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

by Patrick Radden Keefe

When he emerged as a presence on the international scene, Adams had become a hate figure in England. With his unnerving calm and his baritone erudition, he was a deeply polarising and palpably dangerous figure: a righteous, charismatic, eloquent apologist for terrorism. Fearful, perhaps, of his powers of ideological seduction, the Thatcher government imposed a peculiar restriction, ‘banning’ the IRA and Sinn Féin from the airwaves. What this meant in practice was that when Adams appeared on television, British broadcasters were prevented, by law, from transmitting the sound of his voice. His image could be shown, and the content of his speech could be conveyed, but his voice could not be heard. So broadcasters devised a work-around that was practical, if also slightly ridiculous: when Adams appeared on television, an actor would dub his voice. The face was recognisably Adams, and the words were his words, but the voice saying them would belong to somebody else.

As Rea’s acting career continued to flourish, he still balked at questions about Price or her past. But he did not shy away, in his work, from the subject of the Troubles.

On the subject of his own ideology, Rea was elusive. ‘You mustn’t assume that my politics are the same as my wife’s, and you mustn’t assume that her politics are the same as they were twenty years ago,’ he told The Times in 1993. This was a canned answer, rehearsed for the publicity tour, and for the most part Rea stuck to it. But occasionally he would slip. After repeating the same evasive sentiment in an interview with Entertainment Weekly, he added, ‘I don’t feel ashamed of my wife’s political background, and I don’t think she should either. I feel that the people who administered the North of Ireland for the last twenty years should be ashamed.’

There were ordinary, decent people who became involved in the republican movement only to see the conflict spiral into something that they could no longer control. For some of these people, Rea pointed out, a moment arrived when they found themselves saying, ‘I’ve had enough.’

Much blood had been spilled over a quarter of a century in the name of a stark and absolute ambition: Brits out. Yet that ambition had not been realised. This left some members of the movement feeling confused.

The one major concession that the IRA received in the ceasefire negotiations was a greater acceptance, by the British, of Sinn Féin. As one former IRA volunteer remarked, ‘In return for ending the armed insurrection, Sinn Féin was given an opportunity to present itself as a conventional political party and, perhaps more important, as a party that could help deliver an end to the long years of conflict in Northern Ireland.’

At one point, an opportunity had emerged for Helen to relocate with Seamus and the children to Australia. But she felt that she could not go, because, as Seamus explained, ‘she always had this wee thing that her mother might come back’.

Eventually she rallied a group of families who were haunted by their own disappearances. After years of frightened silence, there was relief, if not catharsis, in being able to speak openly with others about the enduring trauma of this kind of loss. The families had mostly given up any hope of their relatives returning alive, but they still wanted to recover their bodies. ‘I could accept now that Brian was dead,’ McKinney said. ‘I could not accept not having a grave to go to.’

After the ceasefire, the families felt secure enough, finally, to go public. In the hope of raising awareness, they wore the blue ribbons, as a symbol of remembrance for the disappeared, and sent ribbons to prominent figures like Bill Clinton and Nelson Mandela.

That this push by the families for answers would coincide with the peace process and the IRA ceasefire could only have been embarrassing for Gerry Adams. Just as he was positioning himself as a visionary who could see beyond the horizon of the conflict, the families of the disappeared were directing a series of loud and increasingly indignant queries at him by name. ‘We have a simple message for Gerry Adams and the IRA: our families have suffered far too much. Please bring this nightmare to an end,’ Seamus McKendry said in 1995. He continued, pointedly, ‘We feel it is hypocritical for Sinn Féin to expect the status of a full democratic party while this issue remains unresolved.’

He had granted a visa to Gerry Adams to visit the United States, a crucial step in ending the isolation of Sinn Féin and legitimating Adams as an acceptable interlocutor.

The ceasefire would eventually end, in 1996, when the IRA detonated a bomb in London’s Docklands, injuring more than one hundred people. The group issued a statement blaming the British government’s refusal to negotiate with Sinn Féin until the IRA had decommissioned its weapons. There was some speculation in the press that Gerry Adams might not have known about the bombing in advance – that in his dedication to the peace process, he may have grown alienated from the IRA’s armed wing.

The various representatives bluffed and quarrelled over dry bureaucratic questions regarding the structure of a new national assembly in Northern Ireland, the decommissioning of paramilitary weapons, the status of prisoners, and future relations between the six counties in the North and the governments of Ireland and Britain.

The key principle was ‘consent’: if, at some juncture, a majority of people in the North wanted to unite with Ireland, then the governments of the UK and Ireland would have a ‘binding obligation’ to honour that choice. But until that time, Northern Ireland would remain part of the UK, and Sinn Féin agreed to set aside its principle of abstention and allow its representatives to serve in the newly created assembly.

But the fiction that Adams had never been a paramilitary created a political space in which interlocutors who might not want to be seen negotiating with terrorists could bring themselves to negotiate with him.

Once, in 1999, the government used a court order to try to force Moloney to turn over his interview notes from a meeting with a loyalist paramilitary. He refused, risking prison. Then he took the government to court, and won.

