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

by Patrick Radden Keefe

Adams might be advocating for a political movement to run in parallel with the armed struggle, but he was not counselling any abandonment of violent means.

Thatcher came into office regarding Northern Ireland as somewhat akin to the Sudetenland, those parts of Czechoslovakia that were predominantly ethnic German and that had been annexed by Hitler on the eve of the war. Like the Sudetenland Germans, the Catholics in Northern Ireland might have been the victims of an accident of geography, but in Thatcher’s view, that did not give them the right to simply break off and join a neighbouring country.

the British would not relent. After the government ended internment and special category status in 1976, the new secretary of state for Northern Ireland, Roy Mason, described the IRA prisoners as ‘thugs and gangsters’. Thatcher would sound the same note. ‘There is no such thing as political murder, political bombing, or political violence,’ she maintained. ‘We will not compromise on this. There will be no political status.’

Armagh jail had rarely housed more than a dozen or so women at any one time. Most of the inmates were locked up for charges of drunkenness, prostitution, or fraud. But during the 1970s, when Dolours and Marian Price arrived, the jail housed more than a hundred women, many of whom had been involved in republican activity.

Both she and Marian had achieved legendary status in the IRA for the sacrifices they had made, but from then on Dolours would become, in her words, ‘a freelance republican’.

Dolours continued, the force-feeding only compounded the trauma, because ‘it further alienated us from the process of sustenance, the whole process of putting food into your body’. As a result, she concluded, ‘we both ended up with very, very, very distorted notions of the function of food and we both found it very difficult to re-establish a proper relationship with the process of eating’.

This gambit marked a radical departure for the Provos. There had been moments in history when republicans ran candidates for elective office, but the movement had long been suspicious of the parliamentary process. For generations, many republicans had adhered to a tradition of ‘abstentionism’ – staying out of politics altogether. There was a sense that one’s revolutionary fervour could be diluted all too easily by the system. This had been part of the basis for the split in 1969 between the Official IRA and the Provisionals – a sense that the Officials had become too political and that politics would inevitably lead to accommodation.

To Adams, who had been thinking through ways in which the struggle could become more political, the Sands election represented an extraordinary opportunity. There were many people in Northern Ireland who might not support the violence of the IRA but would happily vote a republican hunger striker into elected office.

Morrison would eventually capture the strategy in a famous aphorism, asking, at a Sinn Féin gathering, ‘Will anyone here object if, with a ballot paper in one hand and an Armalite in the other, we take power in Ireland?’

‘It is not fair,’ she wrote to Brockway. ‘I will have served eight years in March, even murderers don’t serve that, I am doing life for causing an explosion.’ As a member of the Unknowns, Price had been involved in other operations that were genuinely deadly. But she hadn’t been charged with those actions, and she did not mention them now.

It was indicative of the closeness of the Price sisters that Thatcher erroneously concluded that they were twins. But even so, Thatcher pointed out that Dolours seemed to harbour republican ‘sympathies’, and, should she be released, ‘I doubt whether her old friends will let her alone.’

the story made headlines around the world. Gerry Adams later recalled Sands’s death as having ‘a greater international impact than any other event in Ireland in my lifetime’. One hundred thousand people poured onto the streets of Belfast to watch his coffin being carried to the cemetery. There was an overwhelming upsurge of support for the republican cause on both sides of the border in Ireland.

The Price sisters had stared down the British crown on two occasions, and in both instances, the damage they inflicted upon their own bodies was enough to make them prevail. Sands may have been less fortunate, in that he perished, but he was more fortunate in the sense that he achieved more in martyrdom than he ever might have had he lived. And Humphrey Atkins and Thatcher had been wrong when they speculated that among the ten strikers there must be at least one weak link. After Sands died, another nine followed, starving to death one by one throughout that summer.

Not long after the Price sisters concluded their strike, the World Medical Association had issued a landmark declaration finding that force-feeding was unethical. With the determination made to stop force-feeding Dolours and Marian, the policy had indeed changed in the United Kingdom, when Roy Jenkins announced that hunger strikers would no longer be subjected to force-feeding in British prisons. By triumphing in the particular manner that she had back in 1974, Dolours Price had unwittingly given rise to the circumstances that would allow ten hunger strikers to starve to death seven years later. In subsequent years, she would wonder if this did not make her, in some way, responsible.

She found work almost immediately, writing freelance articles for newspapers. It was, in some ways, a natural vocation for her; she had always possessed a gadfly personality, and this would allow her to remain tangentially involved with political issues while keeping well away from the paramilitary front lines.

She suggested, erroneously, that anorexia was correlated with a ‘higher than average IQ’.

It may be true that Price had come to embrace nonviolence as a personal philosophy. But there is reason to be sceptical of any suggestion that she had renounced altogether the republican tradition of armed resistance. Such an item, discreetly placed in the press, was probably intended for the benefit of the British officials who were deciding how severely they should circumscribe Price’s post-prison life.

