Say Nothing

Andersonstown, where Dolours Price grew up, sits above the Falls Road, at the foot of the flat-topped Black Mountain, which looms over the city in the distance. As the situation grew dire in 1969, normal life had been suspended. Children could no longer safely walk to school, so many stopped going. Two of Dolours’s aunts moved to the neighbourhood after getting burned out of their homes in other areas. The army frequently raided Andersonstown, in search of IRA suspects or their weapons. One local house doubled as a bomb school: a clandestine explosives factory where Provisional IRA recruits could learn how to rig up devices and handle incendiary material. Local residents resented incursions by the authorities, and the presence of armed and uniformed representatives of the British crown only reinforced the impression that Belfast had become an occupied city.

This dynamic of wartime siege led whole neighbourhoods to pull together and collaborate in opposition. ‘The local people had suddenly changed,’ Dolours Price later recalled. ‘They’d become republicans.’ When the authorities were coming, housewives and little children would dash out of their homes, tear the metal lids from their dustbins, kneel down on the pavement, and crash the lids, like cymbals, against the paving stones, sending up a great gnashing din that reverberated through the back alleys, alerting the rebels that a raid was under way. Scrappy school-age kids would lounge on rubble-strewn street corners and unleash a piercing finger whistle at the first sign of trouble.

It was an invigorating solidarity. As the violence intensified, grandiose funerals became routine, with rousing graveside orations and caskets draped in tricolour flags. People took to joking that there was no social life in Belfast any more, apart from wakes. These ceremonies, with their pageantry of death and nationalism, held a certain allure for Dolours Price. She had returned to school after the march at Burntollet Bridge. For years, she had aspired to go to art school, but after applying, she was bitterly disappointed to learn that she had not been accepted. Instead she secured a place at St Mary’s Teacher Training College, at the foot of the Falls Road, to earn a bachelor’s degree in education.

Albert Price was an intermittent presence in these years, because he was involved in the new struggle. When the IRA needed guns, Albert went out looking for them. In the evening, Dolours would find groups of men huddled in her front room, scheming in low tones with her father. At a certain point, Albert went on the run, hiding out across the border in the Republic. Dolours started at St Mary’s in 1970. She was naturally smart and inquisitive, and applied herself to her degree. But something had changed in her after the ambush at Burntollet Bridge. Both Dolours and Marian had been altered by that experience, their father would later say. After they got back to Belfast, ‘they were never the same’.

One day in 1971, Dolours approached a local IRA commander and said, ‘I want to join.’ The formal induction took place in the front room of the Price home on Slievegallion Drive. Someone said, casually, ‘Hey, come in here a minute,’ and Dolours went in and raised her right hand and recited a declaration of allegiance: ‘I, Dolours Price, promise that I will promote the objectives of the IRA to the best of my knowledge and ability.’ She vowed to obey any and all orders issued to her by a ‘superior officer’. Even as Dolours partook in this momentous rite, her mother sat in the next room, nursing a cup of tea and behaving as though she had no inkling of what was going on.

Since the moment she locked eyes with the loyalist who beat her at Burntollet Bridge, Dolours had concluded that her fantasy of peaceful resistance had been naïve. I’m never going to convert these people, she thought. No amount of marching up and down the road would bring the change that Ireland needed. Having strayed, in her youth, from the bedrock convictions upon which her family had built its legacy, she would come to regard the moment when she joined the IRA as a ‘return’ – a sort of homecoming.

Marian joined the Provos, too. During the day, the sisters continued to attend school. But at night they would disappear, not returning to the house until late. In such situations, parents in West Belfast tended not to ask questions. Young people could vanish for a week at a time, and when they got home, nobody would enquire about where they had been. There was a reason for this. Because the IRA was a banned organisation, and even admitting to being a member was grounds for arrest, the group was fanatical about secrecy. Youths who joined the IRA tended not to tell their parents about it. In some cases, parents might disapprove: Belfast was dangerous enough already; to sign on as a paramilitary was simply tempting fate. Occasionally a young IRA gunman would go out on a sniper mission, only to round a corner and bump smack into his own mother. Unfazed by the assault rifle in his hands, she would drag him home by the ear.

