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I, Dolours: a woman’s political biography

Posted on March 7, 2019 // Britain / Ireland / Reviews // 0 Comments

Barney Cassidy reviews I, Dolours, now available on Netflix.

As a child growing up in a Belfast Republican family, Dolours Price was given a particular responsibility when she reached the age of nine. Her maternal aunt Bridie lived with them. She had lost both her eyes and her hands and the young Dolours had to hold her cigarettes while she smoked. This had happened during the 1930s IRA campaign when Bridie was moving a bomb from its hiding place. It exploded prematurely leaving her mutilated for the remaining forty years of her life.

Dolours’ father had been involved in the IRA bombing of English cities in the same decade and spent several years in prison. One of his friends was hanged after being wrongly accused of having planted a bomb which killed five people in Coventry. This family was part of the thin green thread of physical force Republicanism in Belfast during the decades when it was a tradition preserved through a few families rather than a political movement.

To her dying day, Dolours believed that only a united Ireland would give meaning to the suffering of her aunt and the human cost of the struggle to achieve it.

Maurice Sweeney’s film is based on an interview that journalist Ed Moloney did with Price in which she talked freely about her early student radicalism in People’s Democracy (the group which later evolved into the Irish section of the Fourth International), her recruitment to the IRA, her role in transporting informers to be killed, her leadership of a failed IRA bombing mission in London, her hunger strike and subsequent rejection of the current leadership of Sinn Fein. It is essential viewing for anyone who wants to get an understanding of that period of Irish history.

Price was a member of the 1968 generation of working class young people who were the first in their families to access a university education. Like many others across the world she was drawn into political activity inspired by events in the United States, France, Vietnam and Prague. She initially rejected her family’s physical force Republicanism, returning to it when she was among those students attacked by a loyalist mob supported by police on a demonstration. She joined the IRA shortly afterwards.

Initially her role was to transport weapons and explosives across the border. She was talent spotted and recruited to a counter-intelligence unit which reported to Gerry Adams, the IRA commander in Belfast. This group was tasked with identifying and executing informers. Price
was unrepentant till the end about the military necessity of doing so. Her voice hardens audibly when she expresses contempt for people who betray their comrades to the enemy.

Her most controversial claim is that Gerry Adams ordered the killing of Jean McConville. Moloney revealed in his book Voices From the Grave that British military intelligence had given the widowed mother of ten a radio transmitter to pass on information about the local IRA. Adams self-evidently denies Price’s claim that he ordered either the killing or that McConville’s body be hidden in the remote location where it was eventually found in 2003. The viewer is obliged to decide to choose whom they believe – a woman giving an interview she knew would only be made public after her death or a politician denying his role in a killing.

Hunger strike and force feeding

In the film Price comes over as an intelligent, reflective and sardonic woman who was willing to question much of what she did and the reasons for it. But she doesn’t offer any insight to her commitment to the strategy of an armed campaign which failed as horribly in the 1970s and 80s as it had in the 1930s. Lacking any real understanding of the British labour movement or working class, Republicans frequently resorted to the futile short cut of planting bombs in British cities as a way of achieving a united Ireland.

Price volunteered, at a meeting she said Adams organised, to join a bombing mission to England along with her sister Marian. Even at that time, the British had informants at very senior levels in the IRA and the would-be bombers were all arrested after an attack on the Old
Bailey. Price is scathing about the drunken amateurishness of the men with her but they were already compromised.

Both sisters received long prison sentences and campaigned to be sent to a prison in the north of Ireland. Labour Home Secretary Roy Jenkins refused. The sisters went on hunger strike for over 200 days and were force fed for 167 of them. They didn’t break. The dramatisation of this is extremely harrowing to watch, the almost sexualised nature of the torture by male prison staff compounding the brutality

Jenkins eventually sent them to Armagh, the primary women’s prison in the North of Ireland. Five and half months of torture by inserting tubes and liquids into their bodies left the women deeply traumatised. Both were eventually released because they’d been rendered so anorexic that doctors advised they’d die of starvation if kept in prison.

Price died in 2013 from an overdose of painkillers and sedatives, still a Republican. We hear her fulminating against what she saw as the betrayal of the Good Friday Agreement, the deal which made Sinn Fein a pillar of the state it had vowed to destroy. But her critique is
the traditional Republican one: that the leaders had sold out, there were too many informers and not enough bombs. These were the ideas she had learned from her family. The obvious futility of her father’s armed struggle and her own hadn’t changed them.

Yet for all this, at a time when almost every wall in Republican areas in the north of Ireland is covered with murals and slogans which do nothing but propagate a dishonest myth and pull in clueless tourists, I, Dolours is a vital setting straight of the historical record.

