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May 30 - June 1, 2025
‘the old heart of the earth needed to be warmed with the red wine of the battlefield’.
The Royal Ulster Constabulary was overwhelmingly Protestant, and it had a part-time auxiliary, known as the B-Specials, composed of armed, often vehemently anti-Catholic unionist men. One early member, summarising how the B-Specials were recruited, said, ‘I need men, and the younger and wilder they are, the better.’
When she and Marian finally got back to Belfast and appeared, bruised and battered, on the doorstep of the little house on Slievegallion Drive, Chrissie Price listened to the story of her daughters’ ordeal. When they had finished telling it, she had one question. ‘Why did you not fight back?’
A mob would accost such women, forcibly shave their heads, anoint them with warm and sticky black tar, then shower a pillowcaseful of dirty feathers over their heads and chain them by the neck to a lamppost, like a dog, so that the whole community could observe the spectacle of their indignity. ‘Soldier lover!’ the mob would bray. ‘Soldier’s doll!’
‘I wondered if perhaps some of my good fortune might have been due to the fact that I did think just a little bit more like a terrorist than some of our commanders,’
Instead, it was as if the whole community in Divis simply chose to ignore the flatful of abandoned children on St Jude’s Walk.
As other local children were composing Christmas lists, the McConvilles were running out of food.
Inside the Old Bailey itself, several criminal trials were under way: a drug conspiracy case was wrapping up in one courtroom, a judge was addressing the jury for a murder trial in another. Someone burst into the courtrooms and told everyone to get out – a bomb was about to go off right outside the building.
He was now the most wanted man in Northern Ireland, and he didn’t have much time.
They were dubbed the ‘Sisters of Terror’, and depicted as hugely dangerous.
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’.
As soon as he was safe in the Republic, Hughes started to feel the tug of Belfast.
A visiting priest, surveying the prison, compared the men to ‘people living in sewer-pipes in the slums of Calcutta’.
The victims would be buried in the same ground upon which they had been killed just days earlier.
Some people in Ireland looked askance at the ‘plastic Paddies’ who urged bloody war in Ulster from the safe distance of America.
Seamus Heaney composed an original poem for the boys. He wrote it on a Japanese fan, which the couple hung on the wall in their home. (It has never been published.)
But word came back from the outside – specifically, from Gerry Adams – that what Thatcher was proposing was not enough, so the strikers should hold out. Six more men died before the strike concluded.
But I’m certainly not going to stand up and deny it. And to hear people who I would have died for, and almost did on a few occasions, stand up and deny the part in history that he has played – the part in the war that he has played, the part in the war that he directed – and deny it is totally disgusting and a disgrace to all the people who have died.’
‘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?’
Price felt a sharp sense of moral injury: she believed that she had been robbed of any ethical justification for her own conduct.
‘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.’
In fact, the old IRA disappeared people during the War of Independence, back in the 1920s. Nobody knows precisely how many people were secretly buried, but the bodies still crop up occasionally, bones dyed such a deep brown by peat that they look like tree roots rather than anything human.
But the visual implication was always the same: a lethal stiletto, a dagger in the heart of the IRA.
In an interview on the programme, Gerry Adams admitted that he had known about Áine’s allegations – and believed them – for twenty-two years. Yet he had never approached the police. In fact, Liam Adams became an active member of Sinn Féin, one who specialised in working with young people.
hundreds of black umbrellas popped open. The coffin was wrapped in a bright tricolour flag, and for a moment it seemed to float, borne along on that dark tide, like a raft on an unquiet sea.
Long after Hughes and Price called an end to their strikes and attempted to reintegrate into society, they nursed old grudges and endlessly replayed their worst wartime abominations. In a sense, they never stopped devouring themselves.
On race days, Michael released his birds, and they would disappear over the horizon. Then, eventually, they would come home. He always loved that about pigeons. They wander. But their natural instinct is to fly back to the place where they were born.
