Dublin occupies two sharply different roles in the account: it is a link in the clandestine route by which IRA bomb cars were moved to England, and later a city where Dolours Price sought a life beyond armed activity. For Price, the city’s cafés, canals, and cultural life offered distance from Belfast and a setting for writing. Its place in the story is therefore not simply geographical. Dublin connects the logistics of the conflict with the difficult effort to live beyond it.

A staging point for the bombing operation

In February, six cars were hijacked at gunpoint in Belfast and driven to the Republic of Ireland. By early March they had reappeared on Dublin’s streets, repainted and fitted with false number plates. The city served as an intermediate point in a plan to move the vehicles onward to England. Ultimately, four made the journey: a Ford Corsair, a Hillman Hunter, a Vauxhall Viva, and a green Ford Cortina.

The vehicles were adapted to carry large incendiary devices. Each contained more than a hundred pounds of powder explosives concealed in plastic bags, together with a sausage of gelignite. The payload sat beneath the rear seat and was connected by detonating cord to a box under the front passenger seat, where a timer had been fashioned from a household alarm clock. Dublin’s role in this sequence was operational: the cars emerged there with new identities before continuing toward their targets.

The route from Dublin to Liverpool was taken in two stages. On 5 March, Hugh Feeney led a team carrying the Cortina and Viva onto the Dublin–Liverpool ferry. The next day, a second team, led by Marian Price, took the Corsair and Hillman Hunter. At Liverpool customs, the Hunter was delayed over its number plate. Martin Brady was driving, with Roisin McNearney in the back. After McNearney left the car to use the toilet, the customs inspector questioning Brady was called away; another official then waved the waiting car through. The scare prompted the team to tell colleagues in Ireland not to send the two remaining cars, reducing the planned total from six bombs to four.

Dolours Price, the operation’s leader, did not travel by ferry. She flew from Dublin under the assumed name Una Devlin. By 7 March, the group had assembled in London, where the cars were left in public garages and the members checked into separate hotels. The targets had been chosen by the Unknowns and approved by the leadership in Belfast. Gerry Kelly later explained that they were selected to raise particular political questions: the bombings were intended to bring the reality of colonialism to public attention in England, at a time when Northern Ireland was holding a referendum on whether to remain part of the United Kingdom.

A city beyond Belfast

After more than eight years in prison, Price rejoined her family and slowly began to recover. Her release was on licence, with conditions that could return her to prison if breached, including a restriction on leaving Northern Ireland. Several months later she obtained permission for a month-long summer holiday in the Republic. She wanted more than a temporary visit, however: she wished to relocate to Dublin.

Price regarded the city as looser and less constrained than Belfast, and as culturally more vibrant. Its cafés and canals seemed to place it at a remove from the conflict in the North. Dublin also offered a practical alternative to her former life: she found freelance newspaper work almost immediately. Writing let her remain connected to political questions without returning to the paramilitary front lines. In December 1982, she published an article in the Irish Press about anorexia, discussing the illness in terms of control and making a claim about its correlation with intelligence that the book identifies as erroneous.

British intelligence monitored Price both before and after her move. Its reports found no evidence that she remained involved with an illegal organisation or terrorist activity. One report recorded that former IRA comrades had approached her not long after her release to take part in a mission, and that she refused. Dublin thus belongs to the account not as proof that Price had abandoned republicanism, but as the setting for a changed form of life: she kept a political interest while declining a return to violence.

An interval in Stephen Rea’s career

Dublin also figures in Stephen Rea’s professional trajectory. As Price became involved in revolutionary activity, Rea was working as an actor at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin. Dissatisfied, he concluded that Ireland squandered talent and moved to London, where he developed a prominent stage career. The city is part of the contrast between their paths: Price’s later move there followed imprisonment and a departure from armed action, while Rea’s time there preceded his move to London and his growing recognition as an actor.

Dublin’s cultural life also frames Price’s subsequent ambition to write. The same city associated earlier with the covert movement of bomb-laden cars became, for her, a place to work in newspapers and keep a cautious distance from the conflict’s operational world. That contrast gives the city its particular significance in her story: it is both a transit point within the armed campaign and a possible refuge from its demands.