They reminded her, she liked to say, of ‘a pussycat’s paws’. Bridie wore dark glasses, and Dolours once watched a tear descend from behind the glass and creep down her withered cheek. And Dolours wondered: How can you cry if you have no eyes?
On the cold, clear morning of 1 January 1969, a band of student protesters assembled outside City Hall in Donegall Square, in the centre of Belfast. Their plan was to walk from Belfast to the walled city of Derry, some seventy miles away, a march that would take them several days. They were protesting systemic discrimination against Catholics in Northern Ireland. Partition had created a perverse situation in which two religious communities, which for centuries had felt a degree of tension, each came to feel like an embattled minority: Protestants, who formed a majority of the population in Northern Ireland but a minority on the island as a whole, feared being subsumed by Catholic Ireland; Catholics, who represented a majority on the island but a minority in Northern Ireland, felt that they were discriminated against in the six counties.
Northern Ireland was home to a million Protestants and half a million Catholics, and it was true that the Catholics faced extraordinary discrimination: often excluded from good jobs and housing, they were also denied the kind of political power that might enable them to better their conditions. Northern Ireland had its own devolved political system, based at Stormont, on the outskirts of Belfast. For half a century, no Catholic had ever held executive office.
Excluded from the shipbuilding industry and other attractive professions, Catholics often simply left, emigrating to England or America or Australia, in search of work they couldn’t find at home. The Catholic birth rate in Northern Ireland was approximately double the Protestant birth rate – yet during the three decades prior to the march on Derry, the Catholic population had remained virtually static, because so many people had no choice but to leave.
Perceiving, in Northern Ireland, a caste system akin to the racial discrimination in the United States, the young marchers had chosen to model themselves explicitly on the American civil rights movement. They had studied the 1965 march by Dr Martin Luther King and other civil rights leaders from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama. As they trudged out of Belfast, bundled in duffel coats, daisy-chained arm in arm, they held placards that read, CIVIL RIGHTS MARCH, and sang ‘We Shall Overcome’.
Dolours and Marian Price
One of the marchers was Dolours Price, who had joined the protest along with her sister Marian. At eighteen, Dolours was younger than most of the other marchers, many of whom were at university. She had grown up to be an arrestingly beautiful young woman, with dark-red hair, flashing blue-green eyes and pale lashes. Marian was a few years younger, but the sisters were inseparable. Around Andersonstown, everyone knew them as ‘Albert’s daughters’. They were so close, and so often together, that they could seem like twins. They called each other ‘Dotes’ and ‘Mar’, and had grown up sharing not just a bedroom but a bed. Dolours had a big, assertive personality and a sly irreverence, and the sisters plodded through the march absorbed in a stream of lively chatter, their angular Belfast accents bevelled, slightly, by their education at St Dominic’s, a rigorous Catholic high school for girls in West Belfast; their repartee punctuated by peals of laughter.
Dolours would later describe her own childhood as an ‘indoctrination’. But she was always fiercely independent-minded, and she was never much good at keeping her convictions to herself. As a teenager, she had started to question some of the dogma upon which she had been raised. It was the 1960s, and the nuns at St Dominic’s could do only so much to keep the cultural tides that were roiling the world at bay. Dolours liked rock ’n’ roll. Like a lot of young people in Belfast, she was also inspired by Che Guevara, the photogenic Argentine revolutionary who fought alongside Fidel Castro. That Che was shot dead by the Bolivian military (his hands severed, like Aunt Bridie’s, as proof of death) could only help to situate him in her menagerie of revolutionary heroes.
But even as tensions sharpened between Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland, Dolours had come to believe that the armed struggle her parents championed might be an outdated solution, a relic of the past. Albert Price was an emphatic conversationalist, a lively talker who would wrap his arm around your shoulder, tending his ever-present