But even if your parents were ardent supporters of the IRA, there were reasons not to tell them that you had joined. If the police or the army broke down the door to interrogate them, the less they knew, the better. One of Dolours’s friends was a big, square-jawed boy named Francie McGuigan. Like the Prices, the McGuigans were a staunch republican family, and because their parents were friends, Dolours and Francie had known each other all their lives. When Francie joined the IRA, he knew that his father was a member as well – yet they never discussed it. This could be comical at times, with the two of them living under the same roof. Francie’s father was a quartermaster, in charge of weapons and ammunition. But when Francie needed bullets, he wouldn’t ask his father; he would ask his friend Kevin instead: ‘Kevin, does my father have any rounds?’ Kevin would ask Francie’s father, who would give the rounds to Kevin, who would give them to Francie. It may not have been the most efficient way of doing business, but it meant that certain things could be left unsaid.

The chief of staff of the Provos was a man named Seán Mac Stíofáin. A moon-faced teetotaller in his early forties, with a cockney accent and a dimple in his chin, he’d been born John Stephenson in east London, and was raised by a mother who told him stories about her Irish upbringing in Belfast. After serving in the Royal Air Force, he had learned the Irish language, married an Irish girl, adopted an Irish name, and joined the IRA. It would later emerge that Mac Stíofáin was not Irish at all: his mother, who was given to storytelling, had been born not in Belfast but in Bethnal Green, in London. But sometimes it’s the myths that we believe most fervently of all. (Some of Mac Stíofáin’s IRA colleagues, when they wanted to get a rise out of him, would ‘forget’ to use his Irish name and call him John Stephenson.)

Mac Stíofáin, though born a Protestant, was a devout Catholic who had done prison time in England for taking part in an IRA raid on an armoury in 1953. He was a ‘physical force’ republican, an unwavering advocate of armed struggle as the only means of ousting the British; he once summarised his personal military strategy with three words: ‘escalate, escalate, escalate’. Mac Stíofáin’s embrace of violence was such that he became known, to some of his contemporaries, as Mac the Knife.

In a passage in his 1975 memoir, Mac Stíofáin recalled how Dolours Price approached him. ‘She was planning a teaching career,’ he wrote, ‘and though she came from a Republican family, she had been convinced until then that non-violent protest would succeed in overcoming the injustice in the North.’ He pinpointed the ambush at Burntollet Bridge as the moment that changed her mind. Initially, Mac Stíofáin proposed that Dolours join the Cumann na mBan, the female auxiliary wing of the IRA. This was the same unit in which Chrissie Price and Aunt Bridie and Granny Dolan had all served. The women of the Cumann did serious jobs: they would care for injured men or take a gun, still piping hot from use, and spirit it away after a shooting.

But Price was offended by Mac Stíofáin’s offer. Her feminism – in combination, perhaps, with a certain air of entitlement, as the scion of a notable republican family – meant that she had no intention of being relegated to a supporting role. ‘I wanted to fight, not make tea or roll bandages,’ she later recalled. ‘Army or nothing.’ Price insisted that she was equal to any man, and she wanted to do exactly the same work that a man would do. What she wanted, she told Mac Stíofáin, was to be a ‘fighting soldier’.

A special meeting of the Provisionals’ Army Council was convened, and it was determined that for the first time in history, women could join the organisation as full members. This is likely to have been driven in large measure by the ambition (and unimpeachable republican lineage) of Dolours Price. But Price herself would speculate that another factor may have played a role: because men were being locked up en masse by the authorities, the Provos may have felt that they had little choice but to start admitting women.

If Price thought that being female – or coming from republican royalty, or having an education that was fancy by the standards of the IRA – might win her any breaks, she was quickly disabused of such notions. After her swearing-in, she was summoned by her commanding officer to a house in West Belfast where several IRA men had gathered. There, Price was presented with a heap of filthy, mismatched, rusty bullets that had been dug up from some arms dump God knows where. Then somebody handed her a clump of steel wool and said, Clean the bullets.

