study in strategic insanity: the Irish were blowing up their own people in a misguided attempt to hurt the English, and the English hardly even noticed. It bothered Price. ‘This is half their war,’ she would say to Wee Pat McClure, the head of the Unknowns, as they sat around call houses between operations. ‘Only half of it is our war. The other half is their war, and some of it should be fought on their territory.’ She became convinced that ‘a short, sharp shock – an incursion into the heart of the Empire – would be more effective than twenty car bombs in any part of the North of Ireland’.
After making the case to Seán Mac Stíofáin, who approved of the idea, Price worked with McClure and Gerry Adams on an initial plan, to firebomb London. The firebombs were made and smuggled into London, and the idea was that a team of girls would fly over and deposit them in department stores on Oxford Street. But before they could put the bombs in place, they discovered that the acid in the devices had leaked, ruining them. So Price, who was already in London, abandoned the mission and walked down to the banks of the Thames, where she gently slid each faulty bomb into the river.
When firebombs didn’t work, they resolved to plant car bombs instead. The idea took shape within the Belfast Brigade. When it came time to recruit a team for the mission, volunteers from different units assembled at a call house in the Lower Falls. Gerry Adams explained that they were planning a very dangerous job. Any volunteers who signed up for it would have to be away from home for a while. As Adams spoke, Price sat perched on the arm of his chair. In the interests of operational security, Adams was vague about the mission when he spoke to this larger group, offering few details, but he stressed that anyone who participated must be prepared to face the full wrath of the state. ‘This could be a hanging job,’ he said. ‘If anyone doesn’t want to go, they should up and leave now.’ He instructed them to exit through the back door, at ten-minute intervals, so as not to attract attention.
Price thought Adams was being melodramatic. She suspected he might have picked up that flourish about ten-minute intervals from a book about Michael Collins. But, sure enough, people started to get up and walk out. ‘Don’t knock me down in the rush, lads,’ Price said drily.
When this small exodus had concluded, about ten people remained: there was Price’s friend and fellow Unknown Hugh Feeney. He was erudite, bespectacled, in his early twenties. Feeney would be the quartermaster, in charge of all the money for the operation; he was armed with a thick roll of five-pound notes. There was Gerry Kelly, a handsome young man from the Lower Falls, whom Price was meeting for the first time. Kelly had been on the run, after escaping from prison, where he was serving a sentence for bank robbery. Price thought he was a grand lad. And there was Marian, of course. There was always Marian.
They were all very young. Kids, really. The oldest member of the crew, William Armstrong, a window cleaner with slicked-back hair, was twenty-nine. The youngest member was Roisin McNearney, a wide-eyed eighteen-year-old. She had been working as a typist before she joined the Provos six months earlier. She still lived with her parents.
As head of the Unknowns, Wee Pat wanted smart people running the operation. So he selected Dolours to take the lead. She was appointed, in her own words, ‘the OC of the whole shebang’. Reporting to her would be two lieutenants – Hugh Feeney and Marian Price. None of the recruits had any experience serving behind enemy lines, so Wee Pat arranged for them to go across the border for intensive training with explosives and timers.
As Aunt Bridie could testify, bomb making in the IRA was a hazardously inexact science. Brendan Hughes would tell stories about his great-grandfather, who, during the War of Independence, was trying to throw a grenade at an armoured car when it detonated and blew his arm off. Bomb making had improved dramatically in recent years, because the Provos had taken every opportunity to practise. It was not that IRA volunteers no longer blew themselves up with their own bombs, which they continued to do. Rather, as one writer observed, these mishaps came to function as ‘a gruesome