Last Monday when we placed Dolours Price in the cold forbidding clay of a Belfast cemetery, I had no sense that the earth was enriched by absorbing her, just that we had been impoverished by relinquishing our grip on her as she passed into the ground. It marked the final goodbye in stark contrast to first hello that heralded a friendship 14 years earlier. Comradeship had long preceded friendship. People don’t need to know each other to be comrades, merely to be part of the same insurrectionary enterprise. Platonic relationships frequently grow from comradeship but cannot be reduced to them. When comradeship forged by conflict moved rapidly into friendship in a less bellicose world I felt immensely honoured. As a teenage republican I was inspired by the raw courage of two West Belfast siblings, often referred to as the Venceremos Sisters, putting it up the might of what Ian Cobain has termed Cruel Britannia.

It would be a quarter of a century after her epic hunger strike that I first met Dolours. The location, Dublin 1999. Along with her sister Marian, whom I had previously been introduced to in Belfast at another political event, she was attending a discussion in the Teacher’s Club at which I spoke along with Tommy McKearney, himself a survivor of a prolonged hunger strike. We had gathered to muse on the Good Friday Internal Solution which fell so far short of republican goals Sinn Fein’s Jim Gibney had earlier told his audience in a college on Belfast’s Whiterock Road that, from a republican perspective, it could easily be thrown in the bin; its only redeeming factor was that it could advance the nationalist agenda which at that time republicanism was deferring to. Gibney was commenting on what should have been a clear blue sea divide but would soon grow blurred under the mist and myth of the peace process as republicanism came to embrace, even celebrate, its own oceanic failure.

It was evident then that as DNA republicans neither Dolours nor Marian Price could ever buy into anything that resembled the Treaty of 1922. They were not the type of children prepared to devour the revolution and as such would in some ways come to be devoured by it. They came equipped with the right amount of prescience to grasp that as a consequence of accepting an agreement that the party had never actually negotiated, but would later claim ownership of, Sinn Fein would come to behave in a fashion that would suggest its origins lay in Cumann na nGaedheal rather than any anti-Treaty composition.  A well read articulate and intelligent woman, she was too instinctive a republican to buy into Treaty politics which had been bequeathed to Ireland by a Blue shirt mindset. She would have subscribed to the view of Padraic Pearse that:
The Man who, in the [matter] of Ireland, accepts as a “final settlement”, anything less by one fraction of an iota than separation from England - is guilty of so immense an infidelity, so immense a crime - that it were better for than man - that he had not been born.
I became firm friends with both sisters. Dolours played godmother to my son while Marian was maid of honour at our wedding, a politically promiscuous event that saw loyalist and republican activists mingle with each other among the guests to give us a warm nuptial send off. I danced with Dolours when she and Brendan Hughes mischievously interrupted our first bride and groom dance, he whisking my wife Carrie across the floor leaving me to dance with someone more dainty and less clumsy than myself.  It was the anniversary of the funeral of Bobby Sands.

Dolours, the consummate entertainer, was at ease with all manner of opposition, being more than capable of holding her own intellectually. I once introduced her to a loyalist friend at Dublin airport, where she held court, enchanting us with her wit and acerbic thrusts at those who scorned the ‘reviled and spat upon’ whose company she was content, in that resigned sense that was her way, to be part of.  My friend, I believe, was more charmed than he was persuaded.

On another occasion both of us made the trek to Derry to stand shivering outside a voting booth canvassing for the Derry socialist Eamonn McCann, for whom she had enormous admiration of considerable longevity, and who would on the day deliver her funeral oration. At that time a number of republicans including the late Brendan Hughes anticipated Sinn Fein embracing some aspects of Tory Party economics, and felt it important to lend their support to something that had more resemblance to the politics that sustained us through the years of conflict and jail endurance rather than identify with the neo liberal ethos of the party that had sought to crush the republican struggle.

It was a strange day. Despite the mutual antipathy between us and Sinn Fein, it was their party members whom I had known from jail that kept us supplied with ready cups of tea and snacks throughout our sojourn. It was as bitterly cold as the day we buried her.  When Raymond McCartney came into the polling station that evening his wife, a former republican prisoner who had served time in the same wing as Dolours, was genuinely pleased to see her, embracing her warmly, while myself and Raymond chatted. Derry was a cold place that day but not as cold as a Belfast summer where the chill was perennially and perniciously pumped the way of those who refused to profess a belief in what they clearly did not believe.

