More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
A couple of the men were not wearing masks, and Michael McConville realized, to his horror, that the people taking his mother away were not strangers. They were his neighbors.
WHEN DOLOURS PRICE WAS a little girl, her favored saints were martyrs. Dolours had one very Catholic aunt on her father’s side who would say, “For God and Ireland.” For the rest of the family, Ireland came first. Growing up in West Belfast in the 1950s, she dutifully went to church every day. But she noticed that her parents didn’t. One day, when she was about fourteen, she announced, “I’m not going back to Mass.”
Price shared a fierce commitment to the cause of Irish republicanism: the belief that for hundreds of years the British had been an occupying force on the island of Ireland—and that the Irish had a duty to expel them by any means necessary.
He liked to reminisce about beloved comrades whom the British had hanged, and Dolours grew up thinking that this was the most natural thing in the world: that every child had parents who had friends who’d been hanged.
between Britain and Ireland first began. Really, it was hard to imagine Ireland before what the Prices referred to simply as “the cause.” It almost didn’t matter where you started the story: it was always there. It predated the distinction between Protestant and Catholic; it was older than the Protestant church. You could go back nearly a thousand years, in fact, to the Norman raiders of the twelfth century, who crossed the Irish Sea on ships, in search of new lands to conquer. Or to Henry VIII and the Tudor rulers of the sixteenth century, who asserted England’s total subjugation of Ireland.
...more
But the chapter in this saga that loomed largest in the house on Slievegallion Drive was the Easter Rising of 1916, in which a clutch of Irish revolutionaries seized the post office in Dublin and declared the establishment of a free and independent Irish Republic.
After the Irish War of Independence led to the partition of Ireland, in 1921, the island was split in two: in the South, twenty-six counties achieved a measure of independence as the Irish Free State, while in the North, a remaining six counties continued to be ruled by Great Britain. Like other staunch republicans, the Price family did not refer to the place where they happened to reside as “Northern Ireland.” Instead it was “the North of Ireland.” In the fraught local vernacular, even proper nouns could be political.
As a girl, Dolours donned her best white frock for Easter Sunday, a basket full of eggs under her arm and, pinned to her chest, an Easter lily, to commemorate the botched rebellion. It was an intoxicating ritual for a child, like joining a league of secret outlaws. She learned to cover the lily with her hand when she saw a policeman coming.
Bridie wore dark glasses, and Dolours once watched a tear descend from behind the glass and creep down her withered cheek. And Dolours wondered: How can you cry if you have no eyes?
Partition had created a perverse situation in which two religious communities, which for centuries had felt a degree of tension, each came to feel like an embattled minority: Protestants, who formed a majority of the population in Northern Ireland but a minority on the island as a whole, feared being subsumed by Catholic Ireland; Catholics, who represented a majority on the island but a minority in Northern Ireland, felt that they were discriminated against in the six counties.
Northern Ireland was home to a million Protestants and half a million Catholics, and it was true that the Catholics faced extraordinary discrimination: often excluded from good jobs and housing, they were also denied the kind of political power that might enable them to better their conditions. Northern Ireland had its own devolved political system, based at Stormont, on the outskirts of Belfast. For half a century, no Catholic had ever held executive office.
The Catholic birth rate in Northern Ireland was approximately double the Protestant birth rate—yet during the three decades prior to the march on Derry, the Catholic population had remained virtually static, because so many people had no choice but to leave.
But even as tensions sharpened between Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland, Dolours had come to believe that the armed struggle her parents championed might be an outdated solution, a relic of the past.
Bunting was an Orangeman, a member of the Protestant fraternal organization that had long defined itself in opposition to the Catholic population.
“You can’t ignore the devil, brother,” Bunting said. Bunting may have been a bigot, but some of his anxieties were widely shared. “The basic fear of Protestants in Northern Ireland is that they will be outbred by Roman Catholics,”
Many people on the English “mainland” seemed only faintly aware of this restive province off the coast of Scotland; others would be happy to let Northern Ireland go. After all, Britain had been shedding colonies for decades. In the words of one English journalist writing at the time, the unionists in Northern Ireland were “a society more British than the British about whom the British care not at all.” To “loyalists”—as especially zealous unionists were known—this created a tendency to see oneself as the ultimate defender of a national identity that was in danger of extinction.
