Dolours Price’s confession about Jean McConville

Dolours Price’s confession about Jean McConville was a privately recorded 2010 interview with Ed Moloney in which Price described helping to transport McConville across the border and returning to Dundalk with two other volunteers to take part in her execution. Price also alleged that Gerry Adams had ordered the operation and received reports about it. The account was not part of her recorded interviews with Anthony McIntyre; Moloney made a separate recording under a promise to safeguard it until Price’s death. Its detail made it consequential, but did not erase the distinction between what Price said she had witnessed, what she had been told, and what remained contested.

The interview and its separate record

The confession followed a February 2010 interview between Price and Allison Morris of the Irish News. The Belfast Project interviews had ended years earlier, and its archive was held at the Burns Library. After Price spoke with Morris, Moloney visited her in Dublin to ask about her past in greater detail. Their arrangement was to preserve her account on the same terms associated with the Belfast Project: it would not be released until after her death.

Price was being treated for depression and PTSD at St Patrick’s Hospital. Moloney recorded one conversation there, where they spoke for several hours in her room. A few days later, they met again in a rented flat outside the hospital, this time with a small camera crew. The book describes Price as sober and coherent during both conversations. She spoke about her aunt, Aunt Bridie, and the family’s experience of her return after an accident in an IRA arms dump; she also revisited the Burntollet Bridge attack, her decision to join the IRA, and her work with the Unknowns.

The existence of this separate recording matters because Moloney and Anthony McIntyre had publicly insisted that Price never mentioned McConville in her roughly fifteen hours of recorded conversations with McIntyre. That statement was technically accurate about those interviews, but it did not describe Moloney’s later conversations with Price. In the latter, she discussed McConville’s disappearance at length. The difference between the interview sets became central to the question of what the archive contained and what the legal demands for its recordings could reach.

Price’s account of McConville

Price said that she had already helped disappear people before receiving the order to take McConville across the border. She said she had not known McConville before the assignment. Price maintained that McConville had confessed to being an informer and described the discovery of a transmitter in her flat. She also recounted an alleged identification scene at a barracks on Hastings Street: McConville, she said, had been concealed behind a blanket with a slit through which she could see IRA volunteers. One of the men supposedly recognized her slippers. Price said McConville later admitted informing for money.

Those allegations were Price’s account of what the IRA believed and what she said she had been told; she acknowledged that she had no firsthand knowledge of McConville’s alleged crimes. She described informers as people the organization regarded as less than human and said that she had argued for their bodies to be left in the street as a warning. Yet she also questioned whether death was warranted and suggested that McConville might instead have been expelled from the country. Price said she had not known McConville had children, or how many, when she became involved.

Price said that she and two other volunteers, including Pat McClure, collected McConville from a house in West Belfast and drove towards the border. She told McConville that she would be handed over to the Legion of Mary, a Catholic charity, and taken somewhere safe. McConville asked whether her children would be brought to her. Price said the question made her realize, for the first time, that McConville had children.

According to Price, she left McConville with the local IRA unit in Dundalk. After about four or five days, Price and the others were called back. A grave had been dug, but the local volunteers did not want to carry out the killing; Price thought the fact that McConville was a woman may have been why. Price said three members of the Unknowns were present: herself, Pat McClure, and another volunteer. They had one gun and each fired a shot, a decision intended to prevent any one of them from knowing for certain who had delivered the fatal shot. Price said she deliberately missed. One of the others fired, McConville collapsed, and the group left her in the hole; the Dundalk unit then sealed the grave.

Command, guilt, and what Price could not settle

Moloney pressed Price about the chain of command. She affirmed his suggestion that the order had originated with Adams and that reports had gone back to him. Price further alleged that Adams later tried to make it appear that he had been in Long Kesh when the killing occurred, insisting that he had not been there. This was Price’s testimony, not an independently established finding in the interview itself.

As she spoke about McConville and other people who had disappeared, Price’s certainty gave way to visible distress. She said that the dead came into her thoughts and that she sometimes prayed for them in the middle of the night. She described having been required as an IRA volunteer to act against her nature, obeying orders in the moment and only later confronting the difficult questions those actions raised. She also said she had spent considerable time talking with doctors about it.

The account thus holds accusation and uncertainty together. Price described participation in the operation in precise stages, but admitted she had not been involved in deciding McConville’s punishment and knew little about the supposed evidence against her. She said that, had she been included in that discussion, she might have argued for a lesser penalty. Her recollection also carries the moral problem of a story told by a participant who could identify her own actions while remaining unable to establish every claim used to justify them.

Secrecy, evidence, and the unresolved past

Moloney told Price he would protect what she had said and take the recordings back to the United States for safekeeping in the Boston College archive. The interview’s secrecy reflected a broader gap in the post-conflict settlement. The Good Friday Agreement addressed the future and provided for the release of paramilitary prisoners, but did not establish a comprehensive truth-and-reconciliation mechanism for examining the violence of the preceding decades. A limited amnesty applied to information voluntarily supplied to help recover the bodies of the disappeared; otherwise, Troubles-related murders remained open criminal cases.

That unresolved legal landscape made the recordings more than a private recollection. Testimony implicating a speaker could be treated differently from testimony implicating someone else, and investigators and courts had to weigh old accounts without a shared process for addressing the past. Price’s confession offered a detailed account of her asserted role in McConville’s abduction and killing, and a serious allegation about Adams. It also left the reader with the boundary of its evidence: a recorded participant’s account, preserved under a promise of secrecy, containing both specific recollections and claims she could not verify for herself.