Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland

“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.” 

Before the Troubles erupted into violence, peaceful student protesters articulated an ideological and practical freedom struggle that they shared with other working-class populations across the globe. They related the marginalization of Catholics and social immobility of urban workers across religious lines to other global conflicts spurred by bigotry and industrial capitalism. Though these late-1960s-era protestors wanted to emulate Martin Luther King Jr. in their rhetoric and action, when they confronted violence, many reconsidered the efficacy of nonviolent tactics and committed themselves to an entirely opposite strategy. 

“As Dolours struggled in the water, she locked eyes with one attacker, a man with a club, and for the rest of her life she would return to that moment, the way his eyes were glazed with hate. She looked into those eyes and saw nothing.” 

Dolours Price identified the ambush at Berntollet Bridge as a catalyzing event in her evolution as a political activist. Dehumanizing enemies allowed young combatants to steadily commit and justify atrocities as a natural measure in warfare. Keefe explores the psychological phenomenon of radicalization throughout the book, and Price’s recollections of her revolutionary awakening illustrate the strength of impassioned politics on young minds. Her memories also suggest that IRA violence was defensive rather than offensive: republicans necessarily turned to violent strategies only when alternatives became impossible. This framework overrides a characterization of the IRA as terrorists.

“When police or the army came to the front door of a particular flat in search of a weapon, someone would lean out the back window of the flat and pass the gun to a neighbor who was leaning out her back window in the next apartment. She would pass it to a neighbor on the other side, who would pass it to someone farther along, until the weapon had made its way to the far end of the building.” 

Residents in the Catholic stronghold of Divis Flats carried out this weapon passing in the early years of armed conflict in Belfast. These civilians were not IRA members themselves, but they supported the republican cause and aimed to aid it by concealing republican paramilitary activity. The British inadvertently drew more and more civilians into armed conflict by raiding their homes and tear gassing predominantly Catholic neighborhoods. Public support of this type eventually waned when the fighting droned on in later decades, but this type of solidarity and mobilization characterized the early years and galvanized IRA missions.

“If the image of an ‘IRA man’ in Belfast during the 1960s entailed a gin-blossomed barstool radical, a shambling has-been, full of tales about the old days, the Provisionals set out to upend this caricature. They aimed to be clean, disciplined, organized, ideological—and ruthless.” 

The Provos became such a high-profile adversary to State forces because they imagined and structured themselves as a legitimate army with a chain of command, central organization, intelligence networks, and training in combat skills. The desperate need to be the generation of IRA volunteers that successfully and fully ousted the British fueled the Provos, and individuals like Gerry Adams, for decades. Adams most acutely focused on ideology and perceived political advances that deemphasized the hard border between Northern Ireland and the Republic and increased governmental representation as small victories. Other former IRA members fell into ruin and disillusionment after the Troubles the same way their IRA predecessors did. 

“The perceived threats of sexual liberation and paramilitary chaos converged in the mythical specter of a pair of leggy, rifle-toting libertines.” 

This quotation describes the public reaction and anxieties in response to figures like Dolours and Marian Price. Fears of social change included perceived gendered consequences, like this image of lethal young women, freed from the confines of the domestic sphere to pursue revenge for their historical subordination. This image was essentially a femme fatale in a Northern Irish context. Though the image was largely invented, Dolours herself enjoyed the sense of power and glamour that came from notoriety and paramilitary involvement. 

“There was a discomfiting sense in Belfast that there was no place where you were truly secure: you would run inside to get away from a gun battle, only to run outside again for fear of a bomb.” 

This quotation captures the terror of war-torn Belfast. Insurgent and formal military violence lurked in every corner and claimed lives indiscriminately. This threat was disproportionately felt by the working class in the inner city. Families like the McConvilles suffered most acutely, and Keefe therefore details their story to illustrate the full scope of the conflict in multiple dimensions of Northern Irish society.

“Dolours Price liked to joke that she never saw Hughes without a gun and she never saw Adams with one.” 

The divergent histories of Brendan Hughes and Gerry Adams represents the larger ideological break between Troubles-era Provos. Hughes had always organized and participated in violent missions that endangered his life and liberty while Adams directed the conflict from behind the front lines. Both were wanted men, and both served prison sentences, but their opposite leadership strategies ultimately created pain and suffering for Hughes and political and personal success for Adams when the IRA failed to permanently expel the British from Northern Ireland. The relationship between Hughes and Adams also serves as a proxy for understanding the larger fall-out in Irish republicanism in the 1980s: politicians separated themselves from IRA violence and avoided punishment that paramilitary soldiers could not. 