On a different occasion I ended up alongside Dolours outside Belfast City Hall where PSNI members were pummelling people for sitting on the road at an anti war rally shortly after the US invasion of Iraq. She turned up at these things. That was her, one apple that never fell too far from the radical tree within which she had bloomed.

As Brendan Hughes lay dying, she called to our home and we sat together awaiting the dreaded word from Belfast. We saw the hole coming yet still fell through it as the terra firma gave way beneath our feet when confirmation of Brendan’s passing came. The following day she drove me to Belfast on a solemn journey. The next such journey would see me without her but for her.

Then Dolours was fairly robust and not yet near the shell that she slowly morphed into as the years took their toll.  The demons that haunted her were not yet beyond a command that would keep them at a safe distance. But it was a losing battle. She was at pains to work out how so many could with consummate ease perform a volte-face  on the politics they had sometimes killed for, and march in the opposite direction away from republicanism and into the Treaty camp where the entrance sign clearly states ‘abandon all republican hope all ye who enter here.’ Was the motivation for killing so shallow and self serving? 

As the political-moral construct through which she interpreted the world was deconstructed piece by piece, and as profanity after profanity took root in ground she held sacred, the dyke could no longer be plugged. In my affidavit submitted to a US court I expressed the view that the course being pursued by the British police aided by the US was potentially deleterious to the psychological wellbeing of Dolours. The same prosecutorial zeal and harsh indifference that hounded Aaron Swartz to his death would prove far from sated. 

On the Sunday prior to her burial I travelled up to Belfast with my children. My wife had been there since the Friday before. In the wake house I kissed her cold forehead while my son, her god child, held his hand over his mouth mesmerised by my act.

The following morning republicans and others descended on a windblown and rain swept Andersonstown to fall in behind the funeral cortege as it would begin its journey to the Church and from there on down the Andersonstown Road to Milltown Cemetery. I met ex prisoners I had not seen in almost four decades. It was the wettest funeral I recall ever attending. There was virtually no respite from the relentless rain as it sought to penetrate the phalanx of umbrellas that seemed to move as one, Dolours leading the way to her final resting place. We were drenched as the skies seemed to cry above our heads.

In ways she was an enigmatic woman who had an ability to discern. The hard exterior which she sometimes projected never deflected me away from grasping that beneath it all was a sensitivity not at all cut out for the type of conflict she ended up being central to. The road of conflict was stony and she walked it barefooted. She was condemned to suffer and carry the burden that others more liable, more culpable, were only too willing to pass onto her. She fully accepted her role in the political violence that consumed the North. What she could not abide by was the fact that others who had given her orders throughout her very active IRA life seemed eager to adopt the politics of Gethesemane and deny her, disown the IRA, shift the blame for its activities onto subordinates, and mendaciously brand her a liar. It was a burden that grew no lighter as the years grew heavier and her wearier. 

As we carried her along the road where she had seen so many carried before her, the coffin probably heavier than she was, I sensed that the burden of pall bearing her mortal remains was ultimately the price to be paid to secure her own unburdening. For Dolours, republican life had indeed been the Via Dolorosa.



Via Dolorosa


Last Monday when we placed Dolours Price in the cold forbidding clay of a Belfast cemetery, I had no sense that the earth was enriched by absorbing her, just that we had been impoverished by relinquishing our grip on her as she passed into the ground. It marked the final goodbye in stark contrast to first hello that heralded a friendship 14 years earlier. Comradeship had long preceded friendship. People don’t need to know each other to be comrades, merely to be part of the same insurrectionary enterprise. Platonic relationships frequently grow from comradeship but cannot be reduced to them. When comradeship forged by conflict moved rapidly into friendship in a less bellicose world I felt immensely honoured. As a teenage republican I was inspired by the raw courage of two West Belfast siblings, often referred to as the Venceremos Sisters, putting it up the might of what Ian Cobain has termed Cruel Britannia.

