Anthony McIntyre thinks Danny Morrison is a veteran errorist and wonders what lies behind his latest demonstration of being wrong.
Showing posts with label Dolours Price. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Dolours Price. Show all posts
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.
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.
Tonight The Pensive Quill carries a guest article written by my wife, Carrie, on the death of our friend Dolours Price.
.jpg)
Friday I took the train up to Belfast, and called with friends to the wake house. We returned to their place and they got me incredibly drunk which frankly I needed. I slept away most of Saturday, which was also needed. Saturday night we went to the Andytown Road black flag vigil where we stood in the cold, windy air for an hour or so, lined up the length of the road from beyond the leisure centre and past Casement park. We held our flags as they fluttered and cars passed by. Many young people were in attendance, more than I have ever seen in years of white line picket protests. It was sombre, and felt a fitting way to show the solidarity that defined her in that nether world between death and burial. We called briefly into the wake house again, too late to be with Dolours again; she was so near, yet never so far, never to return. Sadness mixed with anger at the frustration of her sister Marian being denied the chance to say goodbye - cruel, unnecessarily heartless; knowing the incredible bond between the two, unimaginable the loss.
Sunday was a long bus ride up and back to Derry for the Bloody Sunday march. Freezing cold. Bernadette McAliskey spoke. Seeing "RIP DOLOURS PRICE" on Derry's walls brought a bittersweet smile; she would have loved that act of defiance and comradeship, and would have loved being the subject of it. Anger shimmered in the air of the crowd, buzzing with word of Marian's clandestine three-hour visit to the wake-house in the early hours of the morning - at a cost of £150,000, cash, hastily and not easily raised on a Saturday. I can't imagine how lonely Marian must feel now; memories of being denied her mother's funeral, who never did see the two sisters back in Ireland again, crowding with living again in prison, denied the last days of those she loves most.
To think about both Marian and Dolours brings an unbearable sadness. More so because it should not be - the women I knew were vibrant women, fighters, feisty, strong; not broken by the burdens they shoulder. These burdens heaped upon them now are too much for any one person, for any family.
We called back to the wake house late in the evening upon return from Derry, and my husband and children joined me. My daughter, being older, has more memories of her "Aunty Dodo"; my son was her godson. Too little to remember very much, too young to understand, he was incredulous as he watched his daddy kiss Dolours goodbye, telling me in the car later in a stage whisper, "Daddy kissed a dead body!" with fascinated horror. My daughter is moved by it all. She sees how the loss of her friend is affecting her mother. She holds my hand and inquires how I am feeling, if I am ok, or asks "What's wrong". I squeeze her hand and tell her I am just sad, too sad for words. She tries to hold her own tears in, feeling the grief around her.
We call at friends' homes and I am grateful for the small kindnesses shown. The slagging and teasing and the ability to just talk about everything. The shared frustrated outrage. The love.
The funeral was today. I held her coffin on my shoulder and thought only of her, why was she gone, why was I carrying her to her grave, how much she struggled and suffered and what an awful way we eventually find peace. The rain was ceaseless, soaking all of us. The Armagh Prison women who formed her guard walked her from her home, to the chapel, to the grave, every step of the way, through every drop of rain. Dolours would have felt she deserved no less, but would have also craved the recognition, the validation: she was a Volunteer; she gave the ultimate sacrifice: her mind, her heart, her soul, her life.
Eamonn McCann and Bernadette McAliskey spoke at her graveside. McCann was a very close friend of Dolours', someone she relied upon greatly. Bernadette has been to the fore in campaigning for Marian. I hope McCann's speech was recorded, or transcribed somewhere; he did her justice. Bernadette's message was frank, and simple: this conflict has been hard. We must embrace our friends, our comrades. Be a friend to each other. Take the time. She is right. We all hurt, we all struggle, we all bear burdens. Reaching out, being there, even for a half hour phone call, or just to say 'Hello - I am thinking of you' - don't let those we know, and maybe even don't know, are hurting, drown in the sorrows they cannot abide, and feel they cannot share.
I hugged Bernadette afterwards and introduced her to my daughter. "This is the woman you are named for," I wanted her to know. Take heed, sweetheart, you are part of a tradition of strong women. Learn from them, from Dolours, the strength of your convictions, and from Bernadette, compassion. From both, learn love.
.jpg)
"If Dolours had a big fault, it was perhaps that she lived out too urgently the ideals to which so many others also purported to be dedicated.He described their friendship as a 40 year love affair, and I know she loved him and relied on him for so much. It has been a long few days. I am not even sure how many days it has been, to be honest. Dolours was found late Wednesday night and we were told of her death Thursday morning. I did not sleep that night. I find everything tinged with an incredible sadness.
"She was a liberator but never managed to liberate herself from those ideas. Sometimes we are imprisoned within ideals; sometimes in war atrocious things are done; sometimes hard things have to be done.
"Sometimes it is very difficult to handle the hard things that you felt compelled to do when you are soft-hearted at the core of your being. And Dolours was a soft-hearted person as well as a hard person in her politics."
- Eamonn McCann, who was a very close and great friend of Dolours, speaking at her graveside.
To think about both Marian and Dolours brings an unbearable sadness. More so because it should not be - the women I knew were vibrant women, fighters, feisty, strong; not broken by the burdens they shoulder. These burdens heaped upon them now are too much for any one person, for any family.
We called back to the wake house late in the evening upon return from Derry, and my husband and children joined me. My daughter, being older, has more memories of her "Aunty Dodo"; my son was her godson. Too little to remember very much, too young to understand, he was incredulous as he watched his daddy kiss Dolours goodbye, telling me in the car later in a stage whisper, "Daddy kissed a dead body!" with fascinated horror. My daughter is moved by it all. She sees how the loss of her friend is affecting her mother. She holds my hand and inquires how I am feeling, if I am ok, or asks "What's wrong". I squeeze her hand and tell her I am just sad, too sad for words. She tries to hold her own tears in, feeling the grief around her.
We call at friends' homes and I am grateful for the small kindnesses shown. The slagging and teasing and the ability to just talk about everything. The shared frustrated outrage. The love.
Eamonn McCann and Bernadette McAliskey spoke at her graveside. McCann was a very close friend of Dolours', someone she relied upon greatly. Bernadette has been to the fore in campaigning for Marian. I hope McCann's speech was recorded, or transcribed somewhere; he did her justice. Bernadette's message was frank, and simple: this conflict has been hard. We must embrace our friends, our comrades. Be a friend to each other. Take the time. She is right. We all hurt, we all struggle, we all bear burdens. Reaching out, being there, even for a half hour phone call, or just to say 'Hello - I am thinking of you' - don't let those we know, and maybe even don't know, are hurting, drown in the sorrows they cannot abide, and feel they cannot share.
I hugged Bernadette afterwards and introduced her to my daughter. "This is the woman you are named for," I wanted her to know. Take heed, sweetheart, you are part of a tradition of strong women. Learn from them, from Dolours, the strength of your convictions, and from Bernadette, compassion. From both, learn love.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
