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

by Patrick Radden Keefe

Really, it was hard to imagine Ireland before what the Prices referred to simply as “the cause.” It almost didn’t matter where you started the story: it was always there. It predated the distinction between Protestant and Catholic; it was older than the Protestant church. You could go back nearly a thousand years, in fact, to the Norman raiders of the twelfth century, who crossed the Irish Sea on ships, in search of new lands to conquer. Or to Henry VIII and the Tudor rulers of the sixteenth century, who asserted England’s total subjugation of Ireland. Or to the Protestant emigrants from Scotland and the North of England who filtered into Ireland over the course of the seventeenth century and established a plantation system in which the Gaelic-speaking natives became tenants and vassals on land that had previously been their own.

Really, it was hard to imagine Ireland before what the Prices referred to simply as “the cause.” It almost didn’t matter where you started the story: it was always there. It predated the distinction between Protestant and Catholic; it was older than the Protestant church. You could go back nearly a thousand years, in fact, to the Norman raiders of the twelfth century, who crossed the Irish Sea on ships, in search of new lands to conquer. Or to Henry VIII and the Tudor rulers of the sixteenth century, who asserted England’s total subjugation of Ireland. Or to the Protestant emigrants from Scotland and the North of England who filtered into Ireland over the course of the seventeenth century and established a plantation system in which the Gaelic-speaking natives became tenants and vassals on land that had previously been their own.

The McConvilles moved into a four-bedroom maisonette in a section of the flats called Farset Walk. But any excitement they may have felt about their new accommodation soon dissipated, because the complex had been constructed with little consideration for how people actually live. There were no social amenities in Divis Flats, no green spaces, no landscaping. Apart from two bleak football pitches and an asphalt enclosure with a couple of swing sets, there were no playgrounds—in a complex with more than a thousand children. When Michael McConville moved in, Divis seemed to him like a maze for rats, all corridors, stairwells, and ramps. The interior walls were cheap plasterboard, so you could hear every word of the dinnertime conversation of your neighbors. And because the exterior walls were built with nonporous concrete, condensation developed, and a malignant black mold began to creep up the walls and across the ceilings of the apartments. For a utopian architectural project, Divis had yielded dystopian results, becoming what one writer would later describe as a “slum in the sky.”

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.

It is hard to judge how seriously to take such folklore. Some of it was the kind of frisky sexualized rumor that occasionally circulates in times of violent upheaval. A society that had always been a bit fusty and repressed was suddenly splitting apart in the most cataclysmic fashion. The perceived threats of sexual liberation and paramilitary chaos converged in the mythical specter of a pair of leggy, rifle-toting libertines. But if this image was to some degree a battlefield fantasy, one of the key people projecting it was Dolours Price herself. “Would you like to be shown round our bomb factory?” she asked a visiting reporter in 1972,

The Price sisters were something else altogether. Dolours always dressed elegantly, her hair and makeup impeccable. “They were sassy girls,” McCann recalled. “They weren’t cold-eyed dialecticians or fanatics on the surface. There was a smile about them.” In those days, there was a discount store in Belfast called Crazy Prices, and, inevitably, Dolours and Marian became known among their friends as the Crazy Prices.

“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.”

As if to underline the futility of nonviolent resistance, when Eamonn McCann and a huge mass of peaceful protesters assembled in Derry one chilly Sunday afternoon in January 1972, British paratroopers opened fire on the crowd, killing thirteen men and wounding fifteen others. The soldiers subsequently claimed that they had come under fire and that they only shot protesters who were carrying weapons. Neither of these assertions turned out to be true. Bloody Sunday, as it would forever be known, was a galvanizing event for Irish republicanism. Dolours and Marian were in Dundalk when they heard reports of the massacre. The news filled them with an overpowering anger. In February, protesters set fire to the British embassy in Dublin. In March, London suspended the hated Unionist parliament in Northern Ireland and imposed direct rule from Westminster.

At a certain point, the family dogs, Provo and Sticky, vanished. Someone had shoved the animals down a rubbish chute, where they died.

British soldiers referred to Hughes’s operational area in West Belfast as “the reservation”—Indian country, where soldiers should tread carefully, if at all. Among themselves (and occasionally in the press) the soldiers would decry their adversary’s lack of humanity, saying, “These people are savages.” Hughes and his men were out there, invisible and silent, embedded in the community. At Palace Barracks, outside the city, where many of the soldiers were stationed, you could hear the bombs going off in Belfast at night. The windowpanes would shudder.

Initially, the techniques had been taught to British soldiers as a way to resist harsh interrogation and torture. But eventually these methods migrated from the portion of the curriculum that was concerned with defense into the portion that dealt with offense. They had been employed for nearly two decades against insurgents in British-controlled territories—in Palestine, Malaya, Kenya, Cyprus. But they had never been memorialized in any written manual and instead were passed down from one generation of interrogators to the next, an oral tradition of human cruelty.

There was one British officer, Ian Corden-Lloyd, who would come to the house in Andersonstown and chat with her. He must have known, or at least suspected, that she was herself a member of the IRA, but they would argue, amiably, about politics as if they were a couple of graduate students, rather than adversaries in a bloody guerrilla war. At one point, Corden-Lloyd told her that he would love to come back and see her in ten years’ time, “and we could all tell each other the whole truth.”

By electing this particular mode of protest, the Price sisters were invoking a long-standing tradition of Irish resistance. Dating back to the Middle Ages, fasting had been used by the Irish to express dissent or rebuke. It was a quintessential weapon of passive aggression. In a 1903 play about a poet in seventh-century Ireland who launched a hunger strike at the gates of the royal palace, W. B. Yeats described An old and foolish custom, that if a man Be wronged, or think that he is wronged, and starve Upon another’s threshold till he die, The common people, for all time to come, Will raise a heavy cry against that threshold.

Ulster Freedom Fighters.

History says, Don’t hope On this side of the grave But then, once in a lifetime The longed-for tidal wave Of justice can rise up And hope and history rhyme.

Eventually, on Good Friday, the parties emerged and announced that they had arrived at a pact to which all sides could agree—a mechanism to end the three-decade conflict. Northern Ireland would remain part of the United Kingdom, but with its own devolved assembly and close links to the Republic of Ireland. The agreement acknowledged that the majority of people on the island wanted a united Ireland—but also that a majority of people in the six counties favored remaining part of the United Kingdom. The key principle was “consent”: if, at some juncture, a majority of people in the North wanted to unite with Ireland, then the governments of the U.K. and Ireland would have a “binding obligation” to honor that