Dieter Reinisch writing for Writing The "Troubles" discusses the use of a term like psychopath to describe the mindset of IRA volunteers like Dolours Price.

(Image: PPCC Antifa Flickr Account)
The recent RTÉ screening of the I, Dolours documentary, directed by Maurice Sweeney, received much media attention in Ireland and was reviewed by several national newspapers, including the Irish Times, Irish Independent, and Irish Mirror. The documentary is, indeed, a gripping, and at times disturbing, insight into the history of the Northern Ireland ‘Troubles’, and into the mind of arguably one of its main protagonists. The public reaction to the documentary provides important challenges for those writing the history of the ‘Troubles’.

I have researched Irish republican women, as I described in a previous article for this blog. Thus, unsurprisingly, many friend and colleagues have mentioned this new documentary about Provisional IRA Volunteer and outspoken critic of the peace process Dolours Price to me. I was led to believe that almost everyone in Ireland had watched it? And, for many this was the first time they had seen (or read) the testimony of a woman involved in paramilitary activity during the conflict.

This explains some of the terms used to describe Dolours Price and her testimony to me; they ranged from ‘hard-line’ and ‘extreme’ to ‘soulless’, ‘mental’, and ‘psychopath’. For most, her account of the disappearance of Jean McConville was particularly disturbing; people were genuinely shocked by what she said. While acknowledging that Price was at the time of the interview struggling to cope with her past, suffering from PTSD, as many other former actors of the conflict, the refusal to condemn the killing of Jean McConville stuck out as one of the most shocking scenes.[1] The reactions to her account reflect two key challenges for researchers: countering the prevailing gender stereotypes and understanding the individual choices for political violence.

The documentary is based on interviews conducted by renowned journalist Ed Moloney; also the lead researcher of the ill-fated Boston College Oral History Project. In 2010, he published a volume containing the testimonies of two participants: Belfast IRA man Brendan Hughes and the loyalist PUP founder David Ervine. In essence, the content of Hughes’ interpretation of the events surrounding the disappearance of Jean McConville from her Divis flat in front of her nine children, her transport south of the border, and the subsequent killing and burying on a beach in Co Louth is almost identical to the interpretation provided by Price in I, Dolours.

While the publication of Voices from the Grave also received considerable media attention, including front-page coverage over several days in the Irish News, people and commentators discussed the content of the interviews rather than how they were made. This stands in stark contrast to the public dismay and outcry at Dolours interview: how could a woman feel so little remorse for what she did. Hence, if she doesn’t feel sorry for the disappearance of McConville and apologises, she must be a psychopath.

This reaction reflects the prevailing gender stereotypes linked to activism during the Northern Ireland conflict. These gender stereotypes existed in the media at the time, in coverage of the sisters’ arrest for the Old Bailey bombing in March 1973, and in dire warnings about the use of women as ‘honey traps’. However, they have been allowed to continue to influence how we understand female republicans by scholars’ decade-long negligence of women in (Northern) Irish paramilitary organisations. In the early 1980s, Margaret Ward broke ground with her study of women activism in Ireland in the early 20th century. Her book, Unmanageable Revolutionaries, set the research agenda for the following decades and still does.[2] Her seminal work, however, stretches only until the 1940s; thus, militant women activism after 1945 remained under the radar of researchers.

In the past decade, several important publications have contributed to closing this research gap on republican women as paramilitary activists during the ‘Troubles’; among those are the works of Miranda Alison, Sikata Banerjee, Tara Keenan-Thomson, Theresa O’Keefe, Azrini Wahidin, and most recently Niall Gilmartin, but this remains an under-developed corner of the field.[3] There exists an even wider gap in the research of loyalist women, an area almost entirely unresearched.[4]

As a result of this, merely a handful of prominent women were singled out by writers, who portray them as the exceptions, while overlooking the vast majority of women activists in republican organisations. The German book by Cologne-based former journalist Marianna Quoirin-Wichert is one example. Quoirin-Wichert devotes separate chapters to distinct hard-line republican women such as Marian and Dolours Price, Rose Dugdale, and Josephine Hayden. Other women singled out as exceptional republicans by other writers are Mairéad Farrell, Máire Drumm, Ella O’Dwyer, or Martina Anderson.

