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

by Patrick Radden Keefe

The interviews that Moloney conducted with Price were not technically part of the Belfast Project at all. But in trying to keep them safe, he had actually been placing them in jeopardy.

One day the following spring, Gerry Adams was arrested by the PSNI, in relation to the abduction and murder, forty-one years earlier, of Jean McConville.

In a phone call to a Dublin newspaper, an armed dissident group, the Real IRA, claimed responsibility. Even the deliverymen were legitimate targets, a spokesman for the group asserted, because they were ‘collaborating with the British by servicing them’.

Dolours might have loathed the Good Friday Agreement, but she could not commit herself to any of the republican splinter groups that were devoted to continuing the violence. Her sister had no such compunction. ‘Armed struggle does have a place in the present and in the future,’ Marian would say. She was in her late fifties, with grown daughters and arthritis, but she was not yet ready to put down the gun.

But this campaign did not garner the kind of popular support among Irish republicans that the Price sisters had enjoyed decades earlier. Marian might not have moved on, but the world had; it had changed in profound and irrevocable ways.

She readily acknowledged that her recalcitrance on this matter was fundamentally anti-democratic – that only a tiny minority of people in Northern Ireland were supportive of further bloodshed in the name of expelling the British.

Some of Marian’s friends worried that she was being used by her young dissident associates, that these wannabe revolutionaries humoured her because she was a Price sister – because she conferred, as a poster girl of the truly dire years of the struggle, some vicarious, if slightly retro, credibility.

Adams insisted that he would come of his own accord and that they could arrest him inside the barracks: he was, by this stage, an emeritus professor of political optics, and he wanted to deny the police the opportunity to arrest him outside the station, in the car park, where a gaggle of press photographers, tipped off in advance, could snap a photograph of him in handcuffs.

But Adams never seemed to be able to account for how it was that Hughes and Price had independently come up with stories about him that were so identical in their particulars.

Áine Tyrrell would later allege that her uncle, whom she called ‘the Beard’, had urged her not to go public and had done everything in his power to prevent the revelations about Liam from coming out. When he came forward with his own story of growing up in an abusive household, Adams was breaking, belatedly, a code of silence that had allowed abuse to flourish.

But Adams had a simple, implacable answer to all that. There was just one problem with their theory: he could not have been the commanding officer of the Belfast Brigade in 1972, because he never joined the IRA in the first place.

And it was the timing that proved most significant: the bank was robbed in December 2004, years after the Good Friday Agreement. The IRA no longer needed money to buy weapons. In fact, at the time the robbery happened, the group was giving up its weapons; the decommissioning process overseen by Father Reid was at that point almost complete. For critics of Sinn Féin, the robbery solidified the impression that the IRA had morphed into a mafia organisation.

‘Mackers has managed to do what countless RUC men failed to do, he has turned good people into touts,’ one former IRA figure told the paper. Mackers had instructed his children that they should no longer answer any knock at the door, and had taken to checking the area around the house for signs of an explosive device.

The report was careful to indicate that the organisation was no longer engaged in violence, and now had a ‘wholly political focus’. Even so, as one columnist in the Irish Times suggested, it seemed to reinforce ‘the notion of men and women in balaclavas running the political show’.

Yet the society seemed as divided as ever. The borders between Catholic and Protestant neighbourhoods were still inscribed in the concertina wire and steel of the so-called peace walls that vein the city, like fissures in a block of marble. In fact, there were more peace walls now than there had ever been at the height of the Troubles. These towering structures maintained some degree of calm by physically separating the city’s populations, as if they were animals in a zoo.

There was even a popular tourist attraction, the Troubles Tour, in which ex-combatant taxi drivers guided visitors to flashpoints from the bad years, decoding the ubiquitous murals that conjured famous battles, martyrs and gunmen. The effect was to make the Troubles seem like distant history.

Bus stops in some parts of Belfast were informally designated Catholic or Protestant, and people would walk an extra block or two to wait at a stop where they wouldn’t fear being hassled.

In light of this ongoing discord, the Villiers report made one fascinating observation. ‘The existence and cohesion of these paramilitary groups since their ceasefires has played an important role in enabling the transition from extreme violence to political progress,’ it asserted.