“The soldiers were often just as young and inexperienced as the paramilitaries they were fighting: gangly, pimply, frightened young men who were scarcely out of their teens.” 

Youth, fright, and recklessness caused mistakes and botched missions on all sides of the conflict. Shrewd leaders could easily collect and convert fighters into double (or triple) agents. Armed combatants committed many accidental killings in their haste to respond to rumors or create a spectacle without proper planning. While the British Army brought advanced military technology to the fight in Northern Ireland, city residents often engaged in combat by throwing stones. Paramilitaries managed to make homemade bombs and smuggle in Armalite rifles, both of which proved to be catastrophically deadly tools in the hands of young, radical revolutionaries. The IRA could easily demonize British soldiers for their massacre of peaceful protestors on Bloody Sunday, and British soldiers could just as easily classify the IRA as wanton terrorists for their reckless bombings on Bloody Friday. This type of dialectic continued long after the Troubles.

“The point was to destroy property, not to murder people.” 

Even if many observers determined IRA activity to be terrorism, the IRA itself imagined their bombings to be carefully crafted economic blows to British infrastructures. Hughes, especially, insisted that the IRA never intended to harm civilians. When one accepts this claim, it becomes easier to sympathize with the IRA as freedom fighters attempting to overthrow an oppressive system. Keefe reiterates Hughes’s assertion in this quotation while introducing the story of the IRA Bloody Friday bombing raid in Belfast, which, regardless of intention, killed nine people and injured an additional 130. We continually see IRA plans go awry and hurt or kill civilians. 

“The act of disappearing someone, which the International Criminal Court would eventually classify as a crime against humanity, is so pernicious, in part, because it can leave the loved ones of the victim in a purgatory of uncertainty.” 

Keefe steadily traces the story of the McConville family to communicate this exact point: the unknown can create as much suffering as more visible forms of brutality. Without knowledge, there can be no understanding, acceptance, or healing. The characters that suffer for the longest in the book are the ones that cannot comprehend their pasts. The plight of the McConvilles and other families that lost members to unknown fates at the hand of the IRA garnered public support and pressured the State into a rare attempt at reconciliation with a search for information and disappeared bodies.

“It was a case 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.” 

The IRA articulated their struggle in a larger context of British imperialism and oppression, but Northern Ireland, not England, remained the battlefield for almost all of the Troubles. When Dolours Price and others reflected on this reality, they strategized to bring the war to London with the 1973 car bombing mission. 

“Even at the height of the Troubles, it could occasionally seem, in the leafier suburbs, that sectarian strife and paramilitary gun battles were chiefly a working-class phenomenon, one that seldom touched the area’s more stable, well-heeled precincts.” 

Despite the widespread devastation of the Troubles, suffering disproportionately affected the working class (which is usual in localized warfare). Emphasizing class in this quotation and throughout the book proves that religious divides alone did not determine the character of the conflict. There were larger forces at work that illustrated troubled intersections of religion, class, and nationality.

“If the British had employed hunger as a weapon during the famine, it would now be turned around and used against them.” 

The hunger strikes carried out by over a dozen republican prisoners during the Troubles became some of the era’s most iconic and influential moments. Public support for strikers tarnished the positive public image that the British tried to maintain throughout the conflict. Hunger was a particularly salient and symbolic political device because it had a long and influential history in Ireland. The Irish suffered mass starvation in the Great Famine of the 1840s, while the English exported desperately needed Irish crops. Hunger striking in prison was voluntary but bore huge potential for public sympathy and pro-republican mobilization.

“It was important to fight the long war, but also to recognize that the end of the conflict would likely result not merely from a military triumph, but from some variety of political settlement.” 

This quotation reflects the ideological shift that Gerry Adams underwent while interned in Long Kesh prison in the mid-1970s. Whereas the IRA had focused entirely on armed resistance and pursued military victory, Adams believed that these tactics could no longer sustain the independence struggle. He became increasingly involved with the political party Sinn Féin, eventually disowning the IRA altogether and serving for decades as party president. Not all republicans agreed with this emphasis on politics, and Adams became an extremely divisive figure within and beyond his old IRA community.

“For years afterwards, Price would weep when she thought of that moment, in which Bobby Sands perished and she was set free.” 

Margaret Thatcher allowed the release of Dolours Price as she approached death from anorexia in prison, but the Prime Minister did not show this same sympathy to the IRA men who died on hunger strike in Long Kesh. Both Price and Sands garnered massive media attention in their respective hunger strikes and prison sentences, but they did not both live beyond their protests. The contrasting outcomes invite questions about the role of gender in the treatment of inmates. Commentators stressed female fragility when they wrote of the demise of Dolours Price. Perhaps this element of gendered concern was more powerful than whatever support IRA propagandists and journalists could create for Sands and his fellow male inmates.