There is a widespread myth, that when the male-only Provisional IRA Army Council passed a resolution to accept women into the PIRA in September 1971, the Price sisters Marian and Dolours, opposing the secondary role of the women’s organisation Cumann na mBan in the Provisional movement, joined as the first two female volunteers.[5] In fact, Marian and Dolours were among a group of three young women who applied to join their local PIRA unit in West Belfast. Several women were to follow serving their movement on all levels; to be sure, they undertook the same paramilitary and non-paramilitary activities as men from the mid-1970s onward. While this did not make women equal members of the Provisionals, it made Dolours one of many women who were actively involved in paramilitary activities. As such, these women showed the same persuasion to the republican struggle as men did.

The testimonies included in I, Dolours reflect this loyal conviction to the republican struggle rather than the words of a psychopath. In his most recent book, Richard English reminds us that:

despite the doubts of some, a persuasive body of scholarly literature now suggests that those who engage in and support terrorism tend to display the same levels of rationality as do other people.[6]

This brings me to my second thought about the psychopath-comment. Dolours and her sister Marian grew up in a republican household in the nationalist neighbourhood Andersonstown in West Belfast. They were reportedly good at school; the sisters had a bright future ahead of them. When the Civil Rights Movement emerged, they became active, joining the peaceful People’s Democracy march from Belfast to Derry in January 1969. The attack on the march by loyalist protesters at Burntollet was a life-changing event for the sisters, which ultimately led them to join the PIRA.

In a recent article, Lorenzo Bosi and Niall Ó Dochartaigh explain that the identity rather than ideology was the main recruitment factor into the PIRA in the early 1970s. They argue:


that those who joined the Provisional IRA between 1969 and 1972 did so in order to respond to a need for action by a northern nationalist community that stemmed from a perceived, alleged or actual, sense of second-class citizenship.[7]

This ‘need for action’ resulted in the recruitment of Dolours Price into the PIRA. For these recruits, joining the PIRA meant joining an army and following orders. For them, this was a necessity to fight for their cause. It needs to be highlighted that loyalist and republican members of paramilitary organisations considered themselves as soldiers; being a soldier and following military orders does not make you a psychopath. So by sticking to this label, allowing it to influence what aspects of the ‘Troubles’ we research, we risk becoming blind to the nuances that women represent in their paramilitary organisations. On the contrary, as I outline in an article for the magazine Merkur, published earlier this year, these were ordinary people who did extraordinary things during exceptional times.[8]

This blog post intends to shed light on two key issues, which reactions to the I, Dolours documentary have illuminated. These are, first, the still under-researched role of republican and loyalist women in paramilitary organisations in Ireland and, second, the recruitment factors into and life in militant organisations. Investigating this will reveal that Dolours Price was not a ‘psychopath’ but a young woman who grew up in a particular place during a particular time, but will also give researchers a unique insight into the motivations behind individual members of the PIRA. We should make it our task, therefore, to research these two fields further to re-balance the gender history of the ‘Troubles’.

[1] Adrien Grounds & Ruth Jamieson, ‘No sense of an ending: Researching the experience of imprisonment and release among Republican ex-prisoners’, Theoretical Criminology 7(3), 2003, pp. 347-362.

[2] Margaret Ward, Unmanageable revolutionaries: Women and Irish Nationalism, New Edition, London: Pluto Press, 1995.

[3] Miranda Alison, Women and political violence: Female combatants in ethno-national conflict, London: Routledge, 2009; Sikata Banerjee, Muscular Nationalism: Gender, Violence, and Empire in India and Ireland, 1914-2004, New York: NYU Press, 2012; Tara Keenan-Thomson, Irish women and street politics 1956-1973, Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2010; Theresa O’Keefe, Feminist Identity Development and Activism in Revolutionary Movements, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013; Azrini Wahidin, Ex-Combatants, Gender and Peace in Northern Ireland: Women, Political Protest and the Prison Experience, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016; Niall Gilmartin, Female Combatants After Armed Struggle: Lost in Transition?, London: Routledge, 2018.

[4] Miranda Alison, ‘”That’s equality for you, dear”: gender, small arms and the Northern Ireland conflict’; in V. Farr, H. Myrttinen & A. Schnabel (Eds.), Sexed pistols: the gendered impacts of small arms and light weapons, New York: United Nations University Press, 2009, pp. 211-45.

[5] Dieter Reinisch, ‘Women’s agency and political violence: Irish Republican women and the formation of the Provisional IRA, 1967–70’, Irish Political Studies, 2018.

[6] Richard English, Does Terrorism work?, Oxford: OUP, 2016.