It would be a quarter of a century after her epic hunger strike that I first met Dolours. The location, Dublin 1999. Along with her sister Marian, whom I had previously been introduced to in Belfast at another political event, she was attending a discussion in the Teacher’s Club at which I spoke along with Tommy McKearney, himself a survivor of a prolonged hunger strike. We had gathered to muse on the Good Friday Internal Solution which fell so far short of republican goals Sinn Fein’s Jim Gibney had earlier told his audience in a college on Belfast’s Whiterock Road that, from a republican perspective, it could easily be thrown in the bin; its only redeeming factor was that it could advance the nationalist agenda which at that time republicanism was deferring to. Gibney was commenting on what should have been a clear blue sea divide but would soon grow blurred under the mist and myth of the peace process as republicanism came to embrace, even celebrate, its own oceanic failure.

It was evident then that as DNA republicans neither Dolours nor Marian Price could ever buy into anything that resembled the Treaty of 1922. They were not the type of children prepared to devour the revolution and as such would in some ways come to be devoured by it. They came equipped with the right amount of prescience to grasp that as a consequence of accepting an agreement that the party had never actually negotiated, but would later claim ownership of, Sinn Fein would come to behave in a fashion that would suggest its origins lay in Cumann na nGaedheal rather than any anti-Treaty composition.  A well read articulate and intelligent woman, she was too instinctive a republican to buy into Treaty politics which had been bequeathed to Ireland by a Blue shirt mindset. She would have subscribed to the view of Padraic Pearse that:
The Man who, in the [matter] of Ireland, accepts as a “final settlement”, anything less by one fraction of an iota than separation from England - is guilty of so immense an infidelity, so immense a crime - that it were better for than man - that he had not been born.
I became firm friends with both sisters. Dolours played godmother to my son while Marian was maid of honour at our wedding, a politically promiscuous event that saw loyalist and republican activists mingle with each other among the guests to give us a warm nuptial send off. I danced with Dolours when she and Brendan Hughes mischievously interrupted our first bride and groom dance, he whisking my wife Carrie across the floor leaving me to dance with someone more dainty and less clumsy than myself.  It was the anniversary of the funeral of Bobby Sands.

Dolours, the consummate entertainer, was at ease with all manner of opposition, being more than capable of holding her own intellectually. I once introduced her to a loyalist friend at Dublin airport, where she held court, enchanting us with her wit and acerbic thrusts at those who scorned the ‘reviled and spat upon’ whose company she was content, in that resigned sense that was her way, to be part of.  My friend, I believe, was more charmed than he was persuaded.

On another occasion both of us made the trek to Derry to stand shivering outside a voting booth canvassing for the Derry socialist Eamonn McCann, for whom she had enormous admiration of considerable longevity, and who would on the day deliver her funeral oration. At that time a number of republicans including the late Brendan Hughes anticipated Sinn Fein embracing some aspects of Tory Party economics, and felt it important to lend their support to something that had more resemblance to the politics that sustained us through the years of conflict and jail endurance rather than identify with the neo liberal ethos of the party that had sought to crush the republican struggle.

It was a strange day. Despite the mutual antipathy between us and Sinn Fein, it was their party members whom I had known from jail that kept us supplied with ready cups of tea and snacks throughout our sojourn. It was as bitterly cold as the day we buried her.  When Raymond McCartney came into the polling station that evening his wife, a former republican prisoner who had served time in the same wing as Dolours, was genuinely pleased to see her, embracing her warmly, while myself and Raymond chatted. Derry was a cold place that day but not as cold as a Belfast summer where the chill was perennially and perniciously pumped the way of those who refused to profess a belief in what they clearly did not believe.

On a different occasion I ended up alongside Dolours outside Belfast City Hall where PSNI members were pummelling people for sitting on the road at an anti war rally shortly after the US invasion of Iraq. She turned up at these things. That was her, one apple that never fell too far from the radical tree within which she had bloomed.

As Brendan Hughes lay dying, she called to our home and we sat together awaiting the dreaded word from Belfast. We saw the hole coming yet still fell through it as the terra firma gave way beneath our feet when confirmation of Brendan’s passing came. The following day she drove me to Belfast on a solemn journey. The next such journey would see me without her but for her.

Then Dolours was fairly robust and not yet near the shell that she slowly morphed into as the years took their toll.  The demons that haunted her were not yet beyond a command that would keep them at a safe distance. But it was a losing battle. She was at pains to work out how so many could with consummate ease perform a volte-face  on the politics they had sometimes killed for, and march in the opposite direction away from republicanism and into the Treaty camp where the entrance sign clearly states ‘abandon all republican hope all ye who enter here.’ Was the motivation for killing so shallow and self serving? 

