The Blanket

The Blanket was a publication that gave Dolours Price a venue to address Gerry Adams in print after their direct communication had ceased. Her articles made the publication a setting for a sustained, if one-sided, exchange over political change, loyalty, and responsibility for the past.

A Venue for Addressing Adams

Price had not spoken to Adams for years, but, through her articles in The Blanket, she maintained what the account describes as a conversation of sorts with him. She invoked their shared history and questioned the reasons for his political transformation, wondering whether clerical influence or the approval of Americans had drawn him away from the cause. Her writing returned to a sense of personal and political betrayal, including the possibility that Adams had exchanged revolutionary commitments for the rewards of conventional respectability.

Political Context of the Dispute

The articles appeared against the background of Price’s earlier participation in armed republican activity and her later retreat from politics. By the time Adams entered electoral politics, Price had supported Sinn Féin campaigning, including canvassing for him. Her later criticism therefore came from someone who had once worked within the movement and helped promote his election, not from a stranger to its political world. The contrast between that earlier support and her subsequent accusations gives her writing its particular charge.

From Grievance to Testimony

Price’s columns were part of a broader impulse to set the record straight. In 2005 she wrote that she looked forward to the freedom to lay bare her experiences, describing that freedom as the only one left to her. When Adams discussed Joe Lynskey’s disappearance in a 2010 interview, Price read his remarks as another occasion to challenge his account and reached for the telephone to contact a journalist. The publication and her calls to reporters belonged to the same effort to make her version of the past public, though the account does not establish that every statement or later interview appeared in The Blanket.

An Unanswered Exchange

Adams did not respond to Price’s provocations in The Blanket. The exchange thus remained asymmetrical: Price used the publication to question his choices and insist on her own account, while his silence left those challenges unanswered there. The evidence establishes The Blanket’s importance as a forum for her public confrontation with Adams, but offers no details about the publication’s editors, organization, or wider editorial program.