[7] Lorenzo Bosi & Niall Ó Dochartaigh, ‘Armed activism as the enactment of a collective identity: the case of the Provisional IRA between 1969 and 1972’, Social Movement Studies, 17(1), pp. 35-47.

[8] Dieter Reinisch, ‘Nordirland: Die Gegenwart des Terrors‘, Merkur (839), pp. 84-91.


Dieter Reinisch is a historian at the Institute for Social Movements in Bochum, 
and a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study, Central European University, in Budapest.

I, Dolours … Broadcasting a Psychopath?


Dieter Reinisch writing for Writing The "Troubles" discusses the use of a term like psychopath to describe the mindset of IRA volunteers like Dolours Price.

(Image: PPCC Antifa Flickr Account)
The recent RTÉ screening of the I, Dolours documentary, directed by Maurice Sweeney, received much media attention in Ireland and was reviewed by several national newspapers, including the Irish Times, Irish Independent, and Irish Mirror. The documentary is, indeed, a gripping, and at times disturbing, insight into the history of the Northern Ireland ‘Troubles’, and into the mind of arguably one of its main protagonists. The public reaction to the documentary provides important challenges for those writing the history of the ‘Troubles’.

I have researched Irish republican women, as I described in a previous article for this blog. Thus, unsurprisingly, many friend and colleagues have mentioned this new documentary about Provisional IRA Volunteer and outspoken critic of the peace process Dolours Price to me. I was led to believe that almost everyone in Ireland had watched it? And, for many this was the first time they had seen (or read) the testimony of a woman involved in paramilitary activity during the conflict.

This explains some of the terms used to describe Dolours Price and her testimony to me; they ranged from ‘hard-line’ and ‘extreme’ to ‘soulless’, ‘mental’, and ‘psychopath’. For most, her account of the disappearance of Jean McConville was particularly disturbing; people were genuinely shocked by what she said. While acknowledging that Price was at the time of the interview struggling to cope with her past, suffering from PTSD, as many other former actors of the conflict, the refusal to condemn the killing of Jean McConville stuck out as one of the most shocking scenes.[1] The reactions to her account reflect two key challenges for researchers: countering the prevailing gender stereotypes and understanding the individual choices for political violence.

The documentary is based on interviews conducted by renowned journalist Ed Moloney; also the lead researcher of the ill-fated Boston College Oral History Project. In 2010, he published a volume containing the testimonies of two participants: Belfast IRA man Brendan Hughes and the loyalist PUP founder David Ervine. In essence, the content of Hughes’ interpretation of the events surrounding the disappearance of Jean McConville from her Divis flat in front of her nine children, her transport south of the border, and the subsequent killing and burying on a beach in Co Louth is almost identical to the interpretation provided by Price in I, Dolours.

While the publication of Voices from the Grave also received considerable media attention, including front-page coverage over several days in the Irish News, people and commentators discussed the content of the interviews rather than how they were made. This stands in stark contrast to the public dismay and outcry at Dolours interview: how could a woman feel so little remorse for what she did. Hence, if she doesn’t feel sorry for the disappearance of McConville and apologises, she must be a psychopath.

This reaction reflects the prevailing gender stereotypes linked to activism during the Northern Ireland conflict. These gender stereotypes existed in the media at the time, in coverage of the sisters’ arrest for the Old Bailey bombing in March 1973, and in dire warnings about the use of women as ‘honey traps’. However, they have been allowed to continue to influence how we understand female republicans by scholars’ decade-long negligence of women in (Northern) Irish paramilitary organisations. In the early 1980s, Margaret Ward broke ground with her study of women activism in Ireland in the early 20th century. Her book, Unmanageable Revolutionaries, set the research agenda for the following decades and still does.[2] Her seminal work, however, stretches only until the 1940s; thus, militant women activism after 1945 remained under the radar of researchers.

In the past decade, several important publications have contributed to closing this research gap on republican women as paramilitary activists during the ‘Troubles’; among those are the works of Miranda Alison, Sikata Banerjee, Tara Keenan-Thomson, Theresa O’Keefe, Azrini Wahidin, and most recently Niall Gilmartin, but this remains an under-developed corner of the field.[3] There exists an even wider gap in the research of loyalist women, an area almost entirely unresearched.[4]

As a result of this, merely a handful of prominent women were singled out by writers, who portray them as the exceptions, while overlooking the vast majority of women activists in republican organisations. The German book by Cologne-based former journalist Marianna Quoirin-Wichert is one example. Quoirin-Wichert devotes separate chapters to distinct hard-line republican women such as Marian and Dolours Price, Rose Dugdale, and Josephine Hayden. Other women singled out as exceptional republicans by other writers are Mairéad Farrell, Máire Drumm, Ella O’Dwyer, or Martina Anderson.

