I, Dolours.
There were a number of new Irish features released this summer. Fortunately, one of them at least has genuine substance. I, Dolours is based entirely on an interview that life-long Irish Republican Dolours Price gave to veteran journalist Ed Moloney.
Moloney is the one time Northern Editor of The Irish Times and the Sunday Tribune, and the author of a number of highly acclaimed books on the troubles. So when Price approached him in 2010 about conducting a lengthy interview with her, he was happy to oblige on one condition. That they only publish the resulting interview after she had passed away.
Ed Moloney’s A Secret History of the IRA.
When subsequently she died of a drug overdose, not long after in 2013, Moloney teamed up with film maker Maurice Sweeney to begin the process of what would eventually become this film.
The decision to tell her story entirely from her perspective is an inspired one. It frees them up from any need for objectivity or balance, and what they produce instead is a history of the troubles from the inside out.
So instead of trying to produce an objective history that seeks to establish exactly what happened and who was responsible, we follow the chain of events that helps explain why it is that a normal, highly intelligent, and extremely articulate woman can end up leading a life, and committing acts that, from the outside looking in, appear to be indefensible and inexplicable.
Born into a life of poverty and prejudice, her staunchly Republican Belfast home was haunted by the presence of her mother’s sister, who had lost her hands and her eyes in a botched IRA bombing, and who lived upstairs in perpetual pain and discomfort. Surprisingly, given the atmosphere at home, Price begins by marching for peace in defiance of her heritage. But when she is amongst those who are attacked in the infamous Burntollet Bridge incident, in 1969, she, like most of those with her there, becomes permanently radicalised.
Lorna Larkin as Dolours.
She then moves quickly up through the IRA ranks, and describes in detail, and with chilling detachment, her role in a number of those that the IRA had “disappeared” throughout the 1970s. The most controversial of which was Jean McConville, mother of ten and, according to Price, a British informer, and about whom Price is especially caustic. And for the rest of the film, we follow her as she moves from activist to rudderless, former paramilitary.
Just how much credence you give her version of these events will largely depend on which side of the Orange Green divide that you stand. And when we later hear just how embittered and disillusioned she becomes in the wake of the Peace process in the 1990s, it’s clear that at least some of what she has to say about the past has been warped by the prism of her prejudices. None the less, a great deal of the story she tells rings resonantly true.
Price’s former husband, Stephen Rea, carrying her coffin.
And in any case, that would be to miss the point. How reliable she is as a witness to history is not what this film sets out to explore. That atrocities were committed on all sides over the course of three decades is not disputed. What’s much more important, and much more interesting, is being given an insight as to how it is that thousands of perfectly normal, and often highly intelligent people, can end up devoting their lives to acts of apparently senseless violence. And how hard they find it to cope, once their raison d’être has been erased.
Condemnation is easy and ultimately hollow. Illuminating why and how is the only thing that can produce understanding. Which is what makes this film so important. And so fascinating.
You can see the trailer to I, Dolours here.
Sign up for a subscription right or below, and I shall keep you posted every month on All the very best and worst in film, television and music!