This, Price decided with a sniff, was the most menial job imaginable. Any adolescent lad could do it. Was this really necessary? Come to think of it, were these bullets even functional? Was anybody ever actually going to shoot them? She pictured the IRA men sitting in the kitchen, chortling over the spectacle of her debasement. She was tempted to march in and say, ‘You know what you can do with these bullets?’ But she stopped herself. She had vowed to obey orders. All orders. This might be an initiation ritual, but it was also a test. So Price took the steel wool and started scrubbing.

‘You’d spent your life being taught that this was a glorious way of life,’ Price recalled. But if she was well acquainted with the romance of her new vocation, she was also aware of the risks. The IRA had just embarked on a shooting war with the British, and whatever her fellow recruits might say about their chances, the odds of success looked slim. In the likely event that you were outwitted or outgunned in any given operation – or in the whole campaign – you could expect the same fate as Patrick Pearse and the heroes of the Easter Rising: the British would end your life, then the Irish would tell stories about you for evermore. New recruits to the Provos were told to anticipate one of two certain outcomes: ‘Either you’re going to jail or you’re going to die.’

Chrissie Price knew these risks, too, and for all her devotion to the cause, she worried about her daughter. ‘Would you not finish your education?’ she implored.

‘Like the revolution’s going to wait until I finish my education,’ Dolours replied.

Most nights, when Dolours came home from operations, Chrissie would silently take her clothes and put them in the washer without asking any questions. But on one occasion, Dolours returned late at night to find her mother crying, because news had reached Chrissie of a bomb going off somewhere and she had been seized by a fear that it might have killed her daughter.

Not long after the Price sisters joined the Provos, they were sent across the border to attend an IRA training camp in the Republic. These camps were a ritualised affair. Recruits would be driven in a car or minibus along winding country roads to a remote location, usually a farm, where a local guide might appear – a housewife in her apron, or a sympathetic parish priest – and escort them to a farmhouse. The camps could last from a few days to more than a week, and they involved intensive training in revolvers, rifles and explosives. The Provos were still working with a limited arsenal of antiquated weapons, many of them dating back to the Second World War, but recruits learned to oil and disassemble a rifle and how to set a charge and prime explosives. They marched in formation, just as they might have done in basic training if they were serving in a conventional army. There was even a uniform, of a sort. Day to day, the young rebels wore standard civilian garb of jeans and woolly sweaters. But during funerals, they dressed in dark suits, sunglasses and black berets, and stood in cordons along the pavements, like a resolute, disciplined street army. The authorities could take photographs at such events, and frequently did. But their intelligence on this new crop of paramilitaries was still rudimentary, and they often could not match the faces of these young recruits to names or any other identifying information.

If the image of an ‘IRA man’ in Belfast during the 1960s entailed a gin-blossomed barstool radical, a shambling has-been, full of tales about the old days, the Provisionals set out to upend this caricature. They aimed to be clean, disciplined, organised, ideological – and ruthless. They called themselves ‘volunteers’, a name that harked back to the doomed heroes of the Easter Rising and captured the sense that patriotism is a transaction in which the patriot must be prepared to pay dearly. As a volunteer, you stood ready to sacrifice everything – even your own life – in service to the cause. This pact tended to inculcate, among the revolutionaries, an intoxicating sense of camaraderie and mission, a bond that could seem indestructible.

The Price sisters may have wanted to serve as frontline soldiers, but initially they worked as couriers. This was an important job, because there was always money or munitions or volunteers to ferry from one place to another, and moving from place to place could be risky. Dolours had a friend, Hugh Feeney, who owned a car, which she would sometimes use to make runs. The bespectacled son of a pub owner, Feeney was a middle-class boy who, like Dolours, had been a member of People’s Democracy and was training to be a teacher when he fell in with the IRA.

