When Moloney asked about the practice of disappearing people, Price said that she never believed in it. ‘Pat McClure and myself and other volunteers would have discussed it among ourselves, that we didn’t know that it was such a smart idea to be doing it this way,’ she said. ‘But we were told, “This is the way it’s being done.”’
‘Do you think it’s a war crime?’ Moloney asked her.
‘I think it’s a war crime, yes. I think it’s a war crime,’ she said. ‘I certainly advocated and said that … their bodies should be thrown out in the street. To put the fear of God and the republican movement into anybody who would choose that form of life.’
Price had already been helping to disappear people for some time when she was ordered to take McConville across the border, she said. Up to that point, she had not known the woman, or known of her. But McConville had confessed to being an informer, Price insisted. A transmitter had been discovered at her flat. There was also another detail: Price said that Jean McConville had been spotted by some IRA volunteers at a barracks on Hastings Street. ‘She was concealed behind a blanket with a slit in it that she could see through,’ Price said.
Like the Mau Mau cloaked in sheets with slits in them so that they could identify their countrymen for Frank Kitson, Jean McConville was, in Price’s telling, hiding behind a blanket and picking out IRA men from a lineup. Except that the blanket did not reach all the way to the floor, Price continued, and one of the men ‘recognised the slippers’.
When McConville was taken for questioning, Price continued, she ‘made an admission’. She said that she had been an informer. ‘For money.’
With a level gaze, Price told Moloney, ‘We believed that informers were the lowest form of human life. They were less than human. Death was too good for them.’
Along with Wee Pat McClure and one other volunteer, Price picked Jean McConville up at a house in West Belfast where she was being held, and they drove towards the border. Price’s friend Joe Lynskey might have known from the moment he got in the car with her that he was being ferried to his death, but Jean McConville had no such premonition. Price told her that she was going to be turned over to the Legion of Mary, a Catholic charity, who would take her away to a place of safety.
‘Will my children be brought to me?’ McConville asked.
Price had not realised until that moment that she had children.
‘Yes, I’m sure they will,’ she lied.
‘Will they give me money?’ McConville asked. ‘Will they get me a house?’
According to Price, McConville felt no fear, having already confessed everything to the IRA. Along the way they stopped, and Price bought McConville fish and chips and cigarettes. Price told Moloney that she did not like McConville. ‘She said at one point, “I knew those Provo bastards wouldn’t have the balls to shoot me.” And the “Provo bastards” who were driving her thought, Oh, wouldn’t they?’ Price said coldly, adding, ‘She talked too much. And condemned herself out of her own mouth.’
Was this true? It was such a specific recollection, and so starkly at odds with the memories that the McConville children had of their mother. The woman they recalled was not some coarse-tongued instigator, but a cowed and tentative recluse. Could McConville really have lashed out in such a suicidally impetuous manner, when her encounter with Price was so obviously fraught with danger? Was Price consciously lying about the woman? Or had she coped with her own sense of culpability by remembering Jean McConville as something less than human? For most of her conversation with Moloney, she maintained her steely resolve. But it could sometimes feel like a pose, a form of armour. And occasionally her tone would falter.
‘I don’t know the specifics of what she did and what she didn’t do,’ Price said immediately after her condemnation of McConville. She had no first-hand knowledge of McConville’s alleged crimes; what she knew was that the organisation had come to the improbable conclusion that the mother of ten was an informer. Even if the charge was true – and Price believed that it was – she doubted, deep down, that the penalty was appropriate. ‘What warrants death?’ she said to Moloney. ‘I have to ask myself. What warrants death?’ She continued, ‘I certainly knew nothing of the nature of the children or the number. I knew none of that. And had it been a situation where I was brought into the discussion of what happened, I might have advocated a lesser punishment.’ Perhaps McConville could have been expelled from the country rather than killed, she suggested.
Instead, Price said, they crossed the border and she left Jean in Dundalk, with the local unit of the IRA.
