Dolours Price and Stephen Rea

Dolours Price and Stephen Rea’s relationship joined a private family life to a public history shaped by republican politics, imprisonment, and later separation. They married in a secret ceremony at Armagh Cathedral in 1983, had two sons, and divorced in 2003. Their clearest public reunion came after Price’s death: Rea and their sons carried her coffin through Andersonstown in the rain, making their family bond visible at the funeral even after the marriage had ended.

Marriage and Family

Price and Rea married in 1983 in a secret ceremony at Armagh Cathedral. Monsignor Raymond Murray, who had served as chaplain when Price and her sister Marian were imprisoned at Armagh jail, performed the marriage. The ceremony connected Rea to a period of Price’s life marked by imprisonment and political commitment; the account establishes the circumstances of their marriage, but does not describe how the couple’s private relationship developed.

They had two sons. The marriage ended in divorce in 2003. The later account identifies Rea as Price’s ex-husband, but offers little detail about their separation or their family life during the years between the wedding and divorce. That restraint matters: the public record presented here gives the relationship a clear outline without supplying a private explanation for its changes.

Price’s Funeral

When Price died in 2013, Marian was allowed to leave prison for a few hours to attend the wake at the family home on Slievegallion Drive. The next day, black flags hung along Andersonstown Road as Rea and their sons carried Price’s coffin through cold rain to St Agnes’s Church, followed by a long cortège. The funeral brought the former spouses together in a final, public act of family mourning: the marriage had ended, but Rea and their sons accompanied Price to her burial.

The funeral also gathered people from distinct chapters of Price’s life. Murray celebrated the requiem Mass, recalling both her imprisonment and the secret ceremony he had performed for her and Rea. Hugh Feeney attended as an old friend and co-defendant. Gerry Kelly, by then a Sinn Féin politician who had fallen out with Price, and her former commanding officer, Gerry Adams, did not attend. The contrast places Rea’s presence within a funeral shaped by both intimate family ties and political estrangements.

Rea and Price’s Public Legacy

After Price’s death, Rea continued working in television and theatre, but had not spoken in any substantial way about her life or legacy. In 2016 he played Eric Miller in David Ireland’s play Cyprus Avenue, a loyalist consumed by the delusion that a newborn baby is Gerry Adams. The role was not a statement by Rea about Price, and the account does not present it as one. It did, however, place him onstage in a drama organized around the obsessive hold of Adams and the unresolved political past with which Price’s life was associated.

The relationship’s documented arc is therefore marked less by accounts of private intimacy than by public acts and absences: a secret wedding performed by a prison chaplain, a later divorce, Rea’s presence with their sons at Price’s funeral, and his continued reluctance to speak substantially about her life. Together, those details show how their family connection endured in public memory without resolving into a fuller account of the marriage itself.