The Price Sisters: IRA Volunteers' Controversial Legacy from 1970s Bombings to 2024 Legal Threats

Dolours Price (born 1950) and Marian Price (born 1954), sisters from Andersonstown, Belfast, Northern Ireland, became prominent IRA volunteers in the early 1970s. Their family background was steeped in Irish republicanism, with their father a former IRA member and their mother and grandmother part of the all-female Cumann na mBan. In March 1973, they were involved in IRA bombings in London that targeted the Old Bailey and Westminster, injuring over 200 people and causing one death. Convicted and given double life sentences, they initiated a hunger strike lasting over 200 days while imprisoned, demanding transfer to Northern Ireland and political prisoner status. They were eventually moved to Armagh prison in Northern Ireland and released in the early 1980s due to deteriorating health. Dolours was a member of the secret IRA unit known as the "Unknowns," implicated in the disappearances of individuals like Jean McConville, a Belfast mother of ten abducted in 1972 and found in 2003 on Shelling Hill Beach, County Louth, Republic of Ireland. After release, Dolours moved to Dublin, worked as a journalist, married actor Stephen Rea, and participated in the Belfast Project oral history archive at Boston College in Massachusetts, directed by Irish reporter Ed Moloney. She publicly identified Gerry Adams, former president of Sinn Fein, as her IRA commanding officer, a claim he denies. Marian Price was arrested in 2009 in connection with an attack on Massereene Barracks in Northern Ireland that killed two British soldiers and was imprisoned in 2011 before release in 2013. In late 2024, Marian threatened to sue Disney+ over her depiction in the TV adaptation of journalist Patrick Radden Keefe's book 'Say Nothing,' which alleges she murdered Jean McConville. The sisters criticized the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, arguing it did not justify the suffering during the Troubles. Dolours Price died in 2013.