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

by Patrick Radden Keefe

What would they have to achieve before they could all go home? The army that deployed in the Troubles was not the army that had fought the Nazis. It was an organisation that had come of age fighting small wars of colonial disentanglement. But what was Northern Ireland? Was it part of the United Kingdom? Or was it one of those restive colonies?

soldiers complained that in West Belfast, a ‘wall of silence’ protected the IRA. Informers were known as ‘touts’, and for centuries they had been reviled in Irish culture as the basest species of traitor. So there was a profound social stigma against cooperating with the British.

Under the Special Powers Act, it was legal to hold someone indefinitely without trial, and internment had been used periodically in Northern Ireland. But not on this scale. Of the nearly 350 suspects arrested that day, not a single one was a loyalist, though there were plenty of loyalist paramilitaries engaged in terrorism at the time. This disparity in treatment only compounded the impression, in the minds of many Catholics, that the army was simply another instrument of sectarian oppression.

The army had arrested a bunch of people it wasn’t looking for while failing to arrest most of the people it was looking for, all while further embittering a Catholic population that was highly embittered to begin with. An official study by the British Ministry of Defence later conceded that internment had been ‘a major mistake’. In the words of one British officer who took part in the sweep, ‘It was lunacy.’

After the sweep, the IRA held a press conference to announce, with smug satisfaction, that the massive operation had succeeded in netting hardly any Provos at all.

For days, the prisoners were deprived of food, water and sleep and made to stand for long periods in stress positions, unable to see anything because of the hoods over their heads. They were also subjected to piercing, high-pitched noises.

in a controversial 1978 decision, the European Court of Human Rights held that the techniques, while ‘inhuman and degrading’, did not amount to torture. (In the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, when the American administration of George W. Bush was fashioning its own ‘enhanced interrogation’ techniques, officials relied explicitly on this decision to justify the use of torture.)

But the unit was doing more than gathering intelligence. It was assassinating people, too. Men in plain clothes would drive around in an unmarked Ford Cortina, with a Sterling sub-machine gun hidden under the seat.

These hit squads deliberately carried particular makes of weapons that were used by the paramilitaries, so that when someone was murdered, the ballistics would suggest that it was the IRA or loyalist killers who were responsible, rather than the army.

It was only later that Winchester came to realise how shoddy British intelligence on the Provos was at that stage, and to suspect that much of the information he had parroted was simply wrong. He eventually concluded, and acknowledged publicly, that he had been used by Kitson as a ‘mouthpiece’ for the army.

Long Kesh was an eerie place. The paramilitaries who were confined there, adamant that they were not criminals but political prisoners, called it a concentration camp. And it looked like a concentration camp: on a windswept, desolate plain, a series of corrugated steel huts housed the prisoners, amid barbed-wire fences, floodlights and sentry towers.

Mac Stíofáin was laying down his demands as if the IRA had already fought the British to a standstill.

A key element of the IRA’s strategy had been to detonate bombs in commercial districts in Northern Ireland. Because most businesses were owned by unionist or British companies, and because the government controlled the infrastructure, an attack on commercial property was regarded as a direct hit at the enemy. These operations may have been staged in civilian areas, but Hughes and his fellow rebels insisted that they were not directed at civilians. The point was to destroy property, not to murder people. Warnings were called in to the police and the media in advance of the blasts so that civilians could (in theory) vacate the area.

As a pall of smoke hung over central Belfast, one woman staggered through the rubble and spotted a strange shape on the ground. She thought it looked like something that had fallen off a meat lorry. Then she realised it was a human torso. Police officers picked through the rubble, retrieving stray body parts and placing them gingerly in plastic bags.

There is no record in the files of the Royal Ulster Constabulary of any investigation into the disappearance of Jean McConville. She was abducted at the end of the most violent year of the conflict, and this sort of incident, horrible though it was, may not have risen to such a level that the police felt the need to concern themselves.

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.

In one of his books, Kitson noted that the very best recruits were the ones with ‘a spirit of adventure’, people who ‘thought that it would be fun to be a gangster and carry a pistol’. They were ‘the easiest to handle because they were the easiest to satisfy’.

countless smaller bombing operations had claimed limbs and lives, steadily eroding support among moderate Irish nationalists for a violent campaign. Worst of all, because the toll of all this bombing was largely confined to Northern Ireland, it did not appear to be registering all that strongly with the intended target – the British.

As Aunt Bridie could testify, bomb making in the IRA was a hazardously inexact science. Brendan Hughes would tell stories about his great-grandfather, who, during the War of Independence, was trying to throw a grenade at an armoured car when it detonated and blew his arm off.