Even after becoming active volunteers, Dolours and Marian remained in college. This served as an excellent cover. They would come home after their classes, put away their books, and head out on operations. As women, the Price sisters were less likely than their male counterparts to attract attention from the authorities. Dolours would often cross the border several times a day, flashing a fake licence that said her name was Rosie. She crossed so frequently that the soldiers manning the border checkpoints came to recognise her. They never grew suspicious, instead assuming that she must hold some dull job near the border that required her to cross back and forth. Dolours had a chatty, ingratiating, slightly flirtatious manner. People liked her. ‘Rosie!’ the soldiers would say when they saw her coming. ‘How are you today?’

Often, the Price sisters transported incendiary material. They came to know the scent of nitrobenzene, an ingredient of improvised explosives: it smelled like marzipan. Bomb-making materials were often prepared in the Republic and then smuggled north across the border. On one occasion, Marian was driving a car packed with explosives when she spotted an army checkpoint. She was still a teenager and was driving without a licence. The explosives were concealed behind a panel in the driver’s-side door. As a soldier approached to inspect the car, he reached for the door handle, and Marian realised that if he opened it, he would instantly register the weight of the hidden payload.

‘I can manage!’ she said, hastily opening the door herself. She stepped out and stretched her legs. Miniskirts were all the rage in Belfast, and Marian happened to be wearing one. The soldier noticed. ‘I think he was more interested in looking at my legs than he was with the car,’ Marian said later. The soldier waved her through.

There were some in the more starchy and traditional Cumann na mBan to whom the presence of women in such operational roles – women who might deploy their own sexuality as a weapon – was threatening, even mildly scandalous. Some Cumann veterans referred to these frontline IRA women as ‘Army girls’, and insinuated that they were promiscuous. As tactics evolved in the conflict, IRA women occasionally set so-called honey traps, trolling bars in the city for unsuspecting British soldiers, then luring them into an ambush. One afternoon in 1971, three off-duty Scottish soldiers were out drinking in central Belfast when they were approached by a couple of girls who invited them to a party. The bodies of the soldiers were later discovered at the edge of a lonely road outside town. It appeared that on the way to the party, they had stopped to urinate and somebody had shot all three of them in the head. The Price sisters disdained such operations. Dolours made a point of asking that she never be assigned to a honey trap. There were laws of war, she maintained: ‘Soldiers should be shot in their uniforms.’

The spectacle of women as avatars of radical violence may have felt bracingly novel, but in other parts of the world, such figures were finding a place in the iconography of revolution. While Belfast was burning in the summer of 1969, a twenty-five-year-old Palestinian terrorist named Leila Khaled hijacked a TWA flight from Rome to Tel Aviv and, with it, the attention of the world. Khaled diverted the flight to Damascus, becoming the first woman to hijack a plane. She emerged as a kind of pin-up for the new militancy. Her photo was splashed across glossy magazines, her dark eyes and cut-glass cheekbones framed by a keffiyeh, an assault rifle clutched in her hands. A few years later, a famous photo captured the American heiress Patty Hearst brandishing a sawn-off carbine and wearing a beret. One close friend of Dolours Price’s suggested that at least part of the allure for her, in those years, was ‘rebel chic’.

Stories about the Price sisters began to circulate among British troops stationed in Belfast and to find their way into the accounts of visiting war correspondents. They developed an outsize reputation as deadly femmes fatales who would venture into the mean streets of Belfast with an assault rifle hidden ‘down a bell-bottomed trouser leg’. Marian was said to be an expert sniper and was referred to, among British squaddies, as ‘the Widowmaker’. Dolours would become known in the press as ‘one of the most dangerous young women in Ulster’.

It is hard to judge how seriously to take such folklore. Some of it was the kind of frisky sexualised rumour that occasionally circulates in times of violent upheaval. A society that had always been a bit fusty and repressed was suddenly splitting apart in the most cataclysmic fashion. The perceived threats of sexual liberation and paramilitary chaos converged in the mythical spectre of a pair of leggy, rifle-toting libertines.