Then what happened? Moloney asked.
‘She stayed there for a while,’ Price said. She hesitated. Then she said, ‘This is where it gets dangerous for me.’
If Price continued to malign McConville’s character at least in part to assuage her own nagging conscience, it may have been because she had done more than simply drive the widow to the border.
‘I need to know the facts,’ said Moloney.
‘Okay, well, we were called back,’ Price said. ‘She’d been there for about four to five days. And we were called back to Dundalk.’ The local unit had dug a hole in the ground. All they had to do was take McConville across a field to the freshly dug grave and shoot her. But they hadn’t. ‘They didn’t want to do it,’ Price said. It was because McConville was a woman, she thought.
‘So you guys had to do it,’ Moloney said.
Price said nothing, just made a small murmur.
‘Is that right?’ he pressed.
She murmured again. Then she uttered, ‘Yeah.’
‘Do you want to talk about that, or not?’ Moloney asked.
There were three members of the Unknowns with McConville when she died, Price said: Wee Pat McClure, another volunteer, and Price herself. They had only one gun, and they worried about their consciences and decided that they would each take a shot, so that they could never say for certain who it was that dealt the killing blow. This is an old trick used by firing squads – one of the gunmen’s rifles will be loaded with a blank so that afterwards, each of the shooters can tell himself that he might not have been the one to take a life. It can serve as a comforting fiction, though in this case, because they had only one gun, there would not be much ambiguity about which of them did the killing. ‘We each in turn fired a shot,’ Price said. When Price fired hers, she deliberately missed. Then one of the others pulled the trigger, and McConville collapsed.
‘We left her in the hole,’ Price said. Then the local Dundalk unit sealed the grave.
‘Then you went back to Belfast?’ Moloney asked.
‘Then we went back to Belfast.’
‘And what happened then?’
‘Well,’ Price said, ‘we were pretty distraught. And Pat went and reported it.’
‘To Gerry?’ Moloney asked.
‘Yeah,’ Price said.
Suddenly shifting his tone from patient confessor to stern cross-examiner, Moloney said, ‘There’s no doubt in your mind, being part of all that operation, that the chain of command was such that the order which had originated with Gerry Adams –’
‘Yes,’ Price said.
‘And reporting went back to Gerry Adams. You’re sure of that?’
‘I’m sure,’ she said. Then, her pace quickening, she said, ‘And he tried to pretend he was in Long Kesh when that happened. He wasn’t in Long Kesh when that happened. He wasn’t. And, um, that’s very hard, a very hard thing.’ She was upset. ‘Those experiences, I mean …’ she trailed off. ‘These people do come into my mind, come into my head,’ she said. Lynskey, Wright, McKee, McConville. ‘I think about them and,’ she continued, ‘I won’t tell a lie: I’m not a great one for prayer. But I do occasionally say the odd one in the middle of the night. I do occasionally say, “Well, God bless them. I hope they are in a better place.”’
As an IRA volunteer, Price said, ‘I was often required to act contrary to my nature.’ Sometimes she had to obey orders that were not
easy to obey. At the time, she always did as she was instructed. But later, she had the opportunity to ask herself ‘all the complex questions that you don’t ask in the heat of the moment’. She added, ‘I’ve spent a lot of time talking to a lot of doctors about all of this.’
After several hours, Moloney and Price stopped talking. They parted ways, and he assured her that he would protect the things she had said. He would bring the tapes back to America and deposit them in the safest place he knew – the Belfast Project archives, in the Treasure Room at Boston College.
They were still there three years later when two detectives from the Police Service of Northern Ireland flew to Logan Airport, in July 2013, and made their way to Chestnut Hill to retrieve the material they had been authorised by Judge Young to collect. The interviews that Moloney conducted with Price were not technically part of the Belfast Project at all. But in trying to keep them safe, he had actually been placing them in jeopardy. Moloney pleaded with Bob O’Neill not to include this material in the collection that the university handed over. The subpoenas were written broadly enough, however, that the university, which had never had much of a fight in it to begin with, chose to give up Moloney’s interviews along with everything else. One day the following spring, Gerry Adams was arrested by the PSNI, in relation to the abduction and murder, forty-one years earlier, of Jean McConville.
