Marian Price released to attend sister's wake

Marian Price attended the wake of her sister Dolours in west Belfast yesterday morning ahead of today’s funeral Mass in St Agnes’s Church, Andersonstown.

Ms Price, who remains in hospital custody and is said to be suffering from serious psychological ill-health, was granted compassionate leave to visit the family home in Slievegallion Drive in Andersonstown yesterday morning where her sister’s remains were being waked.

Hunger strike

It is understood that Marian Price, who with Dolours was part of the IRA unit that carried out the 1973 Old Bailey bombings in London, will not be at today’s funeral.

The sisters were also involved in a hunger strike, in which they were force fed, that ultimately led to them and other members of the IRA bomb team being repatriated to serve their sentences in Northern Ireland.

“Based on medical advice Marian Price was given a short period of release on Sunday morning to attend the wake of her sisters,” a spokesman for the Northern Ireland Prison Service confirmed yesterday.

Marian Price (58), who with her late sister was opposed to the peace process, Belfast Agreement and Sinn Féin leadership, spent several hours at the wake and then returned to custody at a Belfast hospital.

Dolours Price (61) was found dead at her home in Malahide, Co Dublin, on Wednesday night. Her death is not being treated as suspicious.

‘Disappeared’

Dolours Price had stated that she drove the car that brought Belfast mother-of-10 Jean McConville across the Border to her death by the IRA in 1972.

She also said she had information on three others of the “disappeared”, all IRA members, who were murdered by their own organisation at about that time.

Ms Price said that Sinn Féin president Gerry Adams was her “OC” or IRA commanding officer at that time – a claim denied by Mr Adams.

The Sinn Féin president again offered sympathy to the Price family yesterday while confirming he would not be attending the funeral.

Boston tapes: Moloney against handover

US-based journalist Ed Moloney will resist any attempts to have the Dolours Price interviews, given to the Boston College project on the Troubles, released to the Police Service of Northern Ireland or made public.

“There seems to be an assumption on the part of a lot of people that as soon as someone dies we are obliged to put these interviews up on the shop window for people to gawk at. That is not the situation at all,” Moloney told RTÉ yesterday.

The journalist is director of the project.

Interviews that the late IRA member Brendan Hughes gave were used in Moloney’s book Voices from the Grave.

Moloney, however, said the situation in relation to these interviews was entirely different as it was Hughes’s express wish that his views be published.

Moloney said there were others who had participated in the Belfast Project who had since died and that their interviews had not been released.

Whether the Dolours Price tapes will be handed over to the PSNI is a matter for the US supreme court.

However, Moloney said that were the court to rule they should be released, he would embark on a political campaign to prevent their disclosure.