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July 7 - July 31, 2025
Michael McConville realized, to his horror, that the people taking his mother away were not strangers. They were his neighbors.
Albert and Chrissie 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.
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.
McCann urged his fellow protesters not to demonize the Protestant working people. “They are not our enemies in any sense,” McCann insisted. “They are not exploiters dressed in thirty-guinea suits. They are the dupes of the system, the victims of the landed and industrialist unionists. They are the men in overalls.” These people are actually on our side, McCann was saying. They just don’t know it yet.
“Why would we kill Paisley?” Dolours Price’s mother, Chrissie, had been known to say. “He’s our greatest asset.”
There was no television in the house on Avoniel Road, but as the civil rights movement got under way and Northern Ireland became embroiled in riots, Jean and Arthur would visit a neighbor’s house and watch the evening news with a growing sense of trepidation.
As Michael watched his father’s casket being lowered into the frigid ground, he thought to himself that things could not possibly get any worse.
In rural areas, you could stay on the run for years at a time, but in Belfast, where everybody knew everybody, you would be lucky to stick it out for six months. Someone would get you eventually.
Hughes adhered to a philosophy, instilled in him at a young age by his father, that if you want to get people to do something for you, you do it with them.
Despite his small stature, Hughes struck Price as a “giant of a man.” It meant something to her, and to others, that he asked no volunteer to do anything he would not do himself.
He thought of going out and getting into gunfights the way other people thought about getting up and going to the office.
There was a quote attributed to Mao that Hughes was partial to, about how the guerrilla warrior must swim among the people as a fish swims through the sea. West Belfast was his sea: there was an informal system in place whereby local civilians would assist young paramilitaries like Hughes, allowing their homes to be used as shortcuts or hiding places.
Once, a British soldier in the Lower Falls area caught Hughes in the sights of his rifle. Finger on the trigger, he was ready to open fire when an elderly lady stepped out of some unseen doorway and planted herself in the path of his weapon, then informed him that he would not be shooting anybody on her street on that particular evening. When the soldier looked up, Hughes was gone.
Adams’s role, in Hughes’s view—he was “the key strategist” for the Provos, whereas Hughes was more of a tactician. Fearless and cunning, Hughes could mastermind any operation, but Adams had the sort of mind that could perceive the broader political context and the shifting tectonics of the conflict.
Like a general who stays behind the battle lines, Adams was known for avoiding direct violence himself.
Adams later observed, adding that Hughes “compensated for any inability to articulate politically at great length by doing the right things instinctively.”
The MRF consisted of thirty or so special operators, both men and women, who were handpicked from all across the British Army. They dressed in plain clothes, wearing bell-bottoms and jean jackets, and grew their hair long.
In the MRF’s secret briefing room in the heart of Palace Barracks, the walls were plastered with surveillance shots of the biggest “players” among the Provos—their targets. According to an account by one former member of the MRF, the key figures on the wall included Brendan Hughes, Gerry Adams, and Dolours and Marian Price.
After slipping across the border, they held a triumphant press conference in Dublin, where the newspapers anointed them “the Magnificent Seven.”
Why doesn’t he jump out of the car? she wondered. Why doesn’t he smack me on the head and run away? Why doesn’t he do something to save himself? But as she drove on, she realized that he could not act to save himself for the same reason that she could not act to save him. Their dedication to the movement would not allow it.
Brendan Hughes felt betrayed by the decision to disappear Wright and McKee. He had given them his word that they would not be killed. It would trouble him for the rest of his life.
“Today we were unlucky, but remember, we only have to be lucky once. You will have to be lucky always.”
There were vastly more Irish Americans than there were people in Ireland itself. This demographic anomaly was a testament to centuries of migration caused by poverty, famine, and discrimination, and there was strong support for the cause of Irish independence among the Irish in America.
Indeed, it could occasionally seem that support for the armed struggle was more fervent in Boston or Chicago than it was in Belfast or Derry. The romantic idyll of a revolutionary movement is easier to sustain when there is no danger that one’s own family members might get blown to pieces on a trip to the grocery store.
Fewer than twenty people disappeared during the Troubles. Because the country is so small, however, the impact of each disappearance reverberated throughout the society.
If people in Northern Ireland were wondering whether it was safe, yet, to come clean about their own roles in the conflict, the continued denials by Adams would suggest that it most definitely wasn’t.
“the man who in the name of Ireland accepts as a ‘final settlement’ anything less by one iota than separation from England is guilty of so immense an infidelity, so immense a crime against the Irish nation…that it were better that he had not been born.”
it now became clear to him that the leadership of the movement may have been prepared to settle for less than absolute victory and had elected—deliberately, in his view—not to inform soldiers like him. For Hughes, this strategic sleight of hand was deeply personal: he placed the blame directly on his dearest comrade, Gerry Adams.
When Mackers asked about the disappearance of Jean McConville, Hughes told him that Gerry Adams had known about and approved the operation. In Hughes’s view, the murder had been justified. “She was an informer,” he said.
“Whatever happens, never confess. If you confess, you’re dead.”
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.”
During a meeting with Michael McConville, Adams said, “For what it’s worth, I apologize for what the republican movement did to your mother.” Adams excelled at this type of dissimulation. He would assume no personal responsibility himself. After all, he had never been in the IRA.
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.
The official pronouncement in the coroner’s report for Dolours Price was “death by misadventure.”
Hundreds of Union Jacks still fluttered in Protestant neighborhoods, while Catholic areas were often decked out with the tricolor, or with Palestinian flags—a gesture of solidarity but also a signal that, even now, many republicans in the North regarded themselves as an occupied people.
Think of the armed struggle as the launch of a boat, Hughes said, “getting a hundred people to push this boat out. This boat is stuck in the sand, right, and get them to push the boat out and then the boat sailing off and leaving the hundred people behind, right. That’s the way I feel. The boat is away, sailing on the high seas, with all the luxuries that it brings, and the poor people that launched the boat are left sitting in the muck and the dirt and the shit and the sand, behind.”
He always loved that about pigeons. They wander. But their natural instinct is to fly back to the place where they were born.
