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

by Patrick Radden Keefe

One English journalist writing at the time described the unionists in Northern Ireland as ‘a society more British than the British about whom the British care not at all’. To ‘loyalists’ – as especially zealous unionists were known – this created a tendency to see oneself as the ultimate defender of a national identity that was in danger of extinction.

There was a sense among the students that the most intractable injustice could be undone through peaceful protest: this was 1969, and it seemed that young people around the world were in the vanguard. Perhaps in Northern Ireland the battle lines could be redrawn so that it was no longer a conflict of Catholics against Protestants, or republicans against loyalists, but rather the young against the old – the forces of the future against the forces of the past.

There were moments of anarchic poetry: a bulldozer that someone had left on a building site was liberated by a couple of kids, who sat atop the huge machine and drove it jauntily down a West Belfast street, to great whoops and cheers from their compatriots. At a certain point the boys lost control of their hulking steed and crashed into a telegraph pole – where somebody immediately lobbed a petrol bomb at the bulldozer and it burst into flames.

Nearly two thousand families fled their homes in Belfast that summer, the overwhelming majority of them Catholic. Some 350,000 people lived in Belfast. Over the ensuing years, as much as 10 per cent of the population would relocate.

Everywhere there was rubble and broken glass, what one poet would memorably describe as ‘Belfast confetti’. Yet, in the midst of this carnage, the hard-headed citizens of Belfast simply adapted and got on with their lives. In a momentary lull in the shooting, a front door would tentatively crack open and a Belfast housewife in horn-rimmed glasses would stick her head out to make sure the coast was clear. Then she would emerge, erect in her raincoat, a head scarf over her curlers, and walk primly through the war zone to the shops.

Many displaced families were squatting wherever they could. Catholics moved into homes that had been abandoned by Protestants, and Protestants moved into homes vacated by Catholics. At a second chalet, the McConvilles encountered the same problem: another family was already living there and refused to leave. There were new chalets being built on Divis Street, and this time Arthur McConville insisted on staying with the workmen who were building it until the moment they finished construction, so that nobody else could get in first.

For all the chaos, the number of people actually killed in the Troubles was initially quite low: in 1969, only nineteen people were killed, and in 1970, only twenty-nine. But in 1971, the violence accelerated, with nearly two hundred people killed. By 1972, the figure was nearly five hundred.

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.

New recruits to the Provos were told to anticipate one of two certain outcomes: ‘Either you’re going to jail or you’re going to die.’

‘The Provo army was started by the people to set up barricades against the loyalist hordes,’ Albert explained at the time. ‘We beat them with stones at first, and they had guns. Our people had to go and get guns. Wouldn’t they have been right stupid people to stand there? Our people got shotguns at first and then got better weapons. And then the British, who were supposed to protect us, came in and raided our homes. What way could you fight? So you went down and you blew them up. That was the only thing left. If they hadn’t interfered with us, there probably would be no Provo army today.’

‘If we get a united socialist Ireland,’ Albert Price concluded, ‘then maybe it will all have been worth it.’

Tranquilliser use was higher in Northern Ireland than anywhere else in the United Kingdom. In some later era, the condition would probably be described as post-traumatic stress, but one contemporary book called it ‘the Belfast syndrome’, a malady that was said to result from ‘living with constant terror, where the enemy is not easily identifiable and the violence is indiscriminate and arbitrary’. Doctors found, paradoxically, that the people most prone to this type of anxiety were not the active combatants, who were out on the street and had a sense of agency, but the women and children stuck sheltering behind closed doors.

There was a discomfiting sense in Belfast that there was no place where you were truly secure: you would run inside to get away from a gun battle, only to run outside again for fear of a bomb.

It felt to Michael McConville as if he and his family were strangers in a strange land. Expelled from East Belfast for being too Catholic, they were outsiders in West Belfast for being too Protestant.

Hughes adhered to a philosophy, instilled in him at a young age by his father, that if you want to get people to do something for you, you do it with them. So he wasn’t just sending men on operations – he went along on the missions himself.

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. He liked the fact that there was a momentum to the operations, a relentless tempo, which fuelled and perpetuated the armed struggle, because each successful operation drew new followers to the cause. In the words of one of Hughes’s contemporaries in the IRA, ‘Good operations are the best recruiting sergeant.’

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.

The number of British troops in Northern Ireland had escalated dramatically in a short period of time: during the summer of 1969, there were 2,700; by the summer of 1972 there were more than 30,000. The soldiers were often just as young and inexperienced as the paramilitaries they were fighting: gangly, pimply, frightened young men who were scarcely out of their teens. They

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. The British had learned these techniques by studying the experiences of soldiers who were held as prisoners of war by the Nazis or by the North Koreans and the Chinese during the Korean War.

But 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.)

One by-product of the Troubles was a culture of silence. With armed factions at war in the streets, an act as innocent as making enquiries about a vanished loved one could be dangerous.

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’.

