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

State armed forces and paramilitary volunteers alike committed illegal acts of violence in the name of their respective causes during the Troubles. Official reports found that the British military and the RUC colluded with, and covered for, illegal loyalist paramilitaries and even perhaps some of the most violent IRA informants. Keefe maintains that formal and paramilitary organizations probably never meant to randomly kill civilians for spectacle. Still, missions like public bombings come with a great risk of collateral damage, and IRA plans often seemed shoddy at best. Amidst the brutality that Dolours Price and other Provos deemed contrary to human nature, those involved often remained steadfast in the ideology that the ends would justify the means, or in other words, that their behavior would be vindicated when the conflict ended in their favor. For many former IRA volunteers, the fact that the British maintained a presence and meaningful political control in Northern Ireland at the end of the Troubles represented a failure that rendered the entire armed strategy tragically wasteful and their personal actions irredeemable. This notion haunted people like Dolours Price and Brendan Hughes for the rest of their lives. Keefe presents their late-life struggles as sympathetic, despite the histories of violence in their turbulent youths.

British authorities in the 21st century admitted to collusion and alluded to atrocities, but State authorities failed to ever establish procedures for reconciliation and accountability. Paramilitary participation remained illegal and immunity for former combatants was exceptionally rare, reserved only for cases related to disappeared victims’ remains. Keefe stresses that the Good Friday Agreement was strictly forward-looking, and military and political leaders in Northern Ireland and England could use this framework to skirt meaningful discussions about or apologies for what had happened over thirty years of warfare. Civilian commentators still condemned the wartime actions of police forces, soldiers, and paramilitaries alike, but these criticisms rarely amounted to any real accountability. The Troubles had ended in stalemate and compromise, so no side alone could claim victory, emerge dominant, and establish a retrospective narrative of moral justification through the strife. As a result, questions about acts of war and their reasonable ramifications remained open and public, but unsolved.

A related question is about self, rather than civilian, sacrifice. Many activists died for their cause. Any enlistee in a paramilitary assumed great risk in undertaking armed and covert missions against sworn enemies, but self-sacrifice in the form of hunger striking was more intentional and direct. The gamble one made was not with the luck and timing of avoiding explosions or gunfire, but instead with state officials occupying awkward and precarious, though not life-or-death immediate circumstances. Ultimately, Margaret Thatcher and the British State let 10 men starve to death in quick succession rather than meet their conditions for an end to the hunger strike. They were, after all, criminals in the eyes of the British, and therefore were not in a respectable position to negotiate.

The general public, however, felt sympathy for the strikers. The death of Bobby Sands and the other hunger strikers bolstered republican support in a quantifiable way. Common people mobilized to symbolically elect Sands to Parliament. This base of voters largely remained Sinn Féin voters when Adams ran for office. In this way, members’ deaths strengthened IRA platforms. At the end of the conflict, however, republicanism in Northern Ireland accepted conditions contrary to the articulated values that the hunger strikers had died for. It is possible to interpret the change of tide as abandoning and nullifying these self-sacrifices.

Though Brendan Hughes and Dolours Price did not die from their hunger strikes, they sacrificed their healthy, youthful bodies, mental health, and freedom for Irish unification. They lived long enough to reflect on the betrayal of Adams and the IRA within Sinn Féin, who enjoyed productive political careers as other former IRA volunteers suffered trauma and addiction.