Just a quick post to note the passing of Dolours Price, veteran Republican activist and a former Volunteer of the Irish Republican Army, who died at her home in Mullach Íde on Wednesday. While much of the British news media and their parasitical sycophants in the Irish press have taken a certain delight in her passing those who knew Dolours and the personal price she paid for her commitment to the cause of Irish freedom will not forget her. Journalist Ed Moloney and author Anthony McIntyre have written a short tribute and addressed the issue of Dolour’s contribution to Boston College’s “Belfast Project”. In a different vein Irish blogger Fitzjames Horse has posted probably the best summation of the places and times that shaped Dolours Price and an entire generation of Irish men and women who grew up beneath the shadow of the British and Unionist regime in the north-eastern corner of Ireland. Britain reaped what it sowed and in the Price sisters it sowed a whirlwind.
My thoughts are with her children, sisters and broader family and friends. Ar dheis Dé go raibh a hanam uasal.
Related articles
- Dolours Price, RIP (thebrokenelbow.com)
- Death of Dolours Price opens up possibility that her taped oral history will be published (sluggerotoole.com)
AN SIONNACH FIONN 
May she rest in peace. A brave, idealistic woman who gave and sacrified so much for the republican movement at the height of the last phase of armed resistance, who sadly came to a day in which that movement had little use for her or her opinions – and found herself more aligned to those who had little to no influence in the current political climate. It is rather sad to hear too of her poor health, which certainly must not have been helped by the current by the Boston College controversery. (Not that I have a high regard for Moloney and McIntyre’s agenda in contributing it, though certainly invaluable research came of it).
I really hope in the next decade or two, a good researcher/historian/someone will be inspired to give a more rounded biographies of figures like Dolores and her sister (and others, not just republicans) to get a sense of the individuals behind certain infamous incidents of the conflict and why they were driven to do what they did. It’s something deseperately needed as we get further and further from the 1969 – 05 period and the conflict, and as time passes there’s no official way to deal with it’s legacy. (Just on the note of something of a personal interest – it’s rather extraordinary for instance beyond a rather fantastic PBS documentary after her death, there has been no major work written about Mairead Farrell, considering how’s she held up in the Provo icongraphy alongside Sands, Cahill, etc.).
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Very good points all of which I agree with. I think the manner of Mairéad Farrell’s death deters biographers. It was too explicitly an execution, an unarmed woman gunned down and then finished off on the street as she lay wounded, with a dozen witnesses to recall the events. The British press and its Irish affiliates would rip to shreds any historian brave enough to tackle the subject.
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May she rest in peace. She lived a hard, tragic life. Have just read elsewhere that her sister Marian has been denied compassionate leave to attend the funeral.
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An exceptional family in exceptional times. Let us hope those times are behind us and the young women of contemporary Ireland can find other means to demonstrate their commitment to the democratic and progressive ideals of the 1916 Republic.
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