Republic of Ireland

The Republic of Ireland occupies several roles in the book at once: it is the southern state produced by partition, a cross-border base for republican activity, a proposed partner in peace negotiations, and a landscape in which the consequences of secret violence remained hidden for decades. Its border with the North is not merely a line on a map. People and weapons crossed it; political plans reached across it; and, eventually, a grave on its coast connected past actions to public investigation.

Historical Formation and Political Geography

The geography is rooted in the 1916 Easter Rising and the subsequent struggle for Irish independence. After the Irish War of Independence, the 1921 partition divided the island: twenty-six counties in the South achieved a measure of independence as the Irish Free State, while six counties in the North remained under British rule. The book describes this division as both a constitutional arrangement and an everyday political distinction. The Price family, staunch republicans, called the northern territory the North of Ireland rather than Northern Ireland, a choice that made even the naming of a place an expression of allegiance.

The Rising remained a powerful part of the Price family’s historical imagination. Dolours Price grew up hearing stories of the rebels and of Patrick Pearse, one of the rebellion’s leaders, whose execution after the Rising helped sustain a tradition of republican commemoration. The Easter lily worn by Dolours on Easter Sunday linked that history to the divided present: she learned to cover it when a policeman approached. In this setting, the Republic represented not only a neighbouring jurisdiction but also an enduring political ideal, while the border embodied the incomplete and contested outcome of partition.

A Cross-Border Route for Republican Activity

For the emerging Provisional movement, the border offered access to training beyond Belfast. Not long after Dolours and Marian Price joined the Irish Republican Army, they were sent across it to a training camp in the Republic. Recruits travelled by car or minibus along country roads to remote farms, where local guides escorted them to the training site. Camps lasted from several days to more than a week. There, recruits learned to handle revolvers and rifles, maintain and disassemble weapons, and set and prime explosives. The available arsenal was limited and included old weapons dating from the Second World War, but the instruction was systematic: participants also marched in formation, treating the organization as a disciplined army in preparation.

The Republic also appears as a route in the movement’s internal operations, where crossing the border could conceal a person’s destination as well as their whereabouts. In August 1972, Dolours Price collected Joe Lynskey from his sister’s home and told him that a meeting in the Republic awaited him. He carried an overnight bag, freshly washed and shaved, while she drove south. Price later recognized that Lynskey understood that he was being taken to his execution; still, she continued, bound by her commitment to obey orders. In County Monaghan, men were waiting beneath a lamp post. Lynskey thanked her, shook her hand, and went with them. Price drove back in tears. The crossing turned familiar geography into part of a secret procedure: the journey was presented as travel to a meeting, while its real purpose was withheld.

Price’s later account placed another stage of the McConville case in the Republic. In an interview with Ed Moloney, she said that the group had been called back to Dundalk after Jean McConville had been held for four or five days. A grave had been dug, she said, but the local unit had not wanted to carry out the killing, which led to the return call. This account is evidence of what Price said, not an uncontested reconstruction of every stage. The book sets it beside disputed memories, records, and other testimony, preserving the difference between a reported recollection and a settled fact.

The Republic in Plans for Peace

The Republic figures not only as terrain for clandestine activity but also as a possible participant in a political settlement. In conversations with Father Alec Reid, Gerry Adams saw the Catholic Church as a credible convener capable of connecting groups that otherwise distrusted one another. One possible route to ending the fighting, as Adams envisaged it, would bring republicans together with the nonviolent nationalists of the Social Democratic and Labour Party and the Government of Ireland. Such a proposal placed the southern government within a wider strategy rather than treating the conflict as a matter confined to the North.

The political relationship took constitutional form in the Good Friday Agreement. The agreement kept Northern Ireland within the United Kingdom for the time being, with a devolved assembly and close links to the Republic of Ireland. It acknowledged both the island-wide majority in favour of Irish unity and the majority in the six northern counties who preferred to remain in the United Kingdom. The agreement’s principle of consent made a future change conditional on the wishes of a majority in the North, and the governments of the United Kingdom and Ireland undertook to honour that choice. Sinn Féin also agreed to set aside abstention and take part in the new assembly. The Republic thus became part of an institutional framework for managing, rather than erasing, the constitutional division.

Residence, Burial, and the Return of the Past

In the post-conflict period, the Republic was also a place of residence and private reckoning. Dolours Price lived in Dublin after her family moved there in the mid-1990s, and later remained in the family home in Malahide. After her marriage to Stephen Rea ended in 2003, she continued to live there among press clippings, photographs, and patriotic banners recalling her republican past. During a period of treatment at St Patrick’s Hospital, she agreed to discuss that past with Moloney under a promise that the interview would not be released until after her death. He recorded conversations with her at the hospital and later filmed another interview in a rented flat. Those recordings brought the Republic into the story as a setting for retrospective testimony, as well as for earlier operations.

The coastline near Carlingford became the site where one of the conflict’s concealed histories returned to view. In 2003, while walking with his children on Shelling Hill Beach, John Garland noticed fabric protruding from the sand. He used driftwood to pull at it and found human remains. A later examination identified the skeleton as a woman’s and recorded a gunshot wound to the back of the head that would have been sufficient to cause death. The remains were identified as Jean McConville’s; her children examined clothing recovered with the bones, including the remains of a skirt, a pink woollen top, and one shoe. Erosion had gradually exposed a grave that had remained hidden for decades, several hundred yards from an earlier search area.

The discovery shows how the Republic’s geography could become part of the conflict’s aftermath. The 1999 legislation intended to help recover the remains of the disappeared offered a limited amnesty to people who voluntarily supplied information about such cases, but it did not resolve every question surrounding the killings. In the McConville case, accounts of the timing of her abduction and the claim that she had informed for the British remained contested. The beach provided physical evidence and a place of recovery, not a complete account of responsibility. Across the book, the Republic therefore connects national history to individual consequence: a state formed through partition, a route used by armed organizations, a partner in a negotiated settlement, and the setting where the past could no longer remain wholly buried.