28
Death by Misadventure
At Massereene Barracks on Saturday nights, the young British soldiers liked to order pizza. Stuck on the army base, they would telephone a nearby Domino’s. Over the course of a given Saturday evening, the Domino’s might dispatch twenty different orders to the barracks. The soldiers were good customers. A few minutes before ten o’clock on the night of 7 March 2009, a couple of young soldiers ventured out to the brick gatehouse at the entrance of the base. Dressed in desert camouflage, they were scheduled to fly a few hours later, in the dead of night, on a transport plane to Afghanistan for a six-month tour of duty. But first they would fill up on pizza. One delivery car pulled up, and then a second – overlapping orders both from the same Domino’s, two different delivery men withdrawing hot square boxes from insulated bags. Then a third car pulled up, a green sedan, and there was a sudden hail of automatic gunfire. There were two gunmen, dressed in dark clothing, their faces hidden by balaclavas. After a sustained initial volley, they approached the two soldiers, who were lying on the ground, and stood above them, firing repeatedly from close range. Having discharged more than sixty rounds in half a minute, the gunmen scrambled back into the green car and disappeared. The two soldiers were killed. Patrick Azimkar was twenty-one, from north London. Mark Quinsey was twenty-three, and from Birmingham. Two other soldiers were wounded in the attack, along with both Domino’s deliverymen. One of them was a local kid, the other an immigrant from Poland.
Twelve years had passed since the last British soldier was killed in Northern Ireland. In a phone call to a Dublin newspaper, an armed dissident group, the Real IRA, claimed responsibility. Even the deliverymen were legitimate targets, a spokesman for the group asserted, because they were ‘collaborating with the British by servicing them’. In a statement, the chief constable of the PSNI, Hugh Orde, said, ‘This was an act by a small group of increasingly desperate people who are determined to drag 99 per cent of this community back to where they don’t want to go.’
A huge investigation was launched, and several arrests were made. Then, eight months after the shooting, a team of heavily armed police officers burst into a house in Andersonstown. Authorities had traced the telephone used by the Real IRA to claim responsibility for the attack. It was a pay-as-you-go phone that had been purchased at a Tesco supermarket in Newtownabbey the day after the shooting. Consulting CCTV footage from the shop, police spotted a pale woman in late middle age who was bundled in a heavy, dark coat. As she stood at the checkout and reached into her wallet to purchase the phone, the woman’s gaze wandered upward until, suddenly, she was looking directly into the surveillance camera. It was Marian Price.
Dolours might have loathed the Good Friday Agreement, but she could not commit herself to any of the republican splinter groups that were devoted to continuing the violence. Her sister had no such compunction. ‘Armed struggle does have a place in the present and in the future,’ Marian would say. She was in her late fifties, with grown daughters and arthritis, but she was not yet ready to put down the gun. After two days of interrogation about the barracks shooting, she was released without charge. But eighteen months later, she was detained by the authorities again, and this time they did not let her go. Marian was ultimately charged with ‘providing property for the purposes of terrorism’. There was another charge as well, relating to a dissident rally in Derry, at which a masked Real IRA man read a statement threatening police officers, saying that, as an occupying force, they were ‘liable for execution’. While he recited the statement, Marian Price stood beside him, holding his script, unmasked.
For the next two years, Marian was held in prison, including long stretches in solitary confinement. Her psoriasis was acting up, and she started losing weight. In her head, it could seem at times as if she was back in jail in England, institutionalised again, as if the past thirty years had not actually happened, as if she had never married or had children or enjoyed a life outside prison walls. Dolours was distraught with worry for her sister. She took part in a ‘Free Marian Price!’ campaign, outside the prison. Earnest letters were written and little rallies were held. Supporters described Marian as a ‘victim of psychological torture and internment without trial’. It was all conspicuously reminiscent of the movement to free the Price sisters back in the early 1970s.
