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

by Patrick Radden Keefe

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 grocery store.

Adams had become a hate figure in England. With his unnerving calm and his baritone erudition, he was a deeply polarizing and palpably dangerous figure: a righteous, charismatic, eloquent apologist for terrorism.

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.

The one major concession that the IRA received in the cease-fire negotiations was a greater acceptance, by the British, of Sinn Féin.

McKinney was left with a nagging uncertainty, a dull, ever-present pain that she likened to a toothache. 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.

After the cease-fire, the families felt secure enough, finally, to go public. In hopes 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.

people “who never fired a shot,” people who were “never actually involved in the revolution but hung on to the aprons of dead volunteers”—establishing themselves as power brokers in postwar Belfast.