Dolours Price and Eamonn McCann's disagreement over armed struggle

Dolours Price and Eamonn McCann's disagreement over armed struggle grew out of a friendship formed on the 1969 march from Belfast to Derry. Both sought revolutionary change and a less divided Ireland, but McCann opposed demonising Protestant workers and warned that armed struggle would exact pain without commensurate results. The attack at Burntollet Bridge changed Price's understanding of what peaceful protest could achieve: she turned to the IRA, while McCann remained convinced that violence was not the answer. Their relationship gives the book a personal measure of a political divide, tracing how shared hopes could lead to sharply different methods.

A friendship formed on the march

On 1 January 1969, Price joined student protesters assembling at Belfast's Donegall Square for a march of roughly seventy miles to Derry. They were protesting discrimination against Catholics in Northern Ireland, where Catholics were excluded from many good jobs and from housing and political power. Price had come to see the sectarian division between Catholics and Protestants as a distraction from the shared struggles of working people. She attended meetings of People's Democracy and imagined that a united, socialist Ireland might draw Protestant and Catholic workers together.

McCann, a young socialist from Derry and one of the march's leaders, became Price's close friend during the walk. He urged the protesters not to treat Protestant working people as their enemies: in his view, they too were victims of a system controlled by landed and industrialist unionists. That argument aligned with Price's hope that class solidarity could overcome sectarian division. The two were not strangers to the dangers around the march. Unionist counterprotesters harried the procession, and local mobs blocked its passage through their villages. Still, the students believed peaceful protest might shift the conflict's terms, away from Catholics against Protestants and toward young people challenging the forces of the past.

Burntollet and the break in their paths

That hope was tested on the march's fourth and final day, at Burntollet Bridge, ten miles outside Derry. The marchers had pledged not to resist, even as they were beaten and driven into the river. Price struggled in the icy water and looked into the eyes of a club-wielding attacker. The encounter stayed with her. As she later understood it, no amount of marching would convert people who met protest with violence.

The attack also sharpened her doubts about the authorities' neutrality. A Royal Ulster Constabulary officer eventually helped Price out of the water, but many officers had done little to stop the beating; some attackers were members of the police auxiliary, the B-Specials. On the way to hospital, Price cried with a mixture of relief, frustration and disappointment. When she and her sister Marian returned to Belfast bruised and battered, their mother asked why they had not fought back. For Price, the question was not simply about that day's restraint: Burntollet marked the failure, in her eyes, of the strategy she and McCann had shared.

From protest to the IRA

In 1971, Price approached an IRA commander and said she wanted to join. She was formally inducted in the front room of the family home, swore allegiance to the organisation and promised to obey orders. Her decision represented what she would later call a return to her family's republican convictions. Marian joined the Provisionals as well. The sisters continued attending school by day and disappeared into clandestine activity at night, in a movement that treated secrecy as essential.

McCann knew Price had joined the armed struggle, although she never told him explicitly. He was dismayed: he wanted revolutionary change too, but believed violence could not produce an outcome commensurate with the suffering it imposed. His warning made the cost of their difference plain. Their friendship did not erase the disagreement; rather, it made the divergence personal. McCann encountered a woman he knew from the march now committed to a course he believed would bring more pain than political gain.

By 1972, Price could project a formidable public image. She invited a visiting reporter to see the IRA's bomb factory and remarked that Paris Match had recently photographed it. When McCann saw her, he was struck by her elegance and glamour, quite unlike the severe, pious image he associated with many republican women. Her composed appearance and sardonic confidence stood alongside the danger of the work she had chosen. The contrast did not resolve their disagreement: Price could be both a friend with a smile and a participant in armed struggle, while McCann continued to reject violence as a means to their shared political end.

A later political turn

Price's rejection of violence did not mean that she abandoned republicanism. In the 1980s she canvassed for Sinn Féin and supported Gerry Adams's election campaign for West Belfast, even as Adams promised to boycott Westminster if elected. Price ferried voters to polling stations and urged them to vote for him. The movement's electoral strategy had gained momentum in the wake of Bobby Sands's decision to run for Parliament while on hunger strike; his candidacy challenged a long republican tradition of abstention from electoral politics.

This later adaptation complicates, rather than cancels, the earlier division between Price and McCann. Price moved from civil-rights marching to armed action and then supported electoral politics, while the evidence presents McCann as the friend who had opposed the armed turn from the outset. Their relationship captures a political sequence larger than either individual: an attempt to build solidarity through peaceful protest, the shattering effect of state-linked and loyalist violence, and a later effort to pursue republican aims through elections. The friendship began in a shared march, but Burntollet left them on different sides of the question of how change could be won.