But this campaign did not garner the kind of popular support among Irish republicans that the Price sisters had enjoyed decades earlier. Marian might not have moved on, but the world had; it had changed in profound and irrevocable ways. The war had taken its toll, and there was a new spirit of compromise and reconciliation in the air. The very month that Marian was taken into custody, Queen Elizabeth II made a state visit to Ireland – the first by a British monarch since 1911, a century earlier, when the whole island was still part of the United Kingdom. A former schoolmate of Dolours’s, Mary McAleese, had grown up to become president of Ireland. She welcomed the historic occasion of the royal visit, saying it was ‘absolutely the right moment for us to welcome on to Irish soil Her Majesty the Queen’. Marian was still in prison the following year when Martin McGuinness, the former Derry gunman turned deputy first minister of Northern Ireland, met the Queen and shook her hand. McGuinness and Gerry Adams seemed capable of finding common ground with anyone. They even reconciled with the vitriolic Ian Paisley, with whom McGuinness came to work closely in government. ‘In politics, as in life, it is a truism that no one can ever have 100 per cent of what they desire,’ Paisley said, appearing alongside McGuinness at Stormont. ‘They must make a verdict when they believe they have achieved enough.’
But just because everybody else was now ready to give up fighting didn’t mean that Marian was. She readily acknowledged that her recalcitrance on this matter was fundamentally anti-democratic – that only a tiny minority of people in Northern Ireland were supportive of further bloodshed in the name of expelling the British. ‘But being a republican isn’t about entering a popularity contest,’ she observed. ‘It never has been.’ She had announced, back in 2001, that ‘another generation is going to have to take up the torch of republicanism and fight on’. But whereas she took the torch from her parents, just as they had taken it from theirs, Marian’s own daughters, like her sister’s sons, showed little inclination to devote themselves to armed struggle. Marian had raised two civilians, young women who were creatures not of the troubled twentieth century but of the globalised twenty-first. One of her daughters was a journalist; she worked for the BBC.
Some of Marian’s friends worried that she was being used by her young dissident associates, that these wannabe revolutionaries humour
ed her because she was a Price sister – because she conferred, as a poster girl of the truly dire years of the struggle, some vicarious, if slightly retro, credibility. In 2014, after two years in custody, Marian pleaded guilty to both charges against her and was sentenced to twelve months in prison, though, due to her declining health and the time she had already served, the judge suspended the sentence. At the hearing, she was frail, and approached the dock with the aid of a walking stick.
In prison, Marian had sustained herself with a cultural diet that seemed less characteristic of a revolutionary agitator than of a middlebrow, apolitical pensioner. She did the word puzzles in the Daily Mail. She read Stieg Larsson novels. And she spent hours watching her favourite TV show, the lush English confection of manor house nostalgia, Downton Abbey.
It was about a year after Marian Price was released from custody that her old comrade Gerry Adams found himself under arrest. Armed with the Boston College interviews, the PSNI had already arrested a number of people by that point and questioned them about the abduction and murder of Jean McConville. Some of these individuals had lived in the Divis area at the time McConville was taken. But in 1972, many of them had been teenagers, so if they played any role in the affair it is likely to have been a minor one – they may have assisted the scrum of locals who removed McConville from her flat that night – and after their interviews with the police, they were all released. Only one person had actually been charged: Ivor Bell, the veteran republican who, according to Brendan Hughes, had argued that Jean McConville should not be disappeared but should be killed and left in the street, and who was overruled, in Hughes’s telling, by Gerry Adams. Bell faced charges of aiding and abetting the murder, and of IRA membership – because even after the Troubles, you could still be prosecuted for having been a member of a paramilitary organisation in the past.
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