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

by Patrick Radden Keefe

A couple of the men were not wearing masks, and Michael McConville realised, to his horror, that the people taking his mother away were not strangers. They were his neighbours.

Albert and Chrissie Price shared a fierce commitment to the cause of Irish republicanism: the belief that for hundreds of years the British had been an occupying force on the island of Ireland – and that the Irish had a duty to expel them by any means necessary.

He liked to reminisce about beloved comrades whom the British had hanged, and Dolours grew up thinking that this was the most natural thing in the world: that every child had parents who had friends who’d been hanged.

Or to the Protestant emigrants from Scotland and the North of England who filtered into Ireland over the course of the seventeenth century and established a plantation system in which the Gaelic-speaking natives became tenants and vassals on land that had previously been their own.

Like other staunch republicans, the Price family did not refer to the place where they happened to reside as ‘Northern Ireland’. Instead it was ‘the North of Ireland’. In the fraught local vernacular, even proper nouns could be political.

If the Price family felt pity for her, it was secondary to a sense of admiration for her willingness to offer up everything for an ideal. Bridie came home from the hospital to a tiny house with an outside toilet, no social worker, no pension – just a life of blindness. Yet she never expressed any regret for having made such a sacrifice in the name of a united Ireland.

Protestants, who formed a majority of the population in Northern Ireland but a minority on the island as a whole, feared being subsumed by Catholic Ireland; Catholics, who represented a majority on the island but a minority in Northern Ireland, felt that they were discriminated against in the six counties.

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.

But even as tensions sharpened between Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland, Dolours had come to believe that the armed struggle her parents championed might be an outdated solution, a relic of the past.

If only they could be made to see that life would be better in a united – and socialist – Ireland, the discord that had dogged the two communities for centuries might finally dissipate.

Many people on the English ‘mainland’ seemed only faintly aware of this restive province off the coast of Scotland; others would be happy to let Northern Ireland go.

Northern Ireland was not exactly a bastion of free expression. Due to fears of a Catholic uprising, a draconian law, the Special Powers Act, which dated to the era of partition, had created what amounted to a permanent state of emergency: the government could ban meetings and certain types of speech, and could search and arrest people without warrants and imprison them indefinitely without trial.

The Vatican and the Republic of Ireland were secretly in league, engineering a sinister plot to overthrow the Northern Irish state, he argued. As Catholics steadily accrued power and numbers, they would grow into ‘a tiger ready to tear her prey to pieces’.

In fact, he was so unsympathetic, so naked in his bigotry, that some republicans came to feel that on balance, he might be good for their movement. ‘Why would we kill Paisley?’ Dolours Price’s mother, Chrissie, had been known to say. ‘He’s our greatest asset.’

There were dozens of RUC officers there that day, but most of them had done little to intervene. It would later be alleged that the reason the attackers wore white armbands was so that their friends in the police could distinguish them from the protesters. In fact, many of Major Bunting’s men, the very men doing the beating, were members of the police auxiliary, the B-Specials.

When Jean and Arthur fell in love, the fact that they came from different sides of the religious divide did not go unnoticed by their families. Sectarian tensions were less pronounced during the 1950s than they had been in the past or would become again, but even so, ‘mixed’ relationships were rare.

For years, Ian Paisley had been exhorting his Protestant brethren to seek out and expel Catholics who lived among them.

The RUC and the B-Specials responded to this unrest, but the brunt of their authority was felt by Catholics, who complained that the police would simply stand by while the loyalists committed crimes.

As the rioting spread, ordinary families all across Belfast boarded up their doors and windows, as if for an approaching hurricane. They would move their old furniture away from the front room so there was less to burn, in the event that any incendiary material came crashing through the window. Then they would huddle in the back kitchen, grandparents clasping their rosaries, and wait for the chaos to pass.

Jean and Arthur were concerned that a timber yard behind the house might be torched and the fire could spread. So the family moved again, to a Catholic school that had been converted into a temporary shelter. They slept in a classroom on the floor.

For a utopian architectural project, Divis had yielded dystopian results, becoming what one writer would later describe as a ‘slum in the sky’.

Initially they were greeted warmly by Catholics, who welcomed the soldiers as if they were the Allied troops who’d liberated Paris. The Catholic population had been so furious at the RUC and the B-Specials, whom they regarded as sectarian authorities, that when the army (which appeared neutral by comparison) showed up, it seemed to hold the promise of greater security. In West Belfast, Catholic mothers ventured up to the army’s sandbagged posts and offered the soldiers cups of tea.

The troops had scarcely arrived before they began to lose the goodwill of the community. The young soldiers did not understand the complicated ethnic geography of Belfast. They soon came to be seen not as a neutral referee in the conflict, but rather as an occupying force – a heavily armed ally of the B-Specials and the RUC.

With a population that was almost entirely Catholic, Divis Flats became a stronghold for armed resistance.

It was at Divis Flats that the first child to die in the Troubles lost his life.

At night, when gun battles broke out, Arthur bellowed, ‘Down on the floor!’ and the children would drag their mattresses to the centre of the flat and sleep there, huddled in the middle of the room. Sometimes it felt as if they spent more nights on the floor than in their beds. Lying awake, staring at the ceiling, Michael would listen to the sound of bullets ricocheting off the concrete outside. It was a mad life. But as the anarchy persisted from one month to the next, it became the only life he knew.