First he would have to flee Belfast. He loved the city but felt that there was no space to operate there, no room to become anything different. He may have been Protestant, but he was sympathetic to the nationalist cause. After half a century of repression, he felt, it was inevitable that the Catholic community would produce some form of resistance. Rea ended up living in West Belfast for a time, and when he took the stage in the local community festival, his fellow Protestants saw it as a betrayal.

But, like Price, Rea was headstrong, and he decided that he would rather be an unemployed Irishman than find work by sounding as if he had grown up in Surrey. After all, it was one of the great achievements of Irish civilisation to take the English language and adapt it, creating a different music. The Irish might have tended to lose in their political conflict with the British, Rea remarked, but ‘they have been triumphant in terms of the language’.

one critic described Field Day as the ‘cultural wing of the Provos’. But while there was often something obviously political about the plays that they performed, the politics tended to be oblique, and Rea stubbornly refused to be painted into any ideological corner.

In England, a rumour circulated not long after Price and Rea were married that she was going to accompany him to London for the premiere of a new film. The British tabloids sounded the alarm: would the notorious ‘bomb girl’ have the temerity to revisit the very city she had bombed? Price did not make the trip, in the end, but privately she did plead repeatedly with the British government to cancel the residency requirement, or at least grant her permission to visit her husband in England.

The British newspapers, which had always taken such an interest in Price, soon worked out that she was in London and living the fashionable life of the wife of a well-regarded actor.

Rea would later remark that his decision to marry a notorious ex-militant from the IRA had done nothing to hurt his career. ‘The people in my profession were enormously generous about it,’ he said. But inevitably, he was often questioned about his wife’s past, and when this happened, he tended to bristle. Rea wanted the press to focus exclusively on his work and not get caught up in his biography, much less the history or politics of his spouse.

Adams’s decision to embrace an electoral strategy had grown, in part, from the success of Bobby Sands in standing for election, even if Sands had died before he could ever take his parliamentary seat. In a nod to the traditional abstentionism of the IRA, Adams announced that, if elected, he would boycott Westminster and would not actually attend Parliament. Price supported him and took to the campaign trail. ‘Vote Sinn Féin!’ she cried. ‘Vote Gerry Adams!’ On election day, she ferried voters to the polling stations. And Adams won.

Reid possessed an unerring faith in the power of dialogue: if you could just get people to talk, he believed, the most bitter antagonists could discover common ground.

Reid may have assisted the Provos by playing messenger, but that did not mean he condoned their activities. On the contrary, he was deeply unsettled by the violence that had torn his community apart.

At IRA funerals, one perpetual source of tension was the presence of British security forces. With so many known IRA members out on the street, the RUC and the army rarely missed an opportunity to monitor these occasions, taking pictures and gathering intelligence.

Adams had darkly suggested, following the cemetery murders, that it was no accident that the authorities had chosen to steer clear of the funeral – that they may have done so in collusion with the loyalist gunman, quite aware of his designs.

They weren’t police officers. They were soldiers: two British corporals, Derek Wood and David Howes, who had been driving in the area when they took what would prove to be a lethally misguided wrong turn.

Father Reid saw the men being pulled out of the car, then dragged and shoved into a nearby park. There, the mob stripped their clothes off, so that the corporals were dressed only in their underwear and socks, then forced them onto the ground and beat them. There was a madness in the air – you could taste it – and Reid knew as he approached the scene that these men were about to be shot.

Father Reid ran to the men. One of them was clearly dead, but the other stirred; when Reid leaned close, he could hear the sound of breathing. Reid looked up frantically at the people standing around and asked if anybody knew how to resuscitate someone. Nobody responded. They just stood there, watching.

For years, he had tried to discourage paramilitaries and ordinary citizens on both sides of the sectarian divide from resorting to violence. But he had come to believe that the surest way to end the conflict would be to persuade the IRA to stop fighting. Reid broached the issue with Gerry Adams and discovered that he was prepared to entertain the idea. Perhaps Adams had a different vision for the future; perhaps he had found that the ballot and the bullet were not mutually reinforcing but were actually at cross-purposes; perhaps he was simply exhausted. Whatever the case, Reid found that when he made his initial appeal to Adams, he was ‘pushing an open door’. Later, Reid would receive credit for having coaxed Adams onto the path of peace.

Adams saw in the priest an unimpeachable convener. ‘The only organisation that can do anything is the Church,’ he told Reid. Only the Church had the status, the credibility, and the lines of communication with the relevant parties to achieve peace.

To Hume, the hypocrisy of the republican movement – the cynical shell game of the ballot and the bullet – seemed all too calculated. ‘The real strategy and objectives are clear,’ he said. ‘Have the military wing create as much discontent and deprivation as possible, the more unemployment the better. Then have your political wing feed off the people’s discontent. One of these days, Sinn Féin will disappear up their own contradiction.’

