A controversial documentary about Old Bailey bomber Dolours Price will air on RTE tomorrow night.
The feature-length drama includes clips from video interviews the ex-IRA woman gave describing in unprecedented detail the kidnap and murder of Jean McConville.
The 37-year-old widow was abducted from her Belfast flat in front of her 10 children in 1972 after being wrongly identified as a police informer.
She was shot in the back of the head and secretly buried, becoming one of the Disappeared victims of the Troubles.
Her remains were found on Shelling Hill beach in Co Louth in 2003. Nobody has been convicted of her murder.
The documentary – I, Dolours – features archive video footage of the convicted bomber in which she details her role in the killing.
Her claims were made during interviews with journalist Ed Moloney as part of the Boston College tapes on condition they were not released before her death.
She told how in 1972 the IRA began a policy of “disappearing” people they believed betrayed the organisation, a task given to the trusted Unknowns of which she
was one.
Price and two other volunteers drove Mrs McConville across the border and told her she was being taken away by the Catholic Legion Of Mary group.
She said they left her with the IRA’s Dundalk unit for a number of days, adding: “The Dundalk IRA women didn’t want to do it, so we did it. They couldn’t bring themselves to execute her, probably because she was a woman.”
Price along with Pat McClure, who died in the US in 1986, and a third member of the Unknowns took Mrs McConville to a pre-dug grave where she was “shot in the back of the head by one of the volunteers”.
There was one pistol, but Price said the trio “each fired a shot so no one would say for certain they were the person to kill her”.
Asked if she thought the murders of the Disappeared were war crimes, she replied: “Yes, I think it is a war crime.”
Price admitted being haunted by the deaths and said though she was not a deeply religious person she “would say a prayer for them”.
The documentary also chronicles the years she spent in prison after being jailed for life along with her sister Marian for her role in the Old Bailey bombings in London.
She was found dead at her home in Malahide, North Co Dublin, in 2013 from a toxic prescription drug mix. The 61-year-old was the former wife of actor Stephen Rea.
In the tapes Price named Gerry Adams as the IRA’s “officer commanding in Belfast”, a claim he denied.
The documentary has come in for harsh criticism from Mrs McConville’s family.
- I, Dolours will air on Irish television for the first time on RTE One tomorrow at 9.35pm.