There is a widespread myth, that when the male-only Provisional IRA Army Council passed a resolution to accept women into the PIRA in September 1971, the Price sisters Marian and Dolours, opposing the secondary role of the women’s organisation Cumann na mBan in the Provisional movement, joined as the first two female volunteers.[5] In fact, Marian and Dolours were among a group of three young women who applied to join their local PIRA unit in West Belfast. Several women were to follow serving their movement on all levels; to be sure, they undertook the same paramilitary and non-paramilitary activities as men from the mid-1970s onward. While this did not make women equal members of the Provisionals, it made Dolours one of many women who were actively involved in paramilitary activities. As such, these women showed the same persuasion to the republican struggle as men did.

The testimonies included in I, Dolours reflect this loyal conviction to the republican struggle rather than the words of a psychopath. In his most recent book, Richard English reminds us that:

despite the doubts of some, a persuasive body of scholarly literature now suggests that those who engage in and support terrorism tend to display the same levels of rationality as do other people.[6]

This brings me to my second thought about the psychopath-comment. Dolours and her sister Marian grew up in a republican household in the nationalist neighbourhood Andersonstown in West Belfast. They were reportedly good at school; the sisters had a bright future ahead of them. When the Civil Rights Movement emerged, they became active, joining the peaceful People’s Democracy march from Belfast to Derry in January 1969. The attack on the march by loyalist protesters at Burntollet was a life-changing event for the sisters, which ultimately led them to join the PIRA.

In a recent article, Lorenzo Bosi and Niall Ó Dochartaigh explain that the identity rather than ideology was the main recruitment factor into the PIRA in the early 1970s. They argue:


that those who joined the Provisional IRA between 1969 and 1972 did so in order to respond to a need for action by a northern nationalist community that stemmed from a perceived, alleged or actual, sense of second-class citizenship.[7]

This ‘need for action’ resulted in the recruitment of Dolours Price into the PIRA. For these recruits, joining the PIRA meant joining an army and following orders. For them, this was a necessity to fight for their cause. It needs to be highlighted that loyalist and republican members of paramilitary organisations considered themselves as soldiers; being a soldier and following military orders does not make you a psychopath. So by sticking to this label, allowing it to influence what aspects of the ‘Troubles’ we research, we risk becoming blind to the nuances that women represent in their paramilitary organisations. On the contrary, as I outline in an article for the magazine Merkur, published earlier this year, these were ordinary people who did extraordinary things during exceptional times.[8]

This blog post intends to shed light on two key issues, which reactions to the I, Dolours documentary have illuminated. These are, first, the still under-researched role of republican and loyalist women in paramilitary organisations in Ireland and, second, the recruitment factors into and life in militant organisations. Investigating this will reveal that Dolours Price was not a ‘psychopath’ but a young woman who grew up in a particular place during a particular time, but will also give researchers a unique insight into the motivations behind individual members of the PIRA. We should make it our task, therefore, to research these two fields further to re-balance the gender history of the ‘Troubles’.

[1] Adrien Grounds & Ruth Jamieson, ‘No sense of an ending: Researching the experience of imprisonment and release among Republican ex-prisoners’, Theoretical Criminology 7(3), 2003, pp. 347-362.

[2] Margaret Ward, Unmanageable revolutionaries: Women and Irish Nationalism, New Edition, London: Pluto Press, 1995.

[3] Miranda Alison, Women and political violence: Female combatants in ethno-national conflict, London: Routledge, 2009; Sikata Banerjee, Muscular Nationalism: Gender, Violence, and Empire in India and Ireland, 1914-2004, New York: NYU Press, 2012; Tara Keenan-Thomson, Irish women and street politics 1956-1973, Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2010; Theresa O’Keefe, Feminist Identity Development and Activism in Revolutionary Movements, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013; Azrini Wahidin, Ex-Combatants, Gender and Peace in Northern Ireland: Women, Political Protest and the Prison Experience, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016; Niall Gilmartin, Female Combatants After Armed Struggle: Lost in Transition?, London: Routledge, 2018.