What they described to Hughes was an extensive intelligence-gathering network that the British had developed around Belfast. The centrepiece of the operation was a laundry service, with an office in the city centre. Four Square Laundry operated an actual door-to-door laundry service, picking up clothing and linens and then subcontracting to an industrial laundry in Belfast to wash the clothes. But before they got there, the clothes were analysed by British authorities. Traces of explosives could be detected on garments in order to determine whether bombs were being made or stored at a property. Analysts could also compare the clothing being picked up at a given residence with the number, age and gender of the people ostensibly living there; a mismatch might indicate that it was an arms drop or a call house. The laundry van had been specially configured with a hollow roof, in which a soldier could conceal himself, snapping photos of people and houses outside through a hidden opening.

In the streets of Belfast, an empty, unattended car became, all by itself, a source of terror that could prompt people to flee the area and authorities to descend, whether the car actually contained a bomb or not.

If the British had employed hunger as a weapon during the famine, it would now be turned around and used against them.

The British had always outmanned and outspent and outgunned the Irish, but the ‘ultimate weapon’, Dolours believed, was ‘one’s own body’.

‘for there was a sense in which Irish republicanism thrived on oppression and the isolated exclusivity that came with it’.

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

‘Today we were unlucky, but remember, we only have to be lucky once. You will have to be lucky always.’

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.

At one meeting, an opinionated Irish American benefactor informed Hughes that the Provos were going about the war all wrong. What you should really be doing, the man told him, is widening your range of targets. Start shooting anyone who is in any way associated with the British regime – anyone who wears the crown on his uniform. ‘Postmen?’ Hughes interjected. ‘Shoot postmen?’ Of course you should be shooting postmen, the man replied. ‘Right,’ Hughes said. ‘I’m going back to Belfast in a couple of weeks … We’ll get another ticket and you come back with me and you shoot the fucking postmen.’

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.

‘Whatever soul searchings there may be among Irish political parties now or hereafter, we go in the calm certitude of having done the clear, clean, sheer thing,’ Patrick Pearse, the doomed hero of the Easter Rising, once declared. ‘We have the strength and the peace of mind of those who never compromise.’ But the nature of a ceasefire and a peace process is precisely negotiation, soul searching and compromise.

‘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.’

‘The Good Friday Agreement marks the conclusion of one phase and the beginning of a new phase of struggle.’ He wanted to see ‘a new Ireland’, he said. ‘An Ireland in which the guns are silent. Permanently. An Ireland in which all of the people of this island are at peace with each other and with our neighbours in Britain. An Ireland united by a process of healing and national reconciliation.’

‘O land of password, handgrip, wink and nod,’ Seamus Heaney wrote in a poem about the Troubles called ‘Whatever You Say, Say Nothing’.

The IRA had always excelled at internal discipline and, as an emerging political party, Sinn Féin was heavily invested in preserving a particular narrative about the Troubles and the peace process. 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’.

In prison, when the Provos conducted educational workshops on strategy, one fundamental lesson was that a central pillar of Britain’s approach to counterinsurgency was ‘to mould leaderships whom they could deal with’.

If either of them saw any affinity between the Irish tradition of political violence and the mass murder of Al Qaeda, they did not dwell on it.

‘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.’

the image that the British state had scrupulously cultivated for decades was that of the reluctant, impartial referee, stepping into the fray when nobody else would, to sort out two warring tribes. But the truth was that, from the beginning, the authorities perceived the Provos as the main enemy, where their energies should be focused, and regarded loyalist terror gangs as a sideshow – if not an unofficial state auxiliary.

‘If Dolours had a big fault, it was perhaps that she lived out too urgently the ideals to which so many others also purported to be dedicated,’ McCann said. ‘She was a liberator but never managed to liberate herself from those ideas.’ The mourners huddled under their umbrellas as the rain pounded the sodden ground. ‘Sometimes,’ McCann said, ‘we are imprisoned within ideals.’

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. But the walls were still tagged with runelike slurs – K.A.T., for ‘Kill all Taigs,’ a derogatory term for Catholics, on one side; K.A.H., for ‘Kill all Huns,’ a reference to Protestants, on the other.

most residents still lived in neighbourhoods circumscribed by religion, and more than 90 per cent of children in Northern Ireland continued to attend segregated primary schools. 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.

Outrage is conditioned not by the nature of the atrocity but by the affiliation of the victim and the perpetrator. Should the state be accorded more leniency because, legally speaking, it has a monopoly on the legitimate use of force? Or, conversely, should we hold soldiers and police to a higher standard than paramilitaries?

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.’

When it came to the Troubles, a phenomenon known as ‘whataboutery’ took hold. Utter the name Jean McConville and someone would say, What about Bloody Sunday? To which you could say, What about Bloody Friday? To which they could say, What about Pat Finucane? What about the La Mon bombing? What about the Ballymurphy massacre? What about Enniskillen? What about McGurk’s bar? What about. What about. What about.

It is a study in the derangement of bigotry, a portrait of Northern Ireland as a land consumed by feverish pathology, an inquiry into the inability to shake free of what has come before. ‘This is the past,’ Eric tells Slim at one point. ‘No, this is the now,’ Slim corrects him. ‘No,’ Eric says. ‘It’s the past.’