Quote from a review of Patrick Keefe’s ‘Say Nothing‘, by a correspondent  for National Public Radio (the nearest thing America has to the BBC or RTE):

Say Nothing switches back and forth between the mystery of who killed Jean McConville and the wider history of the Troubles. As a historian, there’s no mistaking his bias: (Patrick) Keefe is contemptuous of the British government and the security services, and he venerates the Provisional IRA.

What on earth was he smoking?

In the wake of Patrick Radden Keefe’s book ‘Say Nothing‘, here, as evidence that many of the stories in his book have already been told, is the prize-winning RTE documentary ‘Voices From The Grave‘, which I co-produced.

The film is based on interviews of the late Brendan Hughes by Anthony McIntyre for the Boston College archive. These also formed the basis for the best-selling book of the same name. Both book and film made their debuts in 2010, nine years before ‘Say Nothing’.

Enjoy the film:

‘I, Dolours‘ will be available on Hulu and Netflix UK at the end of March, not the beginning of the month, as I originally said.

Gerry Adams’ alleged role in the killing of Cooley farmer, Tom Oliver, who was accused by the IRA of passing information to the Gardai, has surfaced once again following the appearance of new Garda Commissioner and former PSNI Deputy Chief Constable, Drew Harris at a Dail Justice committee last week.

Harris, who was also the PSNI liaison with MI5, was asked whether the name of the IRA leader who turned down pleas to spare Tom Oliver, and which he had written down for the Smithwick Tribunal, was in fact that of Gerry Adams. Harris dodged the question, referring the matter to the PSNI.

Independent Dail deputy, Peter Fitzpatrick then went on the LMFM radio station to raise questions about Adams’ role in the affair and Adams’ responded in an interview on the same radio station which can be heard here. His section starts at 49 minutes, 30 seconds and ends at one hour, seven minutes and fifty seconds. (Thanks to MO for the tip-off)

The background to the controversy is this: Mr Harris gave evidence in a private session of the Smithwick Tribunal which was investigating allegations of IRA infiltration of the Garda Siochana in the Border area. Inter alia, he told the tribunal that intelligence evidence unearthed by the Northern security forces – the RUC and MI5 – suggested that local IRA members wanted to spare Oliver’s life and had approached a senior IRA figure seeking clemency.

Their appeal was rebuffed and Oliver was then shot dead in a particularly brutal fashion. Six bullets were fired into his skull.

When asked by the tribunal chairman, Judge Peter Smithwick, who this senior IRA figure was, Harris agreed to write it down and give it to the judge.

This story has been covered several times by thebrokenelbow.com. You can read some of those pieces here, here, here, and here.

By the way, Mr Adams used his interview to declare his belief that I am not a reputable journalist. He then went on to describe his role in attempting to find justice for the family of Seamus Ludlow, killed in mysterious circumstances near his Co Louth home in 1976, while neglecting to tell the audience that I was the reporter who first reported the truth of Ludlow’s killing.

John Stalker, the former Deputy Chief Constable of Manchester who was framed by the RUC and MI5 when he came too close to the truth of the ‘shoot-to-kill’ scandal of the early 1980’s has died, aged 79.

I met Stalker – and his formidable wife, Stella – while helping the late Mary Holland organise a TV interview for Channel Four to mark the publication of his book on his inquiry into the RUC, during which he famously butted heads with then RUC Chief Constable, John ‘Jack’ Hermon.

John Stalker – pictured on the cover of his book

At a dinner with Hermon, the RUC chief allegedly passed over to Stalker an envelope on which was sketched Stalker’s family history, showing his various Irish descendants. Stalker, who unfortunately lost the envelope, saw this as a veiled threat by Hermon that the RUC had done their homework on his background and would accuse him of pro-Catholic sympathies if needed.

To help frame questions for Mary, a small number of the researchers were given advance copies of his book, whose contents were the subject of feverish speculation by the rest of the media. We were sitting on a book which some in Fleet Street would have paid a lot of money for.

Stalker was taken off his investigation when largely bogus links were discovered between himself and Manchester businessman, Kevin Taylor, who was alleged, falsely it transpired, to have smuggled drugs on a yacht on which Stalker was a guest. Public anger in Manchester and in Ireland at Stalker’s treatment made  him a hugely popular figure. His book sold out.

RUC Chief Constable, Sir John ‘Jack’ Hermon

Stalker was taken off the investigation when he was intensifying pressure on MI5 to hand over a tape recording made by the spy agency of the death of a Catholic teenager, Michael Tighe, killed by a special RUC undercover unit at a hayshed near Lurgan, Co Armagh which had been used by the IRA to store explosives.

