New movie links Adams to killing of McConville
A CONTROVERSIAL new movie again links Gerry Adams to the murder of Belfast mother Jean McConville.
A former IRA member, Dolours Price, is seen on screen admitting her part in the murder of mother of ten in 1972 for being an alleged informer.
Price, now dead, claims in I, Dolours that the kidnap and murder of the widow was at the behest of Belfast IRA commander Gerry Adams – although the former Sinn Féin president has always denied being a member of the paramilitary force.
Mr Adams’s successor as Sinn Féin president, Mary Lou McDonald, loudly denounced as ‘politically motivated’ his arrest by the PSNI in 2014 for questioning over the kidnap and murder of Mrs McConville. The man behind that operation, Drew Harris, is the new Garda Commissioner.
The body of Mrs McConville was recovered from Shellinghill Beach in Mr Adams’s Louth constituency in August 2003 after it was exposed by a storm.
Price says on film she and two other IRA members murdered her, making orphans of her ten children.
She also implicates herself in three other murders of the so-called ‘Disappeared’.
Price – who died of an overdose in 2013 – tells viewers she was a member of the ‘Unknowns’, an IRA cell run by Pat McClure, also now deceased, who allegedly reported back to Gerry Adams. The latter has vehemently repeated denials of any involvement in Mrs McConville’s disappearance and death.
Mrs McConville apparently came to the aid of a wounded British soldier in the Divis Flats complex in Belfast, but authoritative sources have always denied she was an informer, as claimed by the IRA, which took years to accept responsibility for her disappearance.
Price, who was the former wife of actor Stephen Rea, says she was taken to a grave dug by the Dundalk IRA, who had refused to carry out the killing because of her sex.
Mrs McConville was shot in the back of the head by one of the volunteers, according to Price. All three, including herself, ‘fired a shot so that no one would say that they for certain had been the person to kill her’, she says in the film, which was made in the US by exiled journalist turned historian Ed Moloney.
Yet a post mortem on Mrs McConville concluded she was killed by a single shot to the back of the head, with no mention of further wounds.
Price declares in the film: ‘I think back on those who I had responsibility for driving away. I’m not a deeply religious person, but I would say a prayer for them.’
That same year Price was responsible for the kidnapping of republicans Séamus Wright, Kevin McKee and Joe Lynskey
Murdered and buried by IRA
in separate incidents. All were taken across the border and secretly murdered and buried by the IRA. Price agrees on screen the disappearances were a war crime.
She and her sister Marian were jailed for the 1973 bombing of the Old Bailey in which 200 people were injured. She subsequently went on hunger strike and was force-fed.
Under an agreement that led to the IRA truce in 1975, the sisters were transferred from English prisons to Northern Ireland, along with IRA prisoner turned politician Gerry Kelly.
The filmed interview is linked to the ‘Boston tapes’ of audio recordings by Mr Moloney, carried out not only with Price but also with IRA chief Brendan Hughes. They cooperated on the basis that their historical background would not be released until after their deaths, which have now taken place.
The PSNI took legal action and gained access to the tapes from the US authorities, despite Mr Moloney’s protests and attempt at opposition in the courts. The tapes then ‘informed’ the arrest of Gerry Adams for questioning.
A Sinn Féin party spokesman, asked about Dolours Price’s specific allegations yesterday, replied: ‘Gerry Adams has categorically denied this allegation.’