Woman in a time of war: A documentary on IRA bomber Dolours Price

A documentary on IRA bomber Dolours Price is based around a revealing interview she gave before her death, writes Esther McCarthy.

“As children growing up, that’s the kind of bedtime stories we would hear. We wouldn’t hear Little Red Riding Hood, we would hear ‘They Hanged My Mate Jimmy’,” says Dolours Price in I Dolours, a candid new documentary about her life.

A key member of a secret IRA unit, Price led the first team to bomb the centre of London in the early 1970s. She was also involved in one of the most controversial operations of the Troubles — the killing and burying in unmarked graves of the so-called ‘Disappeared’.

The haunting, sometimes shocking film is told from Price’s point of view and features lengthy extracts from a detailed interview she gave to the journalist Ed Moloney three years before her death in 2013.

It details her background growing up in a staunch Republican family, her role within the IRA and her disillusionment with the peace process.

The film was co-written and produced by Moloney with seasoned filmmaker Maurice Sweeney, who was intrigued by Price’s story from the outset, and feels it offers a unique viewpoint of the Troubles.

“I had a passing knowledge of her, I knew the name. I read some of the interview in transcripts and I was just blown away by it,” says Sweeney.

“It was a really extraordinarily revealing and candid interview that she had given to Ed. I said: ‘How do we do this?’ and then it was a matter of how we approached it, really. This was an interview that she had given in 2010 to Ed, with the idea that it would not be published until after her death.”

Sweeney still vividly remembers seeing Price on camera for the first time when he watched the interviews having come onboard the project.

“I was really conflicted. I wouldn’t have agreed with an awful lot of her stance on stuff. What kept dragging me back was the story and she’s charismatic as well, you see, she’s very hard to look away from.

“As a filmmaker I didn’t want to make a judgement on her, I wanted to present a narrative of the Troubles that I don’t think had been heard before. It’s almost from the inside.

"It wasn’t the status quo of what we’ve been told about the North. And here was a woman, we don’t hear the female story of the Troubles, they’re generally seen as victims. I found it quite haunting. I think it was a unique way of looking at them.

“Ed was able to provide background when writing the script, because he knew her. He was able to provide much more of the background and that was invaluable for me.”

One of the most shocking elements of the film is Price’s claims about her role in the IRA murders of the ‘Disappeared’.

She says she was involved in driving many of them, including mother of ten Jean McConville, over the border to their deaths.

Price makes claims in the film that have angered members of McConville’s family, who have long denied claims that she was an informer.

The allegations have also been discredited by the Northern Ireland Ombudsman.

“We did wrestle with cutting, what do we include and not include about Jean McConville. But I think we have to put it in because it shows, actually, the extreme cold kind of viciousness of what happened in the North, particularly in the early Seventies,” says Sweeney.

“I think she saw it as carrying out orders. They saw themselves as in the middle of a war, unconscionable as it is now, a working-class mother of ten being taken away. She goes on to say later — she wrestles with it in a way — that she thought it was a war crime.”

The interview is mixed with archive footage from the period but also features the dramatisation of some scenes from Price’s life, portrayed by actors.

“There was an element of necessity there because first there wasn’t a huge amount of archive of Dolours herself, or her family,” explained Sweeney. “She’d been in prison for eight years of the key times we’re talking about. We had that one voice, we didn’t have other interviews, because we’d made that editorial decision.

“I suppose the word ‘re-enactment’ is often used, but I kind of see it as more of a visual memory of hers in the film. We have three: we have an archive of the North, bombs, riots, which is quite frenetic visually on screen.

"Then we had a standalone sit-down interview. And I just wanted something to go from her narrative, in and out of her childhood, her time in prison.

"It’s always very hard to get those right. We were very careful about how we shot it. We cut the film, almost, before we shot it, because we had that bed of an interview. It was almost her looking back at those iconic moments in her life.”

Price grew up steeped in Republican activity and her family were involved for many decades. She says three

generations of women in her family — including her sister Marian — served time in Armagh jail and that more militant Republicans in many ways regarded themselves as “elite”.

“An awful big thing in this film, I think, is radicalisation,” says Sweeney. “I think she was radicalised from a very young age. That’s not to say she didn’t make the choice to go join the IRA. But I think she was predisposed to it.

“She had for years taken part in the civil rights movement. This was a thing that was happening to her community and it drove a lot of young people into the arms of the Provisional IRA.”

Sweeney and his team trawled through a total of five hours of interviews, piecing together the most important elements to tell the story of a Republican woman’s life.

“We made the editorial choice of putting her voice in it because I think the most important thing to come out of it is how a woman can make the decisions she’s made. And what was the story of the Troubles and how brutal they were.

“I think we’re going to have a lot more revelations like this down the road.

"There’s going to be a lot more coming out, because there doesn’t exist, at the moment, a forum or a space for people to tell their stories. If you don’t have that, stories are going to come out in different ways, in film it’s started in recent years.

"The amount of feature documentaries coming out about the North, or the North as a backdrop, is

phenomenal.”

I Dolours opens in cinemas on Friday.