MI5 , which was and still is in charge of all covert electronic surveillance in Northern Ireland, was resisting the demand amid suspicions that the tape would also have demonstrated that the RUC shooters had not, as they claimed, given a warning before opening fire.

The tape might also have shown that the security establishment was aware that explosives stored at the shed were used by the IRA in a huge landmine explosion which killed three policemen. The suspicion was that the bombers had been allowed to plant the bomb – and the RUC/MI5 had allowed colleagues to be killed – so as to protect an informer.

The full story of the Stalker inquiry was told in a remarkable piece of television docudrama by Yorkshire TV, the sort of television journalism that Margaret Thatcher and Rupert Murdoch helped kill off within a few years. It lasts over three hours and is followed by a studio discussion (mostly for balance purposes). The discussion can be missed without any loss.

Incidentally John Hermon sued Yorkshire TV, not for alleging that he had allowed his officers to be killed by the IRA, but because it showed the actor playing him drinking a large glass of whiskey.

Enjoy:

Elliot Abrams is one of the darkest figures ever to walk the stage of US foreign policy. As adviser to three presidents – Reagan and the two Bush’s – Abrams brought a swashbuckling version of neoconservative intervention to South and Central America and to the Middle East, inter alia helping the dictators ruling Guatemala and El Salvador deflect criticism of vast human rights abuses – including massacres of opponents – and conspiring with Israel and Iran to finance right-wing rebels in Nicaragua.

He was convicted of lying to Congress about his role in the Iran-Contra affair but was spared jail time when President George H W Bush pardoned him.

George H W Bush’s son, George W Bush appointed Abrams as a special assistant in 2001, in which capacity Abrams left his neocon mark on the Irish peace process.

Elliot Abrams – Trump’s man in Venezuela. He didn’t want the US to talk to Gerry Adams

The Bush White House’s first special advisor to the peace process was former academic and State Dept official Mitchell Reiss who was known for his tough approach to the Provos, at one point curtailing Gerry Adams’ ability to raise funds in the US for Sinn Fein until and unless the IRA decommissioned fully and recognised the PSNI.

But not tough enough for Abrams. When Reiss finally relented and, following Sinn Fein’s acceptance in January 2007 of the new police arrangements, withdrew sanctions against Adams, Abrams got Reiss sacked, apparently telling colleagues that the Sinn Fein leader should never be treated as a normal politician.

Mitchell Reiss, Bush’s first Irish peace envoy, sacked by Abrams because he advocated talking to Adams

Reiss was replaced by career diplomat Paula Dobrianski, whose Ukrainian-born father was a renowned anti-Communist activist in the 1950’s.

Now that Donald Trump has brought Abrams out of retirement and given him the job of overseeing the opposition to the Maduro government in Venezuela – arranging the anticipated coup, in other words – Sinn Fein can expect an even cooler reception at the White House.

Below is a profile of Abrams produced by the estimable Real News Network:

I went to see The Ferryman at the Bernard Jacobs Theatre in Broadway recently with decidedly mixed expectations of Jez Butterworth’s play, which is set in Northern Ireland at the climax of the 1981 IRA hunger strikes.

The work was hailed as a masterpiece by critics when it premiered in London’s West End last May, and now the same has happened in New York where the critics have been, if anything, more extravagant in their praise.

But two reviews I’d read, which I posted on this blog last year, soured me. One, by The New York Times’ chief theatre critic, Ben Brantley (whose verdict can reputedly make or break a production) called The Ferryman:

‘…(a) fiercely, gripping play’ that ‘overflows with storytelling vitality, the kind that so holds the attention that three and a quarter hours seem to pass in the blink of an eye….’

But (in his review of the London production) he went on to say this about Butterworth’s work:

‘….The Ferryman portrays a people in thrall to milleniums of history, in ways they’re not always aware of’.

I groaned inwardly. Why are only the Irish in thrall to their history? Why never the Brits or the Americans? What is Brexit about if it is not inspired at least in part by (an imaginary) glorious imperial past when ‘wogs began at Calais’, Jacob Rees-Mogg lookalikes ruled millions of Indians and Africans, and half the globe was daubed a regal red?

Jacob Rees-Mogg

What is ‘Make America Great Again’ about, if not an appeal to a past in which America was ruled and guided by heterosexual Wasps? Why are these peoples not in thrall to their history but the greatest flaw of the Irish is that they always are?

If The Ferryman reflected this caricature of Ireland, especially the Ireland of 1981, then I had better ways to spend three-and-a-bit hours.