But if this image was to some degree a battlefield fantasy, one of the key people projecting it was Dolours Price herself. ‘Would you like to be shown round our bomb factory?’ she asked a visiting reporter in 1972, adding, ‘We had Paris Match magazine taking pictures of the place last week.’ Eamonn McCann, the activist from Derry who befriended Price on the Burntollet march, would still see her from time to time. She never told him explicitly that she had joined the Provos, but McCann knew. He was dismayed. He desperately wanted revolutionary change in Ireland, but he was certain that violence was not the way to achieve it. He told his friends who joined the armed struggle, ‘Nothing is going to come out of this that is commensurate with the pain that you will put into it.’

When he saw Price, McCann was always struck by her sheer glamour. Most of the republican women he had known growing up were stern and pious – if not the Virgin Mary, exactly, then the Virgin Mary with a gun. The Price sisters were something else altogether. Dolours always dressed elegantly, her hair and makeup impeccable. ‘They were sassy girls,’ McCann recalled. ‘They weren’t cold-eyed dialecticians or fanatics on the surface. There was a smile about them.’ In those days there was a discount shop in Belfast called Crazy Prices, and, inevitably, Dolours and Marian became known among their friends as the Crazy Prices.

Dolours Price, photographed for the Italian magazine L’Europeo (© L›Europeo RCS/ph.Stefano Archetti)

Once, officers from the Royal Ulster Constabulary barged into the house on Slievegallion Drive at six in the morning and announced that they were arresting Dolours as a suspected member of an illegal organisation. ‘She’s not going out of here until she’s had her breakfast,’ Chrissie said. The police, cowed by this small but formidable woman, agreed to wait, and Chrissie instructed her daughter to go and put on makeup. She was buying time so that Dolours could collect her wits. When Dolours was ready to go, Chrissie put on a fur coat, which she normally reserved for special occasions. ‘I’m going with her,’ she announced.

For a moment, Dolours was embarrassed, thinking, I’m in the IRA and my mother is coming with me to get arrested. But off they went. At Castlereagh police station, she was interrogated. She knew the rules, however, and she gave the police no information, repeating only ‘I have nothing to say.’ Eventually, she was released without charges. It would be difficult to make a case against Dolours: after all, she was still a student, with good marks and an attendance record to show for it. Before they left the station, Chrissie paused to admire the mug shot that the police had taken of her daughter.

‘Can I keep that?’ she deadpanned. ‘That’s a nice one.’

As a fund-raising initiative, the Provos took to robbing banks. Lots of banks. One day in the summer of 1972, three fresh-faced nuns walked into a branch of the Allied Irish Bank in Belfast just as it was about to close. The nuns reached under their habits and came out with guns – then proceeded to hold up the place. It was the Price sisters, along with another female volunteer. A month after the original robbery, three women walked into the very same bank and robbed it again. (The identity of the thieves was never ascertained, but it was tempting to wonder whether the sisters had not returned for seconds.) On another occasion, Dolours hijacked a post office lorry, because the IRA had received intelligence that it was transporting sacks of money.

For all the horror unfolding around them, there was a sense of adventure for Dolours and her comrades, a fantasy that they were dashing outlaws in a society in which all order had broken down. When one of Dolours’s close colleagues in the IRA, a man named James Brown, was taken from prison to a hospital in Antrim with a burst appendix, the Price sisters carried out an audacious rescue mission, raiding the hospital, disarming the policemen there, and springing Brown free. It was a small miracle that the sisters managed to evade apprehension by the army or the police. Perhaps their ability to play the part of demure Catholic schoolgirls whenever they were confronted was enough to divert suspicion. But the authorities were also simply overwhelmed by the level of violence during this period.

The ranks of the Provos were filled with interesting characters. Dolours became friendly with an older man named Joe Lynskey, who had grown up on Cavendish Street, off the Falls Road, and still lived with his parents and his sister as he neared his fortieth birthday. Lynskey had trained as a monk during the 1950s, at an abbey in Portglenone, taking a vow of silence and rising before dawn each morning to pray. But he ended up leaving the order and joining the IRA. Lynskey was a bit of an overgrown child, having sat out his adolescence at the monastery. He was regarded as something of an oddball by the younger volunteers. They called him the ‘Mad Monk’. But he had kind eyes and a gentle manner, and Dolours grew very fond of him.