As the political-moral construct through which she interpreted the world was deconstructed piece by piece, and as profanity after profanity took root in ground she held sacred, the dyke could no longer be plugged. In my affidavit submitted to a US court I expressed the view that the course being pursued by the British police aided by the US was potentially deleterious to the psychological wellbeing of Dolours. The same prosecutorial zeal and harsh indifference that hounded Aaron Swartz to his death would prove far from sated. 

On the Sunday prior to her burial I travelled up to Belfast with my children. My wife had been there since the Friday before. In the wake house I kissed her cold forehead while my son, her god child, held his hand over his mouth mesmerised by my act.

The following morning republicans and others descended on a windblown and rain swept Andersonstown to fall in behind the funeral cortege as it would begin its journey to the Church and from there on down the Andersonstown Road to Milltown Cemetery. I met ex prisoners I had not seen in almost four decades. It was the wettest funeral I recall ever attending. There was virtually no respite from the relentless rain as it sought to penetrate the phalanx of umbrellas that seemed to move as one, Dolours leading the way to her final resting place. We were drenched as the skies seemed to cry above our heads.

In ways she was an enigmatic woman who had an ability to discern. The hard exterior which she sometimes projected never deflected me away from grasping that beneath it all was a sensitivity not at all cut out for the type of conflict she ended up being central to. The road of conflict was stony and she walked it barefooted. She was condemned to suffer and carry the burden that others more liable, more culpable, were only too willing to pass onto her. She fully accepted her role in the political violence that consumed the North. What she could not abide by was the fact that others who had given her orders throughout her very active IRA life seemed eager to adopt the politics of Gethesemane and deny her, disown the IRA, shift the blame for its activities onto subordinates, and mendaciously brand her a liar. It was a burden that grew no lighter as the years grew heavier and her wearier. 

As we carried her along the road where she had seen so many carried before her, the coffin probably heavier than she was, I sensed that the burden of pall bearing her mortal remains was ultimately the price to be paid to secure her own unburdening. For Dolours, republican life had indeed been the Via Dolorosa.



32 comments:

  1. A lovely personal fitting tribute,Anthony a cara that it feels almost intrusive to comment further,she will be remembered like the Dark when all others have become nothing but a bad memory.

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  2. Great wee send off. Good to get a deeper insight into the woman. I only knew the price sisters by one of their songs "Go home British soldiers". Which is a classic, and I have sang along to on many a occasion and more than likely will again. I have got cruel Brittania book on kindle, I didnt even know until I looked as I got a free be from a friend, I will give it a spin, I am sure it will being home some more home truths about the british establishment and their lust for imperialist control.

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  3. James,

    thanks. Yes, Cruel Britannia is a great book. I always regard a torturer the most evil type of human being.

    Marty,

    that's for sure. She dealt with her past but never pretended it did not happen and make up an entirely fictional one to subvert and usurp the actual one.

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  4. james, where did you find the info the price sisters wrote that song ? if its true its an interesting piece of trivia :)

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  5. Anthony:

    That is a beautiful and fitting Tribute.

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  6. Emmett,
    I could have sworn it was written by the price sisters. I definatley heard it from someone,I am retracing my steps on it,Wolfetonne album springs to mind, now I may be wrong. If so, I stand corrected, does anyone know who wrote the song?

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  7. Another fitting tribute to Dolours from a friend & comrade...At least she was given a decent goodbye but her legacy will live on. Shame on those former comrades who condemned and demonised her!

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  8. Emmett,
    I stand corrected about the song, it looks like the Wolfe Tonnes wrote it as far as I am aware. I was thinking of Eire og - go bring them home about the Price sisters. Neither the less, you would be hard pushed not to sing one, at the expense of the other.

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  9. James,

    the same thought crossed my mind as did Emmett's. If you made a mistake you are in large company.

    Ardoyne Republican,

    it struck me as ironic that former prisoners could turn up at the funeral of Ronan Kerr, the young British police officer who was killed in Omagh two years ago, but not to bury Dolours. They are free to choose and I don't criticise them for attending Ronan Kerr's funeral. It is just that I wonder about what informs that choice.

