Dolours Price

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Dolours Price is the ex-wife of actor Stephen Rea, as well as a former Volunteer within the Irish Republican Army (IRA). She is also a well-known critic of Gerry Adams and the current leadership of Sinn Féin.

Dolours Price and her sister, Marian Price, are the children of Albert Price, a prominent Irish Republican, from Belfast. Dolours Price served seven years of a life sentence for her part in an IRA car bombing outside the Old Bailey in 1973. Dolours and Marian Price, along with Gerry Kelly and Hugh Feeney, immediately went on hunger strike in a campaign to be repatriated to a prison in Northern Ireland. The hunger strike lasted over 200 days, because the hunger strikers were force-fed by prison authorities.^[1] The force-feeding ended with the death of another hunger striker, Michael Gaughan, in June 1974. The Price sisters, Hugh Feeney, and Gerry Kelly were repatriated to Irish prisons in 1975. This was a benefit of negotiations that occurred during a British-IRA truce ^[2].

In 1980 Dolours received the Royal Prerogative of Mercy and was freed on humanitarian grounds suffering from anorexia nervosa in 1981. She married Stephen Rea after her release, who was hired to speak the words of Gerry Adams when Sinn Féin was under a broadcasting ban. Dolours Price, along with her sister Marian, remains active politically. For example, she regularly contributes to the on-line journal The Blanket,[1] which is edited by Anthony McIntyre and his wife, Carrie Twomey. McIntyre is a former IRA blanketman who spent almost two decades in prison.