[4] Miranda Alison, ‘”That’s equality for you, dear”: gender, small arms and the Northern Ireland conflict’; in V. Farr, H. Myrttinen & A. Schnabel (Eds.), Sexed pistols: the gendered impacts of small arms and light weapons, New York: United Nations University Press, 2009, pp. 211-45.

[5] Dieter Reinisch, ‘Women’s agency and political violence: Irish Republican women and the formation of the Provisional IRA, 1967–70’, Irish Political Studies, 2018.

[6] Richard English, Does Terrorism work?, Oxford: OUP, 2016.

[7] Lorenzo Bosi & Niall Ó Dochartaigh, ‘Armed activism as the enactment of a collective identity: the case of the Provisional IRA between 1969 and 1972’, Social Movement Studies, 17(1), pp. 35-47.

[8] Dieter Reinisch, ‘Nordirland: Die Gegenwart des Terrors‘, Merkur (839), pp. 84-91.


Dieter Reinisch is a historian at the Institute for Social Movements in Bochum, 
and a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study, Central European University, in Budapest.

10 comments:

  1. If one considers 'mainstream' miltary actions such as the Battle of the Bulge, or D-Day -there are no women on the front line and had there been, would they have been individually considered to be a psychopath or hero? I think the answer comes down to the perspective of the observer and their interpretation of what is just cause. It will also be influenced by the morals or standards of the society one obtains their own sense of validation from. That is, in essence, the internal conflict that Dolores endured in her attempts to make sense of her life and those around her.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Can't find fault in this article, the word 'psycopath' is bandied about to often in the wrong setting as it clearly is here. A true psycopath is devoid of emotion, those involved in the conflict invariably had strong emotions.

    Too easy to label the otherside as something which infers inhumanity; first thing all armies train their soldiers is that the enemy is not human as this makes it easier to take a life.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Nothing is gained by demonising or pathologising people like Dolores Price who made choices (which I disagree with) at a time of extreme stress and fear which enveloped the communities which Dolores Price grew up in.

    While utterly opposed to the armed patriarchies that caused so much suffering in NI, I do not accept, from reading the recollections of Brendan Hughes and David Ervine in Voices from Beyond the Grave and of contributors to this weblog, not least its editor, that young people who joined paramilitaries did not all lose their humanity in doing so.

    Good article from a good scholar.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Barry,

    WTF...

    I do not accept, from reading the recollections of Brendan Hughes and David Ervine in Voices from Beyond the Grave and of contributors to this weblog, not least its editor, that young people who joined paramilitaries did not all lose their humanity in doing so.

    I have no idea if you actually know any former Republican or Loyalist paramilitaries. I know a couple (a few) on both sides of 'the divide' and they are some of most humane people I have come across.

    What I do know about you is you have no connection to Israel, no Jewish connections (not in your family) but you defend pathological killers who make up the IDF every day of the week. You defend a state that has abused and has been accused of violating every human right under the sun..And you have the cheek to talk about young people losing their humanity!!!

    I am going to give you the same advice I once gave Daithi, on a good night, no wind, rain etc..Go to Salisbury Plains and drop an acid tab and look at the stars...(don't knock it until you have tried it), either that or next time you visit the island and Belfast, look me up I will get you drunk and you will see this rock for what it is...

    Somewhere along the way you have been brain washed..And coming out with what you said reinforces my belief that you are more British than Finchley.

    ReplyDelete
  5. I meant to say young people did NOT lose their humanity when they joined paramilitaries.

    That should be clear from the first paragraph of my post.

    ReplyDelete
  6. And I apologise to TPQ readers who may have gained that impression through my clumsy use of a double negative.

    ReplyDelete
  7. And I do not need psychotropic substances of any description to form my view of the world.

    ReplyDelete
  8. Barry,

    In layman's terms, do you ever switch off? Or is your whole day filled with thinking about WW2, Nazism, Zionism, Brexit, BLP and all the rest?

    Do ever just go out to a gig or other and get very drunk and forget about politics?...What was the last gig/concert you went to? Who did you see...?

    ReplyDelete
  9. I regularly go to events in Colchester Arts Centre particularly comedy nights jazz events. I get woozy after three pints; there comes a time in life where getting pissed is not particularly cool or funny.

    ReplyDelete
  10. Frankie

    There is a very vibrant music and arts scene (no Rockabillly, I'm afraid) here but the town is of the grid as far as major performers are concerned.

    ReplyDelete