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  10. Pre dating Eire Og- The dublin City Ramblers album Irish Republican Jail Songs 1978.
    Side One
    Our Lads in Crumlin Jail
    Take Me Home to Mayo
    Bring Them Home
    James Connolly
    The Men Behind the Wire
    Shall My Soul Pass Through Old Ireland
    The Jail at Cluan-Meala
    The Old Triangle
    Side Two
    Over The Wall
    Long Kesh
    Tom Williams
    The Helicopter Song
    Robert Emmet
    Kevin Barry
    19 Men
    This album has a lot to answer for, it basically what got me interested with the whole lot. Then the jig saw and pieces started to come together slowly but surely after that, to where we are today. Irish Folk Music has a great way of capturing the history, heart and mind. Not to forget the throat, the clinched fist and the tapping toe.lol. There are some great history lessons out there, from whatever angle you take in republicanism, or what side of the house you are on. Maybe it will be the only way , we are/will be truely united through song.

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  11. Words that describe Dolours Price: intelligent, witty, sensitive, principled, honourable, loyal, brave.

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  12. Nice tribute mackers and a good read.

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  13. Anthony, lovely tribute to her.

    James; 'This album has a lot to answer for'

    I'd agree. Some great old ballads on it. Later bands, in my view, were responsible for helping send many young men and women to gaol and to their deaths, riling and rousing them. I wouldn't have them in my house.

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  14. belfast bookworm

    'I'd agree. Some great old ballads on it. Later bands, in my view, were responsible for helping send many young men and women to gaol and to their deaths, riling and rousing them. I wouldn't have them in my house.'

    so true and some of them are still at it. as bad as SF nothing else in their life! Irish Brigade and the geriatric wolf tones ffs!!!

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  15. I have never met anyone from any faction of republicanism who said that they joined the republican struggle because of a song ,I would like to think our people are a bit smarter than that,,ballads and songs highlight events in our history and may encourage people to think about events but that in itself is can not re regarded as a recruiting sergeant.

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  16. Larry & Marty, you both make a fair point. Look at it like this, both your views have validity. A lot of republican songs are based around historical events. Some people are inspired by mucic. likewise others are inspired by books charting Irish history,or poetry. Some nationalists joinned up because they didn't like what was happening to thier communities. Point is, there are many reasons.

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  17. Marty; I'm not saying music was a recruiting sergeant but that songs and music HELPED rile young people, get their blood boiling.

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  18. Belfast Bookworm lets look at the ballad of Billy Reid for e.g. would it be the fact that the brits shot Billy,or the song would that would make young people angry, I,m inclined to think it was the shooting not the messenger that caused any anger,I,m reading a book Anthony recommended Cruel Britannia that makes my blood boil,again its the facts not the messenger...

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  19. Marty; My point is music, like other forms of art and communication influence all of us and affect our mood - sometimes even behaviour. Classical music for example may have a calming effect on us and there is much debate on how rap music affects and influences young black men in America. There are also a great deal of documented personal stories of US troops being 'fired up' by rock music in Vietnam, Iraq etc.

    Surely it stands to reason that rebel tunes had an influencing effect in us Irish?

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  20. Everything can have an effect on our moods a cara ,watching a tropical fish tank has been shown to slow the heart rate down.Mozarts 1846 overture can stir passion while some of the scores from Les Mes will have ya sobbing yer beads out,thats what the arts are about to stir the emotions be it happy,sad or whatever, but like the sound of the pipes in my case when the hairs literally stand up on the back of my neck,these effect the emotions but rather they would influence me to kill someone a cara I seriously doubt it.

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  21. Well Lads, You can put part of the blame on me, Why?, because I was one off many who used to sell it, and, all proceeds went to the families of prisoners and those OTR,as well as some volunteers, I traveled from Manchester to Glasgow selling them in every Irish Bar and Club, sorry to say, We didn't sell to many in the Irish Centers, Biggest sales then were in the Hibs Clubs , It was Kathleen Largey TAPES. To me it was a worthy cause and I would do it again, at times I play my favourite, Its Only our rivers that run free by Kathleen Largey. that song is still true to this very day, and, in my mind will continue to be so for years to come, way past 2016.

