Hundreds attend funeral of IRA bomber

THE woman convicted of the IRA bombing of London's Old Bailey court in 1973 has been laid to rest with her actor ex-husband helping to carry her coffin.

HUNDREDS of Irish republicans have attended the funeral in Belfast of Dolours Price, convicted of the infamous IRA bombing of London's Old Bailey court in 1973.

Price's ex-husband, the actor Stephen Rea, helped carry her coffin, draped in the Irish flag, through pouring rain in the Catholic Belfast neighbourhood of Andersontown.

The 61-year-old died of a suspected drug overdose on Wednesday last week at her home in the Republic of Ireland.

Price, who was originally from Belfast but was living in Dublin, spent seven years in prison in the 1970s for the attack on England's central criminal court by republicans opposed to British rule in Northern Ireland.

Some 200 people were injured in the car bombing.

On Monday, hundreds of supporters gathered in the rain for the funeral service, as black flags hung from lampposts.

"She was clever and witty, full of fun and held people enthralled by her conversation," Father Raymond Murray told republicans gathered at St Agnes Church.

Price was part of an IRA (Irish Republican Army) unit that bombed a number of buildings in London during the 1970s.

In media interviews in her later years she accused Gerry Adams, leader of the republican Sinn Fein party, which shares power in Northern Ireland's devolved government, of being a high-level IRA commander in the 1970s.

Adams has repeatedly denied that he was ever an IRA member.

Price sparked a transatlantic legal battle after she and other high-profile IRA members gave accounts of their past to Boston College in the United States as part of an oral history project on the Northern Ireland conflict.

Boston College secured the interviews with members of both republican and pro-British paramilitaries on condition that their contents be kept secret until each interviewee's death.

But Northern Irish police have been trying to obtain the tapes since 2011 in a bid to ascertain whether they contain evidence of unsolved crimes, particularly the murder of Belfast mother-of-10 Jean McConville, in 1972.

Price admitted in media interviews that she had driven McConville, one of dozens of "disappeared" people murdered by republican militants during Northern Ireland's three decades of sectarian violence, across the border to her death.