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But the IRA had long counted on the United States as a source of support. Indeed, it was from America that Brendan Hughes had first procured the Armalite rifle years earlier.
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 August 1994, the IRA declared a cease-fire. It appeared that the secret negotiations brokered by Father Alec Reid had borne fruit.
The one major concession that the IRA received in the cease-fire 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.”
group that they established was inspired by the mothers of the disappeared who gathered at the Plaza de Mayo, in Buenos Aires. Fewer than twenty people disappeared during the Troubles. Because the country is so small, however, the impact of each disappearance reverberated throughout the society.
In the symbolic calculus of IRA politics, in which every funeral is a stage, Adams could afford to disassociate himself from Hughes in life, but not in death.
One day in 2009, Dolours Price was arrested and charged with trying to steal a bottle of vodka from a Sainsbury’s supermarket. Price maintained that she had not intended to steal the bottle. The store had automated checkout counters, with electronic scanners, and she simply got confused about the mechanism.
She was subsequently acquitted of shoplifting, but the truth was that Price had been struggling for some time with alcohol and drug addiction, and with PTSD. In 2001, she was caught with stolen pharmaceutical prescriptions and was found guilty of theft. A few years later, she was thrown out of Maghaberry Prison, where she had gone to visit a dissident republican prisoner. Officials at the prison said that she was drunk, though she denied it.
The secret of the archive was officially out. The book would quote Hughes by name not just asserting that Gerry Adams had been an IRA commander, but describing how Adams had personally ordered murders. Here was Hughes, saying in his own words that it was Adams who sent him to America to procure Armalites. It was Adams who sent Dolours Price to bomb London. It was Adams who ordered the killing of Jean McConville. The publisher, Faber & Faber, promised that Voices from the Grave would “make it impossible for certain forms of historical denial to continue in public life.”
But to McCann, it seemed that Price was filled with “a great rage” she could scarcely control. When she read the Adams interview about Lynskey in February 2010, she reached for the telephone.
“Terrorist in a Mini-Skirt Who Married a Movie Star,” Dolours Price. According to Sunday Life, Price fingered Adams directly, saying he had “played a key role in disappearing victims.” When Price picked up Joe Lynskey before he was killed, she did so “on the orders of Gerry Adams.” Price said that she had also driven Jean McConville across the border to her death. Some members of the IRA had “wanted Jean’s body dumped in the middle of Albert Street.” But, Price maintained, Gerry Adams “argued against that,” saying that doing so would be bad for the image of the Provos.
The official pronouncement in the coroner’s report for Dolours Price was “death by misadventure.”
Nearly two decades had passed since the Good Friday Agreement, and Northern Ireland was now peaceful, apart from the occasional dissident attack. Yet the society seemed as divided as ever. The borders between Catholic and Protestant neighborhoods 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.
The local film production facility, Titanic Studios, had become famous as the place where the television show Game of Thrones was filmed. There was even a popular tourist attraction, the Troubles Tour, in which ex-combatant cabdrivers 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.
But the truth was that most residents still lived in neighborhoods circumscribed by religion, and more than 90 percent of children in Northern Ireland continued to attend segregated elementary schools.
Anthony McIntyre was also harshly critical of the effort to prosecute Rea. How will the truth of what really happened during the Troubles ever come out, he asked, if the authorities file murder charges against anyone who has the nerve to talk about it? “I would describe the PSNI stance as one of prosecuting truth, rather than procuring truth,” he said in an interview.
In the summer of 2017, the McConville children came together once again when one of the two youngest brothers, Billy, died of cancer. Before his death, Billy had testified, along with several of his siblings, at an inquiry into child abuse at institutions in Northern Ireland. “After a while I was like—what do you call it?—like a robot; you know what I mean? Because I was so institutionalized,” he said. As he was succumbing to cancer, Billy asked his family, as a dying wish, that he be carried into the church for his funeral feetfirst, in a final gesture of defiance. “You were so strong and
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