The British public may have become inured to catastrophic headlines from Northern Ireland, but a series of bombs in central London would change all that. Nor was the timing of the operation an accident. They selected the day of a referendum in Northern Ireland on whether the territory should remain part of the United Kingdom. The mission, Kelly felt, was to bring ‘the reality of colonialism’ home to England.

they had the night off. You might suppose that on the eve of a coordinated terrorist strike on a major city, the participants would devote the final hours to anxious preparation. But on account of their youth, perhaps, or the almost hallucinatory fever of their own righteousness, Price and her compatriots seemed eerily detached from the gravity and potential consequences of the mission they were about to undertake. Besides, they were in London, a city more vast and freewheeling than their own. The heart of empire it may have been, but London was also, indisputably, a fun town.

Dolours Price would blame the casualties from the blast on British authorities, for moving too slowly after the telephone warnings to locate and defuse the bombs and to alert civilians. Other members of the bombing team took the same view. This was clearly a convenient excuse, and as a moral matter it was conspicuously disingenuous. But as a factual matter, Price was not altogether wrong. The police themselves admitted, in the aftermath of the attack, that ‘human error’ in their control room had garbled the message about the Old Bailey bomb, significantly delaying their response.

When they were offered prison uniforms, some of the team accepted them. But the Price sisters and several others refused. This was a republican principle: they thought of themselves not as criminals but as captured soldiers from a legitimate army – as political prisoners. Given this distinction, they would not accept the prison scrubs of the ordinary criminal.

Detecting, in the sisters, evidence of a disturbing trend, the Daily Mirror noted that ‘the legend that women are passive, peace-loving creatures who want only to stay at home and look after children has been finally exploded in a thunder of bombs and bullets’. The tabloid drew a direct line from the Price sisters to Leila Khaled, the Palestinian hijacker, and diagnosed the violence of these women as a dangerous by-product of feminism – ‘a lethal liberation’.

He had eloquently articulated a philosophy of self-sacrifice that would help define the emerging traditions of Irish republican martyrdom. ‘It is not those who inflict the most but those who suffer the most who will conquer,’ MacSwiney declared.

The notion that two young Irishwomen might die on hunger strike in the very prison where MacSwiney met his fate had the ingredients of priceless propaganda. The sisters, who had already been the subject of widespread press coverage during the trial, now became the stars of a different sort of serialised tabloid drama, with breathless daily updates in newspapers and on the radio about their steadily deteriorating condition. They were the ‘bomb girls’, and the coverage tended to play not on the fortitude with which they continued to swear off nourishment, but on their youth and gender, their frail femininity. (Hugh Feeney and Gerry Kelly, who also continued their strike, received much less attention and were never referred to as ‘boys’.)

The brinksmanship between the Price sisters and the British was described in language that recalled not just MacSwiney, but the Great Famine of the nineteenth century, in which a million people in Ireland were allowed to die of disease and starvation, and another million or more were forced to migrate. Even as the Irish starved during the famine, ships laden with food were leaving Irish harbours – for export to the English. Many in Ireland and elsewhere had taken the view that the British bore a responsibility for the famine, one that exceeded callous neglect and began to look more like deliberate murder.

Such an outcome, she felt, would be proof that the empire never learned from its mistakes. The British had always outmanned and outspent and outgunned the Irish, but the ‘ultimate weapon’, Dolours believed, was ‘one’s own body’.

she watched in terror as a pair of hands prised open her jaws. An object was shoved roughly into her open mouth. It was a wooden bit with a hole in the centre of it. Another pair of hands produced a thin length of rubber hose, then inserted the tip through the hole in the bit and began to slide this tube down her throat. She could not catch her breath as the tube snaked past her tonsils, and she gagged, nearly suffocating. She tried to bite the tube, but the wooden contraption prevented it. Several officials held her body back, and then she felt liquid coursing down the rubber coil and into her belly.

Two days later, the prison doctors started force-feeding Marian as well. It became a gruesome ritual. Each morning at ten o’clock, the crew of doctors and nurses would arrive in their cells, tie them down, and pour the food down their throats. ‘We are learning to breathe a bit more easily when the tube is down,’ Dolours wrote in a letter.

Devlin was shocked by the sight of Dolours. Her hair, which had been a rich dark red, ‘has lost colour to the extent that it is fair, and actually white at the roots’, Devlin said. Because she had begun to struggle with her captors during the feed, biting down on the wooden bit, Dolours’s teeth had started to loosen and decay. Both sisters’ complexions had grown waxy. They shuffled when they walked.

‘They were the stuff of which Irish martyrs could be made: two young, slim, dark girls, devout yet dedicated to terrorism,’ Jenkins later recalled. He feared that the ramifications of ‘the death of these charismatic colleens’ would be incalculable. Privately, Jenkins regarded their demand for repatriation to be ‘not totally unreasonable’. But he felt that the government could not appear to be making any concessions under such duress. Terrorism was a ‘contagion’, Jenkins believed. Bending to the demands of the hunger strikers would only validate their methods and encourage others to adopt them.

Many members of the British public regarded the practice as a form of torture. According to their medical records, the Price sisters sometimes fainted during the procedure. On one occasion, when the sisters resisted the feeding, they were forcibly gagged, and a radio was turned up to cover their screams.