But Ronnie was surely the only member of the march whose father was the architect of a nettlesome counterprotest, leading his own band of loyalist marchers in a campaign of harassment and bellowing anti-Catholic invective through a bullhorn. “My father’s down there making a fool of himself,” Ronnie grumbled, shamefaced, to his friends. But this oedipal dynamic seemed only to sharpen the resolve of both father and son.
The night before, as the marchers slept on the floor of a hall in the village of Claudy, Major Bunting had assembled his followers in Derry, or Londonderry, as Bunting called
Paisley was a Pied Piper agitator who liked to lead his followers through Catholic neighborhoods, sparking riots wherever he went.
Though the population of Derry was predominantly Catholic, in the symbolic imagination of loyalists, the city remained a living monument to Protestant resistance. In 1689, Protestant forces loyal to William of Orange, the new king, had managed to hold the city against a siege by a Catholic army loyal to James II. In some other part of the world, an event of such faded significance might merit an informative plaque. But in Derry, the clash was commemorated every year, with marches by local Protestant organizations. Now, Paisley and Bunting suggested, the student protesters who were planning to
...more
They clambered over the hedge, but the stones kept coming. And now the men started running down and physically attacking the marchers. It looked to Dolours like a scene from some Hollywood western, when the Indians charge into the prairie. A few of the attackers wore motorcycle helmets. They descended, swinging cudgels, crowbars, lead pipes, and laths. Some men had wooden planks studded with nails, and they attacked the protesters, lacerating their skin. People pulled coats over their heads for cover, stumbling, blind and confused, and grabbed one another for protection.
As Dolours struggled in the water, she locked eyes with one attacker, a man with a club, and for the rest of her life she would return to that moment, the way his eyes were glazed with hate. She looked into those eyes and saw nothing.
There were dozens of RUC officers there that day, but most of them had done little to intervene. It would later be alleged that the reason the attackers wore white armbands was so that their friends in the police could distinguish them from the protesters. In fact, many of Major Bunting’s men, the very men doing the beating, were members of the police auxiliary, the B-Specials.
“Why did you not fight back?”
The Falls Road and the Shankill Road run roughly parallel as they move into the center of Belfast, drawing closer together but never touching. The Falls Road was a stronghold for Catholics, and the Shankill for Protestants, and these two arteries were connected by a series of narrow cross streets that ran between them at right angles, and featured rows of identical terraced houses.
When the Troubles ignited, the IRA was practically defunct. The group had engaged in a failed campaign along the border during the 1950s and early ’60s, but the effort drew little support from the community. By the late sixties, some members of the IRA’s leadership in Dublin had begun to question the utility of the gun in Irish politics, and to adopt a more avowedly Marxist philosophy, which advocated peaceful resistance through politics.
Traditionally, the Catholic minority in Northern Ireland had turned to the IRA for protection during periods of sectarian strife. But when the clashes started in 1969, the organization could do little to stop jeering loyalists from burning Catholic families out of their homes. In
To Dolours, a split in the IRA came to seem inevitable. By early 1970, a breakaway organization had formed. Known as the Provisional IRA, they were explicitly geared to armed resistance. The old IRA became known as the Official IRA. On the streets of Belfast, they were often distinguished as the “Provos” and the “Stickies,” because Officials would supposedly wear commemorative Easter lilies that stuck on their shirtfronts with adhesive, whereas the more dyed-in-the-wool Provos wore paper lilies affixed with a pin.
1971, forty-four British soldiers were murdered by paramilitaries. But even as the two wings of the IRA intensified their battle with loyalist mobs, the RUC, and the British Army, they now began to wage bloody war against each other.
It was an invigorating solidarity. As the violence intensified, grandiose funerals became routine, with rousing graveside orations and caskets draped in tricolor flags. People took to joking that there was no social life in Belfast anymore, apart from wakes.
One day in 1971, Dolours approached a local IRA commander and said, “I want to join.” The formal induction took place in the front room of the Price home on Slievegallion Drive. Someone said, casually, “Hey, come in here a minute,” and Dolours went in and raised her right hand and recited a declaration of allegiance: “I, Dolours Price, promise that I will promote the objectives of the IRA to the best of my knowledge and ability.”
