Depression

Depression is presented in the account of Dolours Price as a serious, recurring condition during the final years of her life, not as an explanation for her political actions or testimony. It accompanied the making of her interviews with Ed Moloney and worsened amid the legal dispute over her Boston College interview; the narrative records treatment, a later hospitalisation, and a decline that preceded her death without claiming that depression alone caused it.

Treatment and Recorded Testimony

At the time of her follow-up interviews with Ed Moloney, Price was staying at St Patrick’s Hospital, where she was being treated for depression and post-traumatic stress disorder. Moloney spoke with her in her hospital room for several hours, recording their conversation, and they met again a few days later in a rented flat for a filmed interview. The account emphasizes that she was sober and coherent in both conversations. Her illness and treatment therefore form part of the circumstances in which she gave an extended account of her past, but do not reduce that testimony to a symptom or cast doubt on her composure in those sessions.

Worsening Condition

Price knew about the court battle in the United States over her Boston College interview. In the summer of 2012 she said that she had put the matter out of her mind and would not lose sleep over it. The narrative then marks a contrast between that stated indifference and her deteriorating condition: her drinking intensified, as did her depression. The account does not establish that the legal dispute caused this worsening, but places it in the same late period of her life.

Hospitalisation and Death

The following January, Price was briefly hospitalised after falling down a flight of stairs while drunk. She discharged herself, returned to her house in Malahide, and continued to drink and take Valium. On the day she died, her son Danny checked on her in the morning and found her asleep in bed; when he returned that evening, she had not moved and was not breathing. She was sixty-two. A postmortem found a toxic combination of antidepressants, sedatives, and antipsychotics in her bloodstream, but no alcohol. The account records these findings alongside her depression and substance use without treating any one of them as a complete explanation for her death.