Moloney had grown convinced that Adams was deliberately misleading the rank and file of the IRA. He suspected that Adams had privately resolved early on to give up the army’s weapons in the interests of the peace process but that he and the people around him had kept this closely guarded secret from the rest of the organisation.

as he broke stories that conflicted with the Sinn Féin party line, he encountered hostility.

Boston College should conduct an oral history, in which combatants from the front lines could speak candidly about their experiences. There was a challenge, however. Because of the traditional prohibition on talking about paramilitary activity, the details of many of the key events of the Troubles were shrouded in a fog of reticence. The peace process might have normalised Sinn Féin as a political party, but the IRA remained an illegal organisation. Just admitting to having been a member could result in criminal prosecution.

Ed Moloney had first met Mackers at a republican funeral in 1993, and the ex-IRA man had subsequently become one of his sources. Mackers spoke the language of both the academy and the street, and Moloney felt that he would be an ideal interviewer for the Boston College project.

In their effort to bring about peace, the negotiators had focused on the future rather than the past. The accord provided for the release of paramilitary prisoners, many of whom had committed atrocious acts of violence. But there was no provision for the creation of any sort of truth-and-reconciliation mechanism that might allow the people of Northern Ireland to address the sometimes murky and often painful history of what had befallen their country over the previous three decades.

This queasy sense of irresolution was only complicated by Gerry Adams’s refusal to acknowledge that he was ever in the IRA. If people in Northern Ireland were wondering whether it was safe, yet, to come clean about their own roles in the conflict, the continued denials by Adams would suggest that it most definitely wasn’t. ‘O land of password, handgrip, wink and nod,’ Seamus Heaney wrote in a poem about the Troubles called ‘Whatever You Say, Say Nothing’. There was a sense that, even as people greeted the new day with great enthusiasm, the sulphurous intrigue of the past would continue to linger.

Mackers was also an outsider in another critical respect. Like many Provo foot soldiers, he was disillusioned by the Good Friday Agreement. Patrick Pearse once wrote that ‘the man who in the name of Ireland accepts as a “final settlement” anything less by one iota than separation from England is guilty of so immense an infidelity, so immense a crime against the Irish nation … that it were better that he had not been born’. This kind of absolutism formed the marrow of republican mythology: the notion that any acceptance of incremental change was tantamount to betrayal. In Mackers’s view, Sinn Féin had settled for too little when it acceded to a scenario in which British dominion over Ireland would continue. Adams, Mackers believed, had sold out on the armed struggle.

No Sinn Féin official ever seemed to be off message. In this manner, the party maintained what one scholar described as a ‘monopoly over the memory of republican armed struggle’.

To Hughes, Good Friday had symbolised the ultimate concession: formal acceptance by the republican movement that the British would remain in Ireland. Hughes had killed people. He had done so with the conviction that he was fighting for a united Ireland. But it now became clear to him that the leadership of the movement may have been prepared to settle for less than absolute victory and had elected – deliberately, in his view – not to inform soldiers like him.

For decades he had shared an intimate bond with Adams, but it was never a relationship of equals. Lately he had taken to joking, darkly, that, like the weapons of the IRA, he had been used and then discarded – ‘decommissioned’.

In conducting his interviews, Mackers had found that, for former paramilitaries, the experience of speaking after decades of silence could be profoundly cathartic.

The lives he had taken, the young volunteers he had sent to die: his understanding of those sacrifices had always been that they would ultimately be justified by the emergence of a united Ireland. Instead, Adams had become a well-heeled statesman, a peacemaker; he had positioned himself for a prominent role in a post-conflict Northern Ireland. To his supporters, Adams was a historic figure, a visionary, a plausible candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize. But it seemed to Hughes that Gerry Adams might have been duped by his own ambition – or, worse, manipulated by the British.

‘I’m disgusted with the whole thing,’ Hughes said. ‘It means that people like myself … have to carry the responsibility of all those deaths.’ If all that carnage had at least succeeded in forcing the British out of Ireland, then Hughes might be able to justify, to himself, the actions he had taken. But he felt robbed of any such rationale for absolution. ‘As everything has turned out,’ he said, ‘not one death was worth it.’

The public narrative had always maintained that it was the prisoners themselves who insisted on persevering with the strike, and O’Rawe had never spoken out to question this version of history, deferring to what he came to think of as the ‘carefully scripted myths’ that had solidified around these dramatic events. But privately, he felt enormous guilt for not standing up at the time and being more forceful. He wondered why Adams and those around him would have sustained the strike rather than take an offer that the men on the inside had been prepared to accept.

O’Rawe began to develop an awful theory. When Bobby Sands ran for his parliamentary seat, the spectacle of a peaceful protester seeking public office engendered popular support for republicanism on a scale that the IRA had never achieved through violence. After Sands died, on 5 May 1981, as many as a hundred thousand people took to the streets. O’Rawe wasn’t privy to the discussions of the Army Council, which made the decision; but he came to believe that Adams had deliberately perpetuated the hunger strike in order to capitalise on the broad-based sympathy and support that it produced. In terms of republican policy, the hunger strike was the moment that ‘split the atom’, O’Rawe concluded. For the first time, Adams saw the potential for change through electoral politics.