And then a riposte to Brantley appeared in The Guardian a couple of months later which seemed to confirm my doubts. It was written by Sean O’Hagan, one of the paper’s feature writers, who protested at the Irish stereotypes littering what is (a lot of the time) a very crowded stage:

‘….the relentless drinking, the references to fairies, the Irish dancing, the dodgy priest, the spinster aunts….’.

He concluded:

‘What I had witnessed, and in part enjoyed, was a play that revealed more about English attitudes to Ireland than it did about Northern Ireland’.

All of which persuaded me to give The Ferryman a miss, until a generous friend treated myself and Joan to tickets. And so off we went to Broadway & 56th Street, expecting, if not the worst, then not much better.

And boy, was I wrong. The Ferryman is not flawless, for sure, but buried in the drama, not too deeply, but clearly beyond the reach of the reviewers cited here, lies a truth about the conflict in Northern Ireland, and the nature of the IRA leadership propelled to power by the events described in this play. Together they mark out The Ferryman as a special creation, and Jez Butterworth as a talented, diligent and perceptive writer.

Jez Butterworth

If I was Gerry Adams, The Ferryman would chill my heart; the play foreshadows a place in history that could well become his touchstone. But more of that anon.

None of this is to say that the criticisms made by Sean O’Hagan are misplaced. The stereotypes are there in abundance, especially the drinking which not only has the children tippling, but vast quantities of Bushmills are consumed, perhaps the most expensive whiskey on the Irish market, well beyond the means of most farming families (I counted three bottles drunk in one day).

And the cursing by the children grates; girls of six, seven or eight in most Irish families do not say ‘Fuck’ in front of adults, repeatedly, or in the presence of relatives. And that is before you get to the mysticism, the faeries and dancing.

But I have to say my misgivings about all this diminished as the defining and powerful core of the play revealed itself.

Set in a Co Armagh farmhouse as the 1981 hunger strikes reach their exhausted conclusion – Micky Devine, the 10th and last hunger striker to die, succumbs as the play comes to a bloody conclusion – The Ferryman focuses on the Carney family, particularly Quinn Carney, the family’s dominant male and himself a former IRA internee, as they come to terms, each in their own way, with the news that the body of Seamus Carney – their brother, husband, father, uncle, nephew – has been found in a peat bog in Co. Louth. He has a bullet hole in his skull.

Seamus Carney disappeared in January 1972, New Year’s day to be exact, and while rumours swirled, and eyewitnesses lined up to testify that he had gone to Liverpool, or Wales and that he had even been seen in Loyalist Carrickfergus, the truth is that he was killed by the IRA, apparently because he was judged to be an informer, and his body hidden in the bog – and no-one, least of all his nearest and dearest told. He was one of the IRA’s ‘Disappeared’.

This part of the play echoes the real history of the ‘Disappeared’. I couldn’t help but think of Joe Lynskey as I watched the drama unfold. My mind went back to the day I met Joe’s family in 2009 to tell them what had really happened to him, as told by the late Brendan Hughes in his interviews with Boston College, and also later, in separate interviews, given by Dolours Price, who had ferried Joe to his death. There were disturbing echoes of Joe Lynskey’s death in The Ferryman.

Joe Lynskey

Lynskey was the very first person dispatched to a secret grave on the orders of the Belfast IRA leadership in mid 1972.

Like the Carney’s, his family was fed lies about various sightings, in one instance that he had been spotted as far away as Australia. But unlike Seamus Carney, Joe’s remains have never been recovered.

And deception of the sort peddled to the Lynskeys was cooked up for the other families. When you think about it, someone, somewhere in the IRA must have been given the task of overseeing the process, composing the lies, timing their release for maximum effect, recruiting and briefing delivery boys (surely the lowest form of life in this story), making sure every family was serviced – or at least those who otherwise might kick up dust – and ensuring that each lie was consistent with its predecessor and so on. A factory of lies no less. Hidden away in an attic or under floorboards somewhere in Ireland, there will be a cardboard box filled with a record of its product.

In The Ferryman, the IRA recruit a tame priest to tell the Carney family that their disappeared kinsman has been found; and then a trio of IRA heavies  appear at the household just as the family is beginning an end of harvest celebration – and the Bushmills is flowing.

Their spokesman, clad in a black leather jacket, is known simply as ‘Muldoon’. He is, it soon becomes clear, the leader of the IRA in Derry with a sufficiently well developed public profile that some in the Carney household address him respectfully as ‘Mr Muldoon’. It is not difficult to suppose he is a proxy for Martin McGuinness, although few in the audience on 56th Street would have made that connection.