To Brendan Hughes or Dolours Price or Marian Price or Anthony McIntyre, Sinn Féin’s tendency to brook no opposition seemed self-interested, illiberal and cruel. But perhaps, as the Villiers report appeared to suggest, it was only through such ruthless discipline – and the insistence that Irish republicanism must be a monolith, with zero tolerance for outliers – that Adams and the people around him had managed to keep the lid on a combustible situation, and prevent the war from reigniting.

If Bell was tried for ‘aiding and abetting’ the murder of Jean McConville, then presumably the testimony would touch on who it was that actually ordered the murder, and who carried it out.

But after Sinn Féin embraced an electoral approach during the hunger strike of Bobby Sands and started running other candidates for office, Bell grew concerned that resources and attention were being diverted from the armed struggle in order to campaign for seats. Too much ballot box, not enough Armalite.

There was a sense, though, in which Bell saying that he wasn’t Z was a bit like Gerry Adams saying he wasn’t in the IRA: it was a pretence that turned into a farce.

When police and prosecutors pursued cases against former British soldiers, they were accused of a ‘witch hunt’ against young men who were just trying to do their jobs in a difficult environment. To such charges of bias, the top prosecutor, Barra McGrory, responded that there had been no ‘imbalance of approach’ and that investigations of terrorist atrocities far outnumbered cases against the state.

The anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss once observed that, ‘for the majority of the human species, and for tens of thousands of years, the idea that humanity includes every human being on the face of the earth does not exist at all. The designation stops at the border of each tribe, or linguistic group, sometimes even at the edge of a village.’

But the PSNI took a particular interest in something that Mackers had let slip in a television interview in 2014. On the subject of the sensitivity and confidentiality of the Boston archive, he said, ‘I won’t go into any detail, but I exposed myself to exactly the same risks as anybody else was exposed to.’

They continued to fear retaliation by the IRA, and now they had to contend with the government, whose effort, Mackers was convinced, was motivated purely by revenge – revenge for his public criticism of the PSNI, but also revenge because he had refused to cooperate with the authorities in identifying Z.

The scandal of the Boston tapes had been frustrating for the Independent Commission for the Location of Victims’ Remains. The commissioners felt obliged to assure the public that, notwithstanding the Boston College fiasco, anyone who might have information regarding the whereabouts of the disappeared could share it with the commission in ‘complete confidence’.

If the unionists of Ulster were a people ‘more British than the British’, the Irish Americans of Boston could sometimes seem more Irish than the Irish, and I found that I did not always relate to the shamrock-and-Guinness clichés and the sentimental attitudes of tribal solidarity.

about how individuals – and a whole society – make sense of political violence once they have passed through the crucible and finally have time to reflect.

But the family had no interest in talking, and it struck me that they probably had not realised that the husband and father they knew and loved had also been a war criminal. An obituary for McClure noted that he was a parishioner at his local Catholic church. I wondered whether, before his death, he had confessed.

Dolours Price had become so associated with the disappearance of Jean McConville in the public imagination that it had never occurred to me that her sister might also have played a part in the killing.

The legal actions against Ivor Bell and Anthony McIntyre appear to suggest that if a person implicates himself in a Belfast Project oral history, those utterances can be used against him in court, but if he implicates somebody else, that is simply hearsay, rather than admissible evidence.

If Dolours had condemned Jean McConville in the fiercest terms to Ed Moloney and insisted, at times, that the killing was justified, it may have been an expression of the strain she felt in struggling to reconcile not just her own conduct with some plausible moral code, but the even graver conduct of her sister.

The West Belfast journalist Malachi O’Doherty suggested, in a biography of Adams, that the Sinn Féin leader is prone to ‘propagandising for his own humanity’.

Even after the Good Friday Agreement, Adams always insisted that he had never given up the cornerstone republican aspiration for a united Ireland; it was just that the means for getting there had changed. In the long run, the war may be won by demography.

It would be ironic, to say the least, if one inadvertent long-term consequence of the Brexit referendum was a united Ireland – an outcome that three decades of appalling bloodshed and some thirty-five hundred lost lives had failed to achieve.

Adams will probably not live to see a united Ireland, but it seems that such a day will inevitably come. The real question is whether it would have happened eventually anyway, without the violent interventions of the IRA? This is the sort of conundrum that bedevilled Dolours Price and Brendan Hughes,