were going to execute him that night, but Molloy had asked to confess to a priest before they did. Father McCoy had left in such haste that he forgot to bring his rosary beads. The man whom he took to be the head of the execution squad drew out a set of his own and, handing them to the priest, said, ‘Use mine.’
The boy was frightened. He knew that he was about to die. He asked Father McCoy to deliver one last message to his family: Tell them I’m not an informer. This wasn’t true. It would subsequently be well established that Molloy had indeed been an informer. But his dying wish was that his family be told otherwise. Members of the clergy were often thrust into morally fraught situations during the Troubles, and they didn’t always do the right thing. After Father McCoy left that night, he did not track down the boy’s family to deliver the message. Nor did he ever report the incident to the police.
A month after Molloy’s body was discovered, the commission exhumed two more corpses from a bog in County Monaghan: Brian McKinney, son of Margaret McKinney, who had advocated for the families of the disappeared, along with his friend John McClory. They had been killed for stealing a gun from a Provo arms dump and using it to rob a bar. The search for bodies seemed to be gathering momentum, and one day that summer the children of Jean McConville assembled on a beach at the tip of the Cooley Peninsula, in County Louth. It was a bleak and lonely spot, rocky and raked by the breeze, fifty miles or so from Belfast. Information had surfaced, passed along by the IRA, that their mother had been buried at a spot along this stretch of the coast. Massive excavators lumbered around the site like prehistoric beasts, their craned arms churning up the soil and sand. Police officers in fluorescent jackets worked pneumatic drills, pickaxes, shovels and rakes while the McConville children watched and waited.
This vigil was a reunion for the siblings, but a dissonant one. As children, they had fiercely resisted any effort by the state to split the family up, as though they knew in advance that once they were prised apart, they might never come back together. They had gone their separate ways, getting in touch only sporadically. As they gathered now, in the hope of finally recovering their mother, some of them worried that they would no longer know how to relate to one another as siblings. The physical resemblance among them remained striking. Most of Jean’s children shared her narrow face, sharp cheekbones and small, pursed mouth. But the siblings, who were in their thirties and forties now, looked older than their years; their faces were haggard, and the hands and forearms of the men were etched with inky, blue-black tattoos. They were fractious and edgy around each other. When they spoke of Jean, each tended to use the singular possessive rather than the plural – ‘my mother’ – as if they were all only children.
Jim McConville, who was six when his mother was abducted, had been in and out of prison. Archie, like several of the siblings, had struggled with alcohol, and with his temper. ‘If someone says the wrong thing, you would explode,’ he said. ‘If something is said that hits the right spot, you can’t hold back.’ The children hadn’t had any counselling to speak of, so their grief and anger were still raw and unprocessed. They were particularly incensed at the IRA – over the decision to disappear their mother but also, perhaps even more so, over the suggestion that Jean McConville might have been an informant. The whispers about Jean had started not long after her death, the notion that she might have been executed for being a tout. As if it were not misfortune enough to be orphaned at a young age and cast into austere and predatory Irish orphanages, the children had come of age bearing that incendiary stigma.
The McConvilles stand vigil at the beach: Archie, Michael, Jim, Susa
n, Helen, Robert, Agnes and Billy (Paul Faith/PA Images/Getty)
The previous year, IRA representatives had acknowledged to Helen that the Provos were responsible for disappearing Jean. But in a statement in the spring of 1999, the organisation said that McConville had ‘admitted being a British Army informer’. The children were gratified that the IRA was finally at least acknowledging their mother’s murder and might now cooperate in the effort to track down her remains, but they fiercely disputed any intimation that she had been a tout. Jean was a victim of bigoted animus, they argued, a Protestant widow in a nationalist Catholic neighbourhood at the apex of sectarian tension. They told and retold the story about how Jean had tended to the wounded British soldier in Divis Flats shortly before her death, and how those words – BRIT LOVER – were scrawled in paint, like a scarlet letter, across their door. ‘I fought a lot of times with people who called my mother a tout,’ Jim said, recalling a life of merciless ostracism. ‘People wouldn’t look at us. When we walked into the pubs, they would make a space for us. We sat there by ourselves.’
What the children wanted now was to clear Jean’s name. Archie wondered whether her murder had been a case of mistaken identity: the IRA had been searching for a woman who was a suspected double agent at Divis and might simply have taken the wrong person. Michael scoffed at any notion that his mother could have been some sort of spy. She was an overworked, depressed, psychologically fragile mother of ten who had just lost her husband to cancer. She spent her days cocooned in her flat, smoking cigarettes and juggling children and doing laundry by hand. What information could she possibly provide? As to the claim that Jean might have confessed, Helen said, ‘While they were torturing her, she would have admitted anything.’
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