Dolours Price and Joe Lynskey

Dolours Price and Joe Lynskey were friends whose relationship was marked by an irreversible act: Price drove Lynskey to his death, then spent years regretting that she had not helped him escape. His disappearance remained an intensely personal memory for her, and Gerry Adams’s later public remarks about Lynskey brought that memory back into the open.

Lynskey’s disappearance and Price’s role

Lynskey, known within the IRA as the “Mad Monk,” was court-martialled after ordering a killing aimed at his love rival, an episode that led to the shooting at the Cracked Cup. He was the first person disappeared in the Troubles. When the IRA acknowledged in 1999 that it had disappeared people and published a list that included Seamus Wright, Kevin McKee and Jean McConville, Lynskey was absent. Ed Moloney later informed Lynskey’s family of his disappearance before publishing the story in Voices from the Grave.

Price’s own account of driving Jean McConville across the border gives a stark point of comparison for her relationship with Lynskey. Along with Wee Pat McClure and another volunteer, she collected McConville from a house in West Belfast where she was being held. Price told McConville that she was being taken to the Legion of Mary, a Catholic charity, which would bring her to safety. McConville asked whether her children would be brought to her; Price said she had not realised until then that McConville had children. The account does not establish what Lynskey knew when he got into Price’s car, but Price said he might have understood that he was being ferried to his death. She later told Allison Morris that she should have helped him flee the country and that she had not done enough to save him.

Adams’s interview and Price’s response

Shortly before the publication of Voices from the Grave in February 2010, Gerry Adams was asked about Lynskey in a long interview with the Irish News. Adams described Lynskey as a neighbour and said that he had known him before he disappeared. He also encouraged anyone with information about Lynskey’s disappearance to come forward. His casual manner, as Price perceived it, provoked her anger: she objected to his discussing the disappearance as though it were an impersonal event, and believed that Adams himself had ordered it.

Price answered the interview through a column in The Blanket and then by speaking to Morris. In her writing, she addressed Adams as someone she had known long before his political transformation, questioning whether a cleric or American praise had drawn him away from the cause. Beneath those questions was her feeling of personal and political betrayal. In the interview, she called Lynskey a gentleman and said his death still devastated her. When Morris pointed out that Price was implicating herself, Price replied that she no longer cared and called Adams a liar.

Memory, responsibility and remorse

In a later conversation with Moloney, Price connected Lynskey’s disappearance with those of Wright, McKee and McConville. She was certain that information had gone back to Adams, and disputed his claim to have been in Long Kesh at the time, saying he had not been there. Her recollection was emotional and unresolved: she said these people came into her mind, and described occasionally praying for them in the middle of the night, despite not being much given to prayer.

Price also described the conflict between obedience and conscience in her IRA service. She said she had often been required to act contrary to her nature and had followed orders in the moment, only later asking the complex questions that could not be asked in the heat of events. Her account of Lynskey carries that retrospective reckoning in especially personal form. She remembered him not only as someone disappeared by the organization, but as a friend whose death she believed she might have prevented. Her sorrow did not resolve the circumstances of his disappearance; it made the cost of her own participation, and her later inability to undo it, part of the story.