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

by Patrick Radden Keefe

The Jesuits who founded the university in 1863 did so to educate the children of poor immigrants who had fled the potato famine in Ireland.

With 250,000 volumes and some sixteen million manuscripts, the Burns Library holds the most comprehensive collection of Irish political and cultural artifacts in the United States.

“There will be a time,” he vowed, “when Sinn Féin will be a power in the land.”

“Will anyone here object if, with a ballot paper in one hand and an Armalite in the other, we take power in Ireland?”

“O land of password, handgrip, wink and nod,” Seamus Heaney

wrote in a poem about the Troubles called “Whatever You Say, Say Nothing.”

“Bring back the IRA!” As the audience cheered, Adams chuckled and smiled. Then he leaned into the microphone and said, “They haven’t gone away, you know.”

According to the article, the code name of this supposed spy was “Steak Knife.”

“Stakeknife,” other times “Steak Knife” or “Stake Knife.”

He was “a golden egg.” Stakeknife wasn’t Gerry Adams. He was Freddie Scappaticci.

But then, Donaldson was a spy himself.

It was Marian Price.

“We ain’t gone away, you know.”

“The IRA is gone,” Adams insisted, somewhat less than convincingly, in light of Storey’s comments. “It’s finished.”

The official pronouncement in the coroner’s report for Dolours Price was “death by misadventure.”

Big Bobby Storey was right: they hadn’t gone away.

Hundreds of Union Jacks still fluttered in Protestant neighborhoods, while Catholic areas were often decked out with the tricolor, or with Palestinian flags—a gesture of solidarity but also a signal that, even now, many republicans in the North regarded themselves as an occupied people.

For five years before his death, he had worked as a guard at the Cheshire Correctional Institution, a high-security prison.

Gerry Adams had asked the shooter to become his personal driver.

Mackers then told me that the killer had never actually taken the job,

because he wanted my sister to be his driver.”

“You know, he always had to have a driver,” Price goes on. “And she refused, because it was such a boring job.”

that Dolours had said the execution of Jean McConville was “something that the sisters had done together.”

As a young man, he justified the use of political violence with one important caveat, writing that “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.”

The real question is whether it would have happened eventually anyway, without the violent interventions of the IRA.

“I don’t. I am perfectly at peace. Absolutely.”