Since the moment she locked eyes with the loyalist who beat her at Burntollet Bridge, Dolours had concluded that her fantasy of peaceful resistance had been naïve. I’m never going to convert these people, she thought. No amount of marching up and down the road would bring the change that Ireland needed.
There was a reason for this. Because the IRA was a banned organization, and even admitting to being a member was grounds for arrest, the group was fanatical about secrecy.
But even if your parents were ardent supporters of the IRA, there were reasons not to tell them that you had joined. If the police or the army broke down the door to interrogate them, the less they knew, the better.
When Francie joined the IRA, he knew that his father was a member as well—yet they never discussed it.
But when Francie needed bullets, he wouldn’t ask his father; he would ask his friend Kevin instead: “Kevin, does my father have any rounds?” Kevin would ask Francie’s father, who would give the rounds to Kevin, who would give them to Francie. It may not have been the most efficient way of doing business, but it meant that certain things could be left unsaid.
The chief of staff of the Provos was a man named Seán Mac Stíofáin.
It would later emerge that Mac Stíofáin was not Irish at all: his mother, who was given to storytelling, had been born not in Belfast but in Bethnal Green, in London. But sometimes it’s the myths that we believe most fervently of all.
In the likely event that you were outwitted or outgunned in any given operation—or in the whole campaign—you could expect the same fate as Patrick Pearse and the heroes of the Easter Rising: the British would end your life, then the Irish would tell stories about you forevermore. New recruits to the Provos were told to anticipate one of two certain outcomes: “Either you’re going to jail or you’re going to die.”
If the image of an “IRA man” in Belfast during the 1960s entailed a gin-blossomed barstool radical, a shambling has-been, full of tales about the old days, the Provisionals set out to upend this caricature. They aimed to be clean, disciplined, organized, ideological—and ruthless. They called themselves “volunteers,” a name that harked back to the doomed heroes of the Easter Rising and captured the sense that patriotism is a transaction in which the patriot must be prepared to pay dearly.
Often, the Price sisters transported incendiary material. They came to know the scent of nitrobenzene, an ingredient of improvised explosives: it smelled like marzipan. Bomb-making materials were prepared in the Republic and then smuggled north across the border.
There were some in the more starchy and traditional Cumann na mBan to whom the presence of women in such operational roles—women who might deploy their own sexuality as a weapon—was threatening, even mildly scandalous. Some Cumann veterans referred to these frontline IRA women as “Army girls,”
While Belfast was burning in the summer of 1969, a twenty-five-year-old Palestinian terrorist named Leila Khaled hijacked a TWA flight from Rome to Tel Aviv and, with it, the attention of the world. Khaled diverted the flight to Damascus, becoming the first woman to hijack an airplane. She emerged as a kind of pinup for the new militancy.
When he saw Price, McCann was always struck by her sheer glamour. Most of the republican women he had known growing up were stern and pious—if not the Virgin Mary, exactly, then the Virgin Mary with a gun. The Price sisters were something else altogether.
As a fund-raising initiative, the Provos took to robbing banks. Lots of banks. One day in the summer of 1972, three fresh-faced nuns walked into the Allied Irish Bank in Belfast. Just as the branch was about to close, the nuns reached under their habits and came out with guns—then proceeded to stick up the place. It was the Price sisters, along with another female volunteer.
For all the horror unfolding around them, there was a sense of adventure for Dolours and her comrades, a fantasy that they were dashing outlaws in a society in which all order had broken down.
Another person Price became associated with was a tall, angular young man named Gerry Adams. He was an ex-bartender from Ballymurphy who had worked at the Duke of York, a low-ceilinged pub in the city center that was popular with labor leaders and journalists.
protested the construction of Divis Flats. He never attended college, but he was a fearsome debater, smart and analytical, like Dolours.
“The Provo army was started by the people to set up barricades against the loyalist hordes,” Albert explained at the time. “We beat them with stones at first, and they had guns. Our people had to go and get guns. Wouldn’t they have been right stupid people to stand there?
When British troops were killed, Albert would freely acknowledge the humanity of each individual soldier. “But he is in uniform,” he would point out. “He is the enemy. And the Irish people believe that this is war.” He was against death, he insisted, but ultimately this was a question of means and ends. “If we get a united socialist Ireland,” Albert Price concluded, “then maybe it will all have been worth it.” As if to underline the