The IRA announced afterwards that the bombing had been a mistake: the intended target was actually a ceremony involving British soldiers nearby. Adams apologised for the attack, disassociating himself from it. But the bombing was roundly condemned, and it underlined the pariah status of the Provos. Hume criticised the attack as ‘an act of sheer savagery’.

Throughout the 1980s, Adams played a delicate game. He was elected president of Sinn Féin in 1983. Yet he had become convinced that there would eventually have to be peace: a united Ireland could not be won through armed force alone.

Traditionally, when volunteers were asked if they were in the IRA, they would refuse to answer, because to acknowledge membership would be enough to put them in prison. But as Adams refashioned his persona from guerrilla leader to statesman, he took this gambit one step further: he began to tell people that he had always been a purely political figure, an ardent republican and a Sinn Féin leader – but not a volunteer, not someone who was in any way directly involved or implicated in the armed struggle. ‘I am not a member of the IRA, and have never been in the IRA,’ he would say.

Adams defended the morality of violence to the priest, arguing that paramilitarism was not a role IRA members had sought out but, rather, one that had been thrust upon them. ‘Rightly or wrongly, I am an IRA Volunteer,’ Adams wrote. ‘The course I take involves the use of physical force, but only if I achieve the situation where my people can genuinely prosper can my course of action be seen, by me, to have been justified.’

This paradox would become a signature of Adams’s emerging persona: homespun whimsy mingled with armed insurrection, cake fairs with a dash of bloodshed.

But Adams insisted that when it came to a moral accounting of violence, the IRA should be held to the same standard as the British state. ‘In any war situation, civilians unfortunately suffer and die,’ he pointed out. ‘The presence of the gun in Irish politics is not the sole responsibility of the Irish. The British were responsible for putting it there in the first place and they continue to use it to stay in Ireland.’ He added, ‘No amount of voting papers alone will get them out.’

Adams now maintained that he had never personally ordered or participated in any violence, but he would not renounce violent techniques. In his first address after being elected president of Sinn Féin, he made it clear that violence should continue – in tandem with political activity.

The following October, a volunteer placed a time bomb in a room at the Grand Hotel in Brighton, where Margaret Thatcher and many of her cabinet would be staying during the Conservative Party conference. The bomb exploded, killing five people, but not Thatcher. The IRA issued a statement, eloquently capturing the strategic advantage of terrorism: ‘Today we were unlucky, but remember, we only have to be lucky once. You will have to be lucky always.’

Thatcher may have survived the attack, but she was shaken. Privately, she became convinced that the Provos would eventually succeed. ‘They’ll probably get me in the end,’ she would say. ‘But I don’t like to hand myself to them on a plate.’

After years on the run, Adams tended to deliberately make his movements difficult to predict. But his trial was a major news story, and it was widely known that he would be at court in the centre of Belfast that day. He had grown so fearful about his own safety that he had applied for a licence to carry a firearm for self-defence. But the request had been rejected, to nobody’s surprise, by the RUC. Adams had taken to predicting his own death, saying, ‘I think there is a 90 per cent chance I may be assassinated.’

from his bed at Royal Victoria Hospital, Adams claimed that the authorities had known about the attack in advance and had hoped it would succeed. It was indicative of Adams’s continued status as a political outcast that none of his fellow members of the British Parliament issued any expressions of sympathy or condemnation following this assassination attempt. They greeted the news of the shooting with glacial silence.

Prison life had a comforting, if monotonous, predictability. By contrast, Belfast seemed noisy, jarring, unsafe.

Hughes could sense that Adams was manoeuvring politically, though he had no inkling of the nascent peace process. He still thought of himself as a soldier, and Adams, who had always been political, was now an actual politician. There were places in Belfast where hard men congregated, and Hughes could go and sit and be accepted among such men, but Adams could not, because even before his rote denials of IRA membership, he had never been perceived as much of a soldier.

There were vastly more Irish Americans than there were people in Ireland itself. This demographic anomaly was a testament to centuries of migration caused by poverty, famine and discrimination, and there was strong support for the cause of Irish independence among the Irish in America. Indeed, it could occasionally seem that support for the armed struggle was more fervent in Boston or Chicago than it was in Belfast or Derry. The romantic idyll of a revolutionary movement is easier to sustain when there is no danger that one’s own family members might get blown to pieces on a trip to the grocer’s shop. Some people in Ireland looked askance at the ‘plastic Paddies’ who urged bloody war in Ulster from the safe distance of America.

The man presented Hughes with a suitcase full of money for the cause. But the more they conversed, the more objectionable Hughes found his politics. Hughes still regarded himself as a revolutionary socialist, but he was discovering that among the conservative Irish Americans who supported the IRA during the 1980s, socialism was not exactly in vogue. Finally, in a fit of pique, Hughes blurted, ‘I don’t want your fucking money!’ So the man left and took his suitcase with him.

In prison, Price had feared that she might never have a child, but now here she was, getting a chance at something like a normal life.