Allison Morris

Allison Morris was a Belfast journalist whose February 2010 interview with Dolours Price helped turn Price’s private anguish over the disappeared into a public controversy. Morris recorded Price’s willingness to implicate herself and her accusation that Gerry Adams had ordered actions she regretted, but published an intentionally restrained account. When a rival paper soon printed far more specific claims, the source of its information became disputed, placing Morris’s interview at the centre of a mystery about testimony, confidentiality, and competing accounts of the past.

Reporting Background

Morris worked at the Irish News and had grown up in Andersonstown, like Price. When she arrived at work one morning, she found that Price had been leaving messages at the paper’s night desk throughout the night. Morris travelled to Dublin to meet her. She was an experienced reporter on paramilitary subjects, with strong republican sources, and had interviewed Brendan Hughes several times before his death. Those interviews could be difficult: Hughes was sometimes drunk, and Morris occasionally had to stop. She knew that former paramilitaries might be navigating trauma alongside alcohol or prescription drugs, and approached the meeting with an awareness of those hazards.

Price, however, appeared sober and coherent when she greeted Morris and the photographer at the door. Morris noticed her short, platinum-blonde hair, cardigan, and red scarf, as well as her poise and beauty. Price struck her as bohemian, almost theatrical. That impression of composure mattered to the encounter: Morris was speaking not simply with a former paramilitary whose history demanded scrutiny, but with a woman who seemed presently capable of choosing what to say and of understanding its implications.

The Interview and Price’s Admission

Price wanted to talk about the disappeared. The immediate provocation was Adams’s apparently casual discussion of the disappearance of her old friend Joe Lynskey. Price considered that manner of speaking a denial of an atrocity, and accused Adams of having ordered it. She described Lynskey as a gentleman, said she should not have allowed him to go to his death, and regretted not helping him flee the country. Her remorse was not presented as distant reflection: she told Morris that it had devastated her and still did.

Morris confronted Price with the consequence of her words: they implicated Price herself. Price answered that she no longer cared and called Adams a liar. The exchange made the interview more than a denunciation of another person. Price’s charge joined an allegation about command responsibility to an admission of her own part and a continuing sense of failure. Morris thus became the listener to a confession-shaped account in which accusation and self-reproach could not be cleanly separated.

The conversation was interrupted when Price’s son Danny appeared in the doorway with a telephone. He told Morris that his aunt Marian Price wanted to speak to her. Marian was angry at the prospect of an interview and said Dolours had been receiving treatment at St Patrick’s Hospital in Dublin and was not well enough to talk to people. Morris protested that Price was an adult, but Marian remained insistent. The episode placed a question about Price’s health and autonomy directly beside the journalistic question of whether her disclosures should be published.

A Deliberately Restrained Story

After leaving the house, Morris consulted her editor and looked for a way to salvage the interview. She chose to publish a slightly anodyne account, saying Price intended to confess to the Independent Commission for the Location of Victims’ Remains. The commission offered, in theory, immunity from prosecution to people who came forward with information. Morris’s article said Price had vital information about the disappearances of Lynskey, Seamus Wright, and Kevin McKee, but withheld the details. It also noted that she knew something about the final days of Jean McConville, a mother of ten.

The article’s restraint was deliberate: it made Price’s stated intention to approach the commission the public frame for her information without setting out the allegations Morris had heard. Before publication, Morris telephoned Price to ask whether she had contacted the commission. Price said that she had, although this was untrue. The false claim complicates any simple account of the interview as a straightforward path from testimony to official disclosure: the article reported an intention to confess, while Price had not taken the step she claimed to have taken.

The Sunday Life Dispute

Three days after Morris’s story appeared, Sunday Life published a much more detailed account attributed to Price. It said that she implicated Adams in the disappearances, described collecting Lynskey on his orders, and claimed to have driven McConville across the border to her death. The account also attributed to Price a dispute within the IRA over where McConville’s body should be left, and an argument against dumping it in Albert Street because of the damage that would do to the movement’s image. These claims aligned closely with the account Brendan Hughes had given, but the newspaper’s description of its source raised a separate problem.

The author, Ciarán Barnes, did not appear to have interviewed Price directly. Sunday Life referred to a taped confession it had heard and also said Price had made taped confessions to academics at Boston University, apparently suggesting access to her Boston College Belfast Project recordings. Ed Moloney, who knew those recordings had been kept under lock and key in the Burns Library, rejected that explanation. He also noted that Price had not mentioned Jean McConville in her recorded interviews with Anthony McIntyre, who had warned her not to discuss McConville. Morris’s interview, by contrast, had included information about McConville.

Moloney and Anthony McIntyre therefore suspected that there were two recordings: Price’s Belfast Project interviews and Morris’s interview. They knew Morris and Barnes were friends and former colleagues at the Andersonstown News, and inferred that Morris might have given Barnes her recording after publishing the less detailed story. The inference was not established as fact. Morris denied sharing her interview; Barnes declined to discuss his sources, saying only that he would be remiss to do so. The difference between the two published accounts consequently left Morris’s material at the centre of an unresolved question without proving how Barnes obtained his information.

Testimony, Vulnerability, and Public Record

Adams rejected Price’s allegations and emphasised that she had long opposed Sinn Féin and the peace process. He also pointed to her trauma and the need for her to find closure. Morris’s reporting captured Price as apparently sober and coherent during their meeting, while Marian’s interruption foregrounded concerns about her treatment and wellbeing. Neither circumstance alone settled how her accusations should be judged; together, they show the difficult terrain on which Morris had to report: a serious, self-implicating account from a person whose condition and motives were themselves contested.

Morris’s encounter preceded another recorded conversation. After Price spoke to her, Ed Moloney visited Price, who was then staying at St Patrick’s Hospital for treatment for depression and PTSD. He proposed a detailed interview to be kept under the same condition of secrecy as the Belfast Project material, unreleased until after Price’s death. Price agreed; Moloney recorded conversations with her at the hospital and later in a rented flat. That later account included subjects absent from Price’s interviews with Anthony McIntyre, including McConville. Morris’s interview therefore occupies a distinct place in the record: it was public, guarded in what it disclosed, and later difficult to disentangle from the separate recordings and claims that followed.