“It occurred to Hughes, when he beheld the meager circumstances in which Twomey would spend his final years, that there wasn’t much of a pension plan for the movement.” 

Brendan Hughes had this realization after his release from prison. He visited an older IRA chief of staff who had spent his entire adulthood working for the organization, only to face poverty and loneliness at his dismissal. Hughes worried that the same fate would befall him now that Adams had taken Irish republicanism in a new, nonviolent direction. To some extent, Hughes’s fears came true several decades later. He certainly suffered and struggled in his late life.

“In their effort to bring about peace, the negotiators had focused on the future rather than the past.” 

The Good Friday Agreement anticipated a new century free from armed conflict and bolstered a public commitment to peace, but it did not meaningfully address the lingering trauma that the Troubles created across Northern Ireland. While a prospect of peace may have increased public morale, a failure to reconcile the past left a wide array of victimized families in pain and without closure. It fell to these families to pursue their own justice and place enough pressure on State entities to create reconciliatory initiatives.

“To the small cohort who knew about the Belfast Project, the penumbra of silence and innuendo that still hung over Northern Ireland only added urgency to the need to establish a space in which people could talk candidly about their experiences.” 

The Belfast Project proved to be cathartic to former paramilitary troops that participated for the precise reason that the project’s administrators anticipated: people wanted to talk openly about their illegal missions and reconcile their enduring emotions about the larger conflict. They could not do this publicly because they would face prosecution. The Belfast Project’s managers, however, ultimately acted with too much urgency and not enough careful planning. Without formalizing the secrecy clause in their contracts with lawyers’ assistance, they made promises they could not keep to interviewees who spoke candidly without guaranteed protection.

“The lives he had taken, the young volunteers he had sent to die: his understanding of those sacrifices had always been that they would ultimately be justified by the emergence of a united Ireland.” 

This quotation captures the disillusionment that Brendan Hughes (and others) felt when Sinn Féin’s political strategies overwrote the IRA paramilitary struggle that Hughes had helped orchestrate. The failure to secure a united Ireland by force meant not only a lost war but also a major personal identity crisis. Without the redemption of victory, Hughes had to imagine himself as a murderer. 

“But the truth was that, from the beginning, the authorities perceived the Provos as the main enemy, where their energies should be focused, and regarded loyalist terror gangs as a sideshow—if not an unofficial state auxiliary.”

British authorities attempted to maintain a public image of neutrality and hone an image of peacekeeping, but in truth, they escalated the conflict. When the Provos accused British forces of bias, commentators dismissed the accusations as anti-British propaganda. After the cease-fire, even subsequent British Prime Ministers admitted to rampant collusion and anti-republican bias. This prejudice retained importance in the post-war period, when state authorities narrated the history of the Troubles and carried out legal investigations to identify and punish former insurgents.  

“In the midst of tumult and tragedy, nobody is consulting the calendar. And memory is a strange thing.” 

Keefe relays this point when discussing the contradictory accounts that the McConville children and other sources offered about the timeline of Jean’s detention and abduction. He stresses that memory is faulty for many reasons. In one sense, people cannot chronicle and document basic facts like names and dates in their minds like they can on paper. Selective memory can also be a coping mechanism for understanding and accepting troubling events. Both of these realities could have influenced the chain of events that the McConvilles recalled from the most disturbing period of their lives.

“She was in her late fifties, with grown daughters and arthritis, but she was not yet ready to put down the gun.” 

Keefe detailed the disenchantment and personal declines of Dolours Price and Brendan Hughes, but in this quotation, he contrasts their trajectory’s with Marian’s. She never abandoned violent means in pursuit of a united Ireland. This image of Marian makes Keefe’s eventual insistence that Marian ruthlessly killed Jean McConville more believable.

“In some other political party, in some other place, the arrest of a politician in a cold-case investigation involving the notorious murder and secret burial of a widowed mother of ten would more than likely mean the swift end of a political career. But Gerry Adams was a special case.” 

Although Hughes and Price accused Adams of direct involvement in the McConville murder, and although authorities questioned him, he walked free and resumed his career. Sinn Féin had successfully built a monopoly on truth and policed dissent. Keefe often stresses the unique abilities of Adams, both crediting him with brokering peace and questioning his denial of any and all responsibility in traumatizing people like the McConvilles.