The sisters struggled so hard that it became difficult for the doctors to insert the tubes safely into their stomachs. They informed the doctors that they were giving them ‘the privilege of killing us’ if something went wrong. After a few of these fraught encounters, the doctors simply stopped, refusing to continue with the procedure, because it was just too dangerous. It was a clinical judgement, not a political one, that ended the force-feeding.

On 3 June, another Irish hunger striker, Michael Gaughan, died in Parkhurst Prison, on the Isle of Wight. Gaughan was also an IRA volunteer, though he had played no role in the bombing mission. He was imprisoned for robbing a bank in London, and when he went on hunger strike, Dolours Price had been annoyed. She’d been striking since November when he started in April, and she felt that Gaughan was a Johnny-come-lately, ‘getting in at the heels of my hunt’. She was watching TV when the news was announced, and when she heard the words ‘One of the IRA prisoners on hunger strike has died,’ her stomach seized and she wondered if it was Hugh Feeney or Gerry Kelly.

The orphanage was run by an order of stern nuns who were legendary for their sadism. One former resident described the facility as ‘something out of Dickens’, a bleak, pinched place where beatings and harsh punishment were routine.

A subsequent government investigation revealed that a ‘culture of physical force’ had pervaded the establishment, and both monks and lay employees would resort to violence on the merest of pretexts. Children were pummelled with fists, strapped with belts, and lashed across the knuckles with a thin wooden cane that snapped down with such ferocity it felt as if it might sever their fingertips.

The adults at Kircubbin put the children to work. Sometimes the staff would hire them out to neighbouring farms, as labour, to pick potatoes.

In the evenings, as everyone watched a programme in the darkened TV room, monks in their long robes would instruct certain children to come and sit on their laps. Sexual abuse was rampant at the home. Michael was never molested himself, but at night he would watch from under the covers as shadowy adults entered the dormitory with a torch and plucked sleeping boys from their beds.

The boys could not turn to any of the adults for help, because so many of the staff were molesting children that the behaviour was silently tolerated. All the Christian Brothers, one former resident explained, ‘were in it together’.

(The De La Salle Brothers later admitted that widespread sexual abuse took place at Kircubbin during this period. The Sisters of Nazareth, who administered Nazareth Lodge, have also acknowledged a pattern of physical abuse at that home.)

The staff liked to say that the fences were for keeping people out, not keeping people in, and it may be that by sealing out some of the tragedy and mania of the Troubles, Lisnevin created a space in which a victim like Michael McConville could finally settle down and begin to heal.

He had been living in institutions for nearly a third of his years. But this was how it worked: when you reached sixteen, they simply opened the door. They did very little to prepare you for this abrupt emancipation. Nobody taught you how to rent a flat or find a job or boil an egg. They simply let you go.

By the mid-1970s, Adams was confronting a dilemma. From the moment the Provisionals emerged in 1969 and began to bring the fight directly to the unionist establishment, there had been a sense that it might take just one final, furious push to drive the British into the sea. It was this strategic thesis that accounted both for the frantic pace of operations during the early years of the Troubles and for the high morale that drove recruitment and galvanised the lads. As the conflict entered its sixth year, however, it appeared that matters might not be so simple. After years of violence, the brunt of which was often felt by the very citizenry the IRA claimed to represent, public support for the Provos had tapered. The British, meanwhile, seemed to be settling in for a conflict of indefinite duration.

It was almost as if ‘defeat suited them better than victory’, in the words of one historian, ‘for there was a sense in which Irish republicanism thrived on oppression and the isolated exclusivity that came with it’.

To be sure, there was a doomed romance in the notion of republican failure, a poetry in those archetypes of futility. But Gerry Adams was not a romantic.

Adams also began to subtly modulate the language in which he talked about what victory itself might mean. It was important to fight the long war, but also to recognise that the end of the conflict would probably result not merely from a military triumph, but from some variety of political settlement. The armed struggle is simply a means to an end, Adams would tell the young IRA men at the wire. It is not the end itself.

He also thought that the Provos had to be restructured. Traditionally, the IRA had imitated the hierarchical configuration of the British military. But Adams believed that the Provos should reinvent themselves, adopting the type of cellular structure more typical of paramilitary organisations in Latin America. They would be more secure this way: if the authorities managed to interrogate and turn one gunman, he would know only the contacts in his particular cell, rather than the whole command. What Adams was proposing was an ambitious reorganisation. It was also the blueprint for an IRA that could fight the long war.

Towards the end of 1975, internment had officially ended. From now on, rather than being detained indefinitely as political prisoners, paramilitary suspects would be charged like ordinary criminals. This might have seemed like mere semantics, a simple matter of classification, but the distinction cut to the core of the republican identity. To call IRA volunteers criminals was to delegitimise the very basis upon which they had taken up arms.

What the protesters wanted was ‘special category’ status, which would effectively classify them as prisoners of war. But the authorities refused to grant it. Inside Long Kesh, relations between the inmates and the screws deteriorated, and a grinding game of mutual escalation took hold.