‘Muldoon’ confronts Quinn Carney (played by Paddy Considine)

The purpose of his mission soon emerges. Muldoon asks to speak to Quinn Carney alone:

MULDOON – This is a critical time Quinn. The hunger strikes have garnered an unprecedented global focus. We stand a chance of becoming a real political force. That’s why it’s critical, moving forward, that when the news concerning Seamus is released, that no wrongful allegation be made which might damage our efforts, or jeopardise our goals.

So what I merely ask is this. That you accept that Seamus’ disappearance was a tragedy which had absolutely nothing to do with us. And in doing so, that you provide me with assurances that if a reporter were to telephone that there’ll be no hot-headedness. That you and everyone under this roof will be trusted to behave responsibly. If you can provide me with that assurance then you have my word…..

QUINN – No. The answer is no. I’m gonna drink this drink, and bury my brother. And I will ask you to leave my home…and leave this family be.

And so, with Muldoon spurned, his lie rejected, the scene is set for the play’s bloody (literally) culmination.

In the real hunger strike, there was also a lie, a real one which killed real people, six of the ten dead, by my count, some of whom died in excruciating pain. But this lie was told, and for many years believed.

It took Richard O’Rawe, IRA prisoner and PRO for his protesting comrades in Long Kesh/The Maze prison, the best part of twenty-five years to summon up the courage to make the lie public, first in interviews for Boston College that I oversaw, and then in a book titled, Blanketmen.

O’Rawe’s claim was that in the midst of a rising death toll and political tension, the British government made a proposal to end the protest, by granting most of the prisoners’ demands.

Richard O’Rawe

The proposal was accepted, almost gleefully, both by O’Rawe and the IRA’s prison commander, Bik McFarlane, but was then rejected by the organisation’s leadership outside the jail.

A committee headed by Sinn Fein’s then vice-president, Gerry Adams had been set up by the IRA to run the protest. Some mystery is attached to this body. It was a creation of the Army Council but according to one Council member I spoke to after the protest, the committee rarely if ever reported back. It appeared to function with a considerable degree of independence.

It was this committee that rejected the British offer and in consequence six more prisoners, IRA and INLA would die before the fast was eventually called off that autumn.

An important question remains unanswered. Why did the Adams’ committee reject the British offer when the prisoners’ leaders thought it acceptable?

We can only speculate but the smart money says that it had something to do with the beguiling political opportunities offered by the prison protest. A number of factors were working to the political and electoral advantage of the IRA: Margaret Thatcher was British prime minister at the time and she was loathed by NI Nationalists for her evident arrogance towards all things Irish; the Catholic Cardinal had strongly identified with the prisoners’ protest for political status and the SDLP, the North’s moderate, constitutional Nationalist party was reluctant to openly oppose the prisoners’s cause or question their motives.

Gerry Adams poses in front of a mural of Bobby Sands

So when the sitting Westminster MP for Fermanagh-South Tyrone suddenly died, Sinn Fein abandoned its opposition to electoral politics and nominated Bobby Sands as its candidate in the impending by-election. Sands was the leader of the protest and the first to go without food; he was also likely to be the first to die. The SDLP stood aside, the Catholic church stayed silent, the Nationalists of the constituency turned out in numbers and Sands won the by-election comfortably.

It seemed to be a victory for the hunger strikers but it had implications that reverberated beyond the prison’s walls

This was the Provos’ first electoral triumph, a promising victory for sure which broke through the abstentionist ban favoured by the more austere Irish republicans. But how to capitalise on it when Sands died, which he surely would?

If the hunger strike was settled before his successor was elected then a great chance to make a major political breakthrough would be lost, an opportunity to make Sinn Fein a real player in Irish politics would be missed. But if the hunger strike was still underway, the Provos could be almost certain of a repeat victory. And then, who knows?

So, the Adams’ committee’s rejection of the British offer that O’Rawe and McFarlane had accepted, ensured that the hunger strike continued and with it the propitious circumstances for Sinn Fein’s electoral breakthrough. The rest, as they say, is history.

The deception inherent in this manoeuvre is the equivalent of Muldoon’s effort in The Ferryman to cajole and threaten the Carney family into accepting the lie about Seamus Carney’s disappearance. The prize is the same: the ‘chance of becoming a real political force’.

I don’t know whether Jez Butterworth read Richard O’Rawe’s book when he was researching The Ferryman, but I’d bet the mortgage he did. The play shows so many other signs of historical research, and the insights gained thereof, that it would be extraordinary if he missed it.

And the other lesson from our evening on Broadway? Don’t believe what you read in theatrical reviews.