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

Dolours slowly recovered after her release. Her freedom, however, was conditional. She was forbidden to leave Northern Ireland but endeavored to relocate to Dublin or a bigger city. She also decided that she wanted to become a writer. As she began publishing work, she reconnected with an old Belfast acquaintance, well-known stage actor Stephen Rea. He was Protestant but proudly Irish, and “sympathetic to the nationalist cause” (188). In late 1983, Price married Rea. Violating her terms of freedom, she traveled with Rea’s theater company, Field Day, throughout Ireland. Violating the terms even more brazenly, the couple moved to London by mid-1985. Thatcher resented and disapproved of Price’s behavior but turned a blind eye so as not to once again engage in public conflict with a woman of Price’s popularity and determination.

The same year she married Rea, Price canvased for Sinn Féin, fully embracing Adam’s strategy of “the Armalite and the ballot box” as the best strategy for independence (193). Adams entered the race himself and won a seat in British Parliament, representing West Belfast. Adams was not acting as the covert military expert anymore. He had “trimmed his hair and gradually replaced the casual jumpers of his guerilla days with a wardrobe of corduroy and tweed” (193), physically reflecting his shift in self-image and intention.

The timeline stretches to the late 1980s in this chapter. Continued paramilitary violence on all sides claimed casualties. At a triple funeral service for IRA bombers killed abroad in 1988, a loyalist paramilitary soldier from the Ulster Defence Association threw grenades and open-fired into the enormous crowd of mourners “hoping to kill Gerry Adams and other top republicans” (197). Though republican leaders survived, the attack killed three and injured more than 60 mourners.

This tragedy heightened tensions. Misreading their behavior, a group of mourners beat and murdered two British corporals at the funeral precession of one of the recently killed mourners.

Keefe relays these episodes from the perspective of Father Alec Reid, a Catholic priest in Belfast, who, for the duration of the Troubles, maintained personal relationships with some top IRA men, including Gerry Adams and Brendan Hughes. Reid was not on the republican or loyalist side, per se, but felt a duty to intervene on behalf of the poor and suffering. Because of these relationships and commitments, Reid began acting as a messenger and diplomat in a plot to bring about an end to IRA violence. Specifically, he passed along correspondence between Adams, head of Sinn Féin, and John Hume, head of the nonviolent nationalist party, the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP). Hume was a moderate with a vocal history of condemning IRA tactics, but the two began to meet clandestinely and work towards a peace deal.

Keefe explains some contradictions surrounding Adams’s political career. He denied ever having been a member in the IRA, which was, as Keefe notes, “a laughable assertion” (204). He had to rewrite his persona and separate himself from arrestable offenses in order to operate as a successful politician and respected public intellectual. He carefully crafted statements that lamented violence but blamed the British for its necessity. With his questionable past and continued surge to bring Irish independence, Adams remained a controversial figure and the target of assassination attempts from loyalist paramilitaries. 

Brendan Hughes left Long Kesh in 1986. His newfound freedom was bewildering after a dozen years in prison. He occupied a unique position as a celebrated soldier who never strayed from the violent pursuit for independence and as a close friend of Adams, the converted politician. After initially rejoining the IRA upon his release, he started assisting in political activity, traveling to the United States to collect donations from zealous Irish Americans.

Politics were not a good fit for Hughes. He was disenchanted with the change of tide in his republican circle and imagined his own inevitable passage from notoriety to anonymity like older IRA volunteers.

Dolours Price, meanwhile, was “getting a chance at something like a normal life” (212). She gave birth to two sons in 1989 and 1990. Her husband continued to act, and steadily deflected questions about his wife’s politics. In his work, he projected the notion that the Troubles were a tragedy of British creation, in which desperate revolutionaries went too far to overthrow the colonizers.  

The IRA apparently agreed; they announced a cease-fire in August 1994. This maneuver legitimatized Sinn Féin in the eyes of the British but left IRA volunteers of previous decades confused about the sacrifices they had made to pursue a solution through violence. Some disapproved of the declaration, as the British remained in control without signs of withdrawing from Northern Ireland.

With the threat of sudden death drastically reduced, family members of disappeared victims spoke out about their suffering and demanded information and closure about their lost loved ones. The McConvilles were one of a handful of families torn apart by unexplained disappearances. We learn that in adulthood, the siblings struggled to find work, overcome addiction, and otherwise stay out of trouble.

The chapter ends with families putting enough pressure on Sinn Féin to elicit a “carefully worded” statement from Adams asking, “anyone who has any information about the whereabouts of these missing people to contact the families” (218).