Dolours Price and Jean McConville

Dolours Price and Jean McConville are linked in Price’s account by a journey presented as a transfer to safety that ended in McConville’s killing and secret burial. Price said she helped take McConville across the border, then was called back to Dundalk several days later when the local unit would not carry out the execution. She described being present when McConville was shot, while also admitting that she had no first-hand knowledge of the alleged informing that supposedly justified the sentence. The account is consequential not only for what Price said she did, but for the contradictions it exposes between organizational certainty, personal responsibility, and what could be established from a guarded oral history.

The accusation and its limits

Price said she had already been helping to make people disappear when she was ordered to take McConville across the border. She claimed she had not previously known McConville, or even known of her. According to Price, the Irish Republican Army believed McConville had informed for money: a transmitter had allegedly been found at her flat, and volunteers had supposedly recognized her at a barracks on Hastings Street, concealed behind a blanket with a slit through which she could see. Price added that the blanket did not reach the floor and that one volunteer recognized McConville’s slippers. She said McConville was questioned and made an admission.

Those details were Price’s account of what the organization believed, not evidence that she had independently verified the accusation. She later made that distinction explicit: she did not know the specifics of what McConville had or had not done, and had no first-hand knowledge of the alleged crimes. The charge that McConville was an informer was something the organization had concluded, Price said. She believed it, but belief did not erase the limits of her knowledge.

Price described informers as the lowest form of human life and said death was too good for them. Yet almost in the same account she asked what could warrant death. She said that she did not know McConville was a mother of ten, knew nothing of the children, and might have advocated a lesser punishment had she been included in the discussion. Expulsion from the country, she suggested, might have been an alternative. The contrast is central to the relationship as the book presents it: Price recounted the language of collective condemnation while acknowledging that she lacked the knowledge that might have tested the accusation or shaped the punishment.

The journey from West Belfast

Price said she went with Pat McClure and another volunteer to collect McConville from a house in West Belfast where she was being held. They drove towards the border. Price’s friend Joe Lynskey may have understood that he was being taken to his death, she reflected, but she said McConville did not appear to anticipate the same fate. Price told her she would be handed over to the Legion of Mary, a Catholic charity, which would take her somewhere safe.

McConville asked whether her children would be brought to her. Price said she had not realized until then that McConville had children. She answered yes, although she knew she could not promise it. McConville then asked whether she would receive money and a house. In Price’s telling, reassurance served as a cover for the real purpose of the journey: the woman being transported was not being taken to safety, and the assurances gave her no truthful account of what awaited her.

Price also described the journey in ordinary, specific terms. They stopped, and she bought McConville fish and chips and cigarettes. Price said McConville felt no fear because she had already confessed everything to the Irish Republican Army. She recalled McConville saying that the volunteers would not have the courage to shoot her, and described the thought of the drivers as the opposite: they believed the organization would do it. Price said McConville talked too much and had condemned herself. The book places this recollection beside the memories of McConville’s children, who remembered their mother as cowed and tentative rather than as the coarse-tongued provocateur Price described. That discrepancy leaves open whether Price’s recollection was accurate, distorted, or shaped by the need to see McConville as deserving of what happened.

Dundalk and the killing

Price said McConville was left in Dundalk with the local unit. After four or five days, Price and the others were called back. The local unit had dug a grave and needed only to take McConville across a field and shoot her, but, Price believed, its members did not want to kill a woman. Her account thus makes the return journey a decisive change: the people who had delivered McConville to the border were summoned again because the local group would not complete the killing.

When asked whether Price and her companions had to do it, she first made no answer beyond a small murmur, then said yes. She said that three members of the Unknowns were with McConville when she died: Price, Pat McClure, and another volunteer. They had only one gun. Concerned about their consciences, they decided each would fire a shot, so none could be certain who had delivered the fatal one. The arrangement resembled the firing-squad practice of using a blank cartridge, but here there was only one weapon, leaving little real uncertainty about who could have killed her.

Price said each of them fired in turn and that she deliberately missed. One of the others then fired, and McConville collapsed. Price said they left her in the hole, after which the local Dundalk unit sealed the grave; the group returned to Belfast. Her description combines direct participation with an effort to distribute responsibility among the shooters. The missed shot did not stop the execution, but it marks the difference between Price’s own action and the fatal shot she attributed to another member of the group.

Testimony, memory, and public record

The account emerged through Ed Moloney’s separate interviews with Price, not through the recorded conversations Anthony McIntyre conducted for the Belfast Project. Price spent about fifteen hours recorded with McIntyre and did not mention McConville in those interviews. In 2010, after meeting Price at St Patrick’s Hospital and later in a rented flat, Moloney recorded and filmed conversations in which she discussed McConville in detail. Price agreed that this additional testimony would remain protected until after her death, under terms similar to those intended for the project.

That distinction became important when a court reviewed the archive in response to a subpoena seeking material relating to McConville’s abduction and murder. The judge found that six republican interviewees mentioned her, and authorized the release of recordings associated with five; Price was among them. Moloney and McIntyre had maintained that Price had not discussed McConville in her interviews with McIntyre. Technically, the claim was accurate, but it did not encompass Moloney’s separate recordings. The episode shows how the identity of the interviewer and the boundaries of an archive affect what a statement can establish: a denial about one set of interviews did not describe the whole record.

The book does not treat Price’s detailed account as a simple resolution of every question. It presents her reported knowledge of the informing allegation, her admission that she lacked first-hand knowledge, her part in taking McConville across the border, and her account of the killing as distinct claims with different evidentiary limits. The contrast between the confidence of the accusation and Price’s later doubts, and between her memory of McConville and the children’s recollections, remains part of the relationship’s historical meaning. The testimony makes Price’s claimed role explicit; it does not turn every element of her account into independently confirmed fact.