Dublin

Dublin is more than a destination in the book’s account of the conflict: it is a place where republican resistance becomes visible in public, where political change leaves former militants feeling displaced, and where Dolours Price later recounts a past that remains contested. The city links the armed struggle to its aftermath, from a triumphant press conference by escaped prisoners to the recorded conversations that reopened questions about Jean McConville’s disappearance.

A public stage for republican events

Dublin appears as a political stage in February 1972, after British paratroopers killed thirteen people and wounded fifteen at a peaceful gathering in Derry. The massacre, known as Bloody Sunday, intensified republican anger. The following month, protesters set fire to the British embassy in Dublin. The sequence places the city within a widening confrontation: public outrage crossed from the scene of the killings into a direct attack on a symbol of British power. In March, London suspended the Unionist parliament in Northern Ireland and imposed direct rule from Westminster, another consequence of the political crisis surrounding the massacre.

The city also provided a place of public celebration for prisoners who had escaped from the Maidstone prison ship. Seven men had crossed the icy Musgrave Channel after cutting through an iron bar and squeezing through a porthole. Having reached shore in their underwear, smeared with butter and boot polish, they hijacked a bus and then received clothes and help from republican sympathisers in Belfast. They eventually crossed the border and held a press conference in Dublin. Newspapers dubbed them the Magnificent Seven. Dublin thus marked not the escape itself but its successful passage into public narrative: the men had eluded a six-hundred-troop manhunt and could present their survival as a republican victory.

A city of political transition

Dublin also exposes the distance between the movement’s revolutionary past and its increasingly conventional political activity. After his release from prison, Brendan Hughes returned to active service, travelling on both sides of the border to plan operations. But when he visited Sinn Féin headquarters on Parnell Square, he found the place busy with above-board political work and felt he no longer had a role in the emerging political landscape. His unease sharpened during a visit to Seamus Twomey, a former head of the Irish Republican Army who had been pushed out of its Army Council by Gerry Adams and his associates. Twomey lived alone in a run-down Dublin flat after devoting his adult life to the movement. Hughes saw in those circumstances a bleak measure of what the organisation offered its former leaders. When Twomey died a few years later, Hughes drove his coffin from Dublin to Belfast; apart from Twomey’s wife, nobody was there to greet it. The journey links the city to a political succession that left some veterans sidelined and unremembered.

For Dolours Price, Dublin became a home as well as a place of political and personal disaffection. She and Stephen Rea had two sons, Danny and Oscar, and lived in London while also keeping a home in Belfast. The family later moved to Dublin in the mid-1990s. Price hoped her sons would retain Belfast accents and grow up with an Irish childhood; the household’s location therefore carried a deliberate connection to the island even as the family lived across different cities. Her marriage to Rea became strained and ended in 2003. Price remained in the family home in Malahide, where framed press clippings, faded photographs, and patriotic banners kept her earlier notoriety present in domestic surroundings.

Work, memory, and private testimony

Dublin offered Price new pursuits, though not the writing career she had hoped to establish. For a time she studied law at Trinity College. To younger students she appeared as an eccentric older figure in brightly coloured hats, tilting her head during lectures and interrupting lecturers without raising her hand. She took pleasure in amiable heckling. The image is a small but telling contrast to her public identity as a former militant: in this setting, her forcefulness emerged in a classroom, through interruption and argument rather than clandestine action.

The city and its surrounding area also became the setting for her later efforts to speak about the past. After the Good Friday Agreement, Price and journalist Eamonn McCann shared a deep disaffection. She sometimes telephoned journalists when seized by an impulse to testify, despite McCann’s warnings that discussing her history with reporters could be dangerous. In February 2010, after reading an interview about Joe Lynskey, she repeatedly called the night desk at the Irish News. Allison Morris, a Belfast reporter who had known the hazards of interviewing former paramilitaries, travelled to meet her in Malahide. Price appeared sober and coherent, poised and bohemian rather than incapacitated by the past. Dublin’s domestic setting made the encounter intimate, but what Price wanted to say had consequences far beyond her home.

Ed Moloney later interviewed Price while she was receiving treatment for depression and post-traumatic stress disorder at St Patrick’s Hospital. They spoke for several hours in her hospital room; a few days later they met again in a rented flat, where Moloney brought a small camera crew. Price described her aunt Bridie’s injuries in an accident at an Irish Republican Army arms dump and the mourning imposed on the household, and connected that suffering to her own decision to join the struggle. She also discussed joining the Unknowns and the practice of making people disappear. These recordings were separate from her roughly fifteen hours of recorded conversations with Anthony McIntyre, in which she never mentioned McConville. The distinction later mattered: the McConville account existed in recordings made by Moloney, not in the interviews conducted by McIntyre for the Belfast Project.

A place in the unresolved aftermath

In the later recordings, Price described being called back to Dundalk after McConville had been held there for four or five days. A local unit had dug a grave, but its members did not want to carry out the killing. Price said that the Unknowns were then called upon to do it. Her account was one contribution to a dispute over who had ordered and carried out McConville’s murder; other testimony and documentary evidence did not settle every element of the chronology or responsibility. Dublin’s importance here lies in its role as the setting for a private account that entered a public and legal struggle over the past.

Across these episodes, Dublin connects distinct forms of political visibility: a press conference after an escape, the headquarters of a movement changing course, the private life of a former militant, and interviews preserved for later scrutiny. The city does not resolve the conflict’s competing accounts. Instead, it gives them places to be staged, lived, and recorded, while the distance between public narratives and private memory remains open.