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  22. How does this music make you feel? Turn your jukebox up loud. To me, it brings back memories of the BCT club on the Dublin Rd in the late 80's on a Sat. night.

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  23. The music some of the above are referring to is now the staple of drunk celtic fans and the tone deaf. It has become a parody of itself. youd need to be full to listen to it or not wise lol
    there is to much great folk music out there to waste ones time on garbage.

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  24. Frankie:

    "How does this music mane you feel"

    FFS, me and her were up jiving to that one, Cheers mucker, still a bit of life in us yet. lol

    Emmett:

    The only song those Celtic fans sing is, Fields of Athenry, and yes, I will agree most of them are drunk. But the tapes I and others sold, from lands end to john O' groats, were for a cause, The Republican Cause, Prisoners being Tortured, Trying to keep their women to stay with there children instead of going out on the piss and leaving them and jumping into bed with any tom dick or harry, Sometimes I felt like saying, Ack, Fuck this, its a waste of time, But I didn't, Plenty of lads Got to safety on the other side of the atlantic with some of that money, they had a choice, stay here, or, Emigrate. But SOME still stayed as Republicans when they got set up in the grand old U.S. of A, and weapons started coming in. I would say it was well worth it. as for the songs, have you ever heard of the tapes in question, "Price of Freedom", "Price Of Justice", if not, Please listen to them.

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  25. feel the love

    only ever gets played in my gaff after 6 guinnes at the ocal and a further 4 of the 8 cans ive brought home with me...in the morning its cringe and hide the fekers!!! til next time. lol

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  26. This is true, the older you get the less this music springs to mind for a night. It certainly ries the blood, made worse with ale. It is usually at get togethers from old friends and after a fill of drink they come out, neither the less, they seem to appear and disappear like "rentaghost" at a party down the years. I prefer a little subtle approach these days with christy moore et al they also have a history lesson attached. I would also hazzard a guess and say rebel music did send a brave few into the paramilitaries on their way. The same way rap music has,on the gangsta,there is definate linkage, but not the primary reason. I also find funny how quite a lot of celtic fans I have met from here in my experience sectarian, need to go to a field in glasgow watching a british sport - import "soccer" to sing about Ireland. When rangers left the scottish premier, I thought it was great, not because I am against rangers, it was that what would the bigots do without their little fixture.

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  27. Emmett; 'there is to much great folk music out there to waste ones time on garbage.'

    How right you are.

    Luke Kelly, Paddy Riley, Planxty, DeDanaan, Christy, the Blacks, Kathleen Largey, Moving Hearts, there's none who could hold a candle to any of these guys.

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  28. Anthony,

    I don't as a rule impose on obituries. There is a sacredness about the dead and our relationship with them that transcends political opinion. Of all the commmentary that I have read about Dolours Price, this in my opinion, is perhaps, the most personal and profound account offered to date. It is a testimony to your writing that even an implacable opponent is moved to acknowledge. I am sorry for your loss.

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  29. James

    when was the last time ye heard a rebel tune at a GAA match? Great days/weekends out those Celtic games. Don't miss rangers a bit, Juventus coming up, after gobbing Barcelona. Couldn't make it up.

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  30. Must say as one who is generally dismissive of unionism, there's something genuine coming across from Robert. Fair do's.

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  31. That was a beautiful tribute to Dolours Anthony, I got a sense of knowing something of her despite never having met the woman so thanks for sharing all that with us. I hope she has the peace now in death she struggled to find in life, God rest her soul.

    In terms of the discussion on music I'm with Marty on this, I don't see how Irish republican music can be held responsible for helping send many young men and women to gaol and to their deaths as Bookworm states. It was the British occupation that done that, were it not for that occupation none of this would ever have happened. The conditioning effect of British violence against the nationalist community is what recruited people into the republican movement rather than Irish rebel music.

    This song http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tcC8KlAu-eM is one of my favourites, I often listen to it when thinking about the tragedy of what happened in our country and when I see the lads at the end and that roguish smile on Dessie's face I know that we'll never give up 'till this land of ours is free and the goals the boys set out to achieve have been achieved.

    We'll never forget them and if their memory is preserved in a beautiful song such as the one I have posted we are all the richer for it

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  32. Sean Bres, Larry and Belfast Bookworm,

    thanks a lot.

    Robert,

    as ever, much appreciated.

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