For twenty years, he had been walking around with the weight of those six dead strikers on his conscience, and after two decades of silence he felt purged, emotionally, to be talking about it. ‘I don’t give a fuck any more, this is coming out,’ he told Mackers. ‘Guys died here for fucking nothing!’

As Ed Moloney subsequently wrote, ‘The hunger strike made Sinn Féin’s successful excursion into electoral politics possible: the subsequent tension between the IRA’s armed struggle and Sinn Féin’s politics produced the peace process and ultimately the end of the conflict. Had the offer of July 1981 not been undermined, it is possible, even probable, that none of this would have happened. There will be those who will say that the end justified the means, that the achievement of peace was a pearl whose price was worth paying.’

Playing a similar game of if/then counterfactuals, Hughes would consider what might have happened had he just allowed McKenna to die. Could the second strike have been prevented altogether? Could that have saved the lives of ten men? He ran the arithmetic in his head. It could be overwhelming. At one point, long after the strike, Hughes bumped into McKenna in Dundalk. McKenna had brain damage, and his eyesight had been permanently affected by the strike. ‘Fuck you, Dark,’ McKenna said to Hughes. ‘You should have let me die.’

Later, he learned that after watching all ten men die in the hunger strike, Dr Ross had taken his own life, with a shotgun, in 1986.

Gerry Adams once remarked that informants are ‘reviled in all aspects of society in this island’.

Campbell lived by a principle: Everyone is recruitable. Sometimes you just need to find the right button. You could haul the same person in fifteen times and he would not break; then, the sixteenth time, something would happen.

Informants from the ethnic ghettos that bred Belfast paramilitaries were often unemployed, scraping by on public benefits. If you timed your overture right, you could offer a bailout at the moment when they most desperately needed it.

It was hazardous to pursue such a double existence, in a land where the punishment for touting was a bullet in the head and a lifetime of shame for one’s family. It was also lonely. Campbell’s informants often came to rely on him emotionally. He may have been exploiting their preparedness to risk death. He may have blackmailed them into cooperating with him in the first place, or blackmailed them into staying an informant when they wanted to quit. But he was also, quite often, the only person who knew their secret. As such, he became doctor, social worker and priest. The tout’s problems became his problems: repairs to the house, Christmas presents for the kids.

Recruit the man who drives Gerry Adams’s car and you may get more valuable intelligence than you would if you recruited Adams himself. (Roy McShane, who served as Adams’s personal chauffeur during the

Members of the Nutting Squad would interrogate any IRA member who was suspected of possible cooperation with the British. Methods seldom varied. The questioning would last for hours, and often days, with threats, beatings and torture until a confession was proffered. The signs of the group’s handiwork would suddenly materialise in stretches of wasteland at the edge of town or alongside rutted lanes in the country: corpses, their limbs bound, their flesh singed and battered from torture, their eyes ghoulishly blotted out with scraps of masking tape. ‘Every army attracts psychopaths,’ Brendan Hughes liked to say.

When Trevor Campbell was working with his own informants, he would tell them: ‘Whatever happens, never confess. If you confess, you’re dead.’

Even if one were to accept Hughes’s account that McConville was an informer, it is difficult to conceive of a scenario in which she could have furnished anything but low-level titbits. That didn’t matter to Hughes and his comrades. However minor the practical impact of the alleged betrayal might have been, to the IRA, a tout was a tout, and the penalty was death.

Even in the chaos of 1972, the Provos did not kill and disappear someone lightly, Hughes insisted. As barbaric as it might seem in retrospect to bury a mother of ten in an unmarked grave, the decision to do so was the product of an earnest debate.

There may have been concern, Hughes hypothesised, that because McConville was a woman, and a widowed mother, her murder could damage the reputation of the IRA. Yet the Provos had identified her as an informer, and that necessitated the ultimate sanction.

Price clung to her acid wit. She could seem, at times, to marinate in it. But there were signs, also, that she was haunted. She felt as though she spent a great deal of time rummaging around her own head, coming up with bits and pieces of her past. She was troubled by her experiences as a young woman – by things she had done to others, and to herself.

‘For what Sinn Féin has achieved today, I would not have missed a good breakfast,’ she said in an interview on Irish radio. ‘Volunteers didn’t only die,’ she pointed out. ‘Volunteers had to kill, as well, you know?’

Price felt a sharp sense of moral injury: she believed that she had been robbed of any ethical justification for her own conduct.

Price joked that when she spoke about the tumultuous events of her youth, it seemed as distant to them as ‘the stone age’. After a series of sectarian murders in 1998, Stephen Rea had remarked, ‘Everyone has become so used to the state of war that it becomes impossible for them to imagine anything else.’

Like Brendan Hughes, Price was keenly attuned to the commodification of republican martyrs.