It may have been the tear gas, as much as anything, that brought West Belfast together in virulent opposition.

One correspondent who reported on the siege described the gas as a kind of binding agent, a substance that could ‘weld a crowd together in common sympathy and common hatred for the men who gassed them’.

During the riots of 1969, barricades went up around the neighbourhoods, formalising the sectarian geography. These would eventually be replaced by so-called peace walls, towering barriers that separated one community from another.

When the Troubles ignited, the IRA was practically defunct. The group had engaged in a failed campaign along the border during the 1950s and early ’60s, but the effort drew little support from the community. By the late sixties, some members of the IRA’s leadership in Dublin had begun to question the utility of the gun in Irish politics, and to adopt a more avowedly Marxist philosophy, which advocated peaceful resistance through politics.

There was still some residual expertise in how to manufacture crude explosives, but the IRA had developed a reputation as an outfit whose bombers had a tendency to blow themselves up more often than their targets.

Traditionally, the Catholic minority in Northern Ireland had turned to the IRA for protection during periods of sectarian strife. But when the clashes started in 1969, the organisation could do little to stop jeering loyalists from burning Catholic families out of their homes. In the aftermath of these purges, some people began to suggest that what IRA really stood for was ‘I Ran Away’.

There was a faction in Belfast that wanted to take a more aggressive stand – to rekindle the IRA’s identity...

By early 1970, a breakaway organisation had formed. Known as the Provisional IRA, they were explicitly geared to armed resistance. The old IRA became known as the Official IRA.

how to rig up devices and handle incendiary material. Local residents resented incursions by the authorities, and the presence of armed and uniformed representatives of the British crown only reinforced the impression that Belfast had become an occupied city.

It was an invigorating solidarity. As the violence intensified, grandiose funerals became routine, with rousing graveside orations and caskets draped in tricolour flags.

Since the moment she locked eyes with the loyalist who beat her at Burntollet Bridge, Dolours had concluded that her fantasy of peaceful resistance had been naïve. I’m never going to convert these people, she thought.

But even if your parents were ardent supporters of the IRA, there were reasons not to tell them that you had joined. If the police or the army broke down the door to interrogate them, the less they knew, the better.

special meeting of the Provisionals’ Army Council was convened, and it was determined that for the first time in history, women could join the organisation as full members.

They called themselves ‘volunteers’, a name that harked back to the doomed heroes of the Easter Rising and captured the sense that patriotism is a transaction in which the patriot must be prepared to pay dearly. As a volunteer, you stood ready to sacrifice everything – even your own life – in service to the cause. This pact tended to inculcate, among the revolutionaries, an intoxicating sense of camaraderie and mission, a bond that could seem indestructible.

There were some in the more starchy and traditional Cumann na mBan to whom the presence of women in such operational roles – women who might deploy their own sexuality as a weapon – was threatening, even mildly scandalous. Some Cumann veterans referred to these frontline IRA women as ‘Army girls’, and insinuated that they were promiscuous.

As a fund-raising initiative, the Provos took to robbing banks. Lots of banks. One day in the summer of 1972, three fresh-faced nuns walked into a branch of the Allied Irish Bank in Belfast just as it was about to close. The nuns reached under their habits and came out with guns – then proceeded to hold up the place. It was the Price sisters,

As if to underline the futility of nonviolent resistance, when Eamonn McCann and a huge mass of peaceful protesters assembled in Derry one chilly Sunday afternoon in January 1972, British paratroopers opened fire on the crowd, killing thirteen men and wounding fifteen others. The soldiers subsequently claimed that they had come under fire and that they only shot protesters who were carrying weapons. Neither of these assertions turned out to be true.

In an environment where many married men were being locked up for long stretches, leaving their wives alone, and where cocky young British soldiers were patrolling the neighbourhoods, deep-seated fears of infidelity, both marital and ideological, took hold.

To Hughes, it seemed like a grand adventure. He thought of going out and getting into gunfights the way other people thought about getting up and going to the office.

Some of the residents were intimidated by the Provos and felt they had little choice but to cooperate, while others assisted out of an unforced sense of solidarity.

In this manner, Hughes used a ship named after the British queen to smuggle weapons to the IRA. When the guns arrived, fresh graffiti on the walls of West Belfast heralded a game change: GOD MADE THE CATHOLICS, BUT THE ARMALITE MADE THEM EQUAL.

Kevin never gave any specific rationale for the admonition, apart from suggesting, vaguely, that a tattoo was an ‘identifiable mark’. But years later, Brendan would reflect on that moment, wondering whether his father might have had some premonition about the road that he would end up taking.

In fighting an insurgency, Kitson realised, quality intelligence is essential, and one way to obtain that intelligence is to inveigle some members of the insurgency to switch sides.

In this book, Kitson advanced an argument that would become a cornerstone of later counter-insurgency thinking: it is important not merely to put down an uprising but to win the hearts and minds of the local population. The book also focused heavily on the gathering of intelligence. It made a point so obvious that it almost went without saying: if you want to defeat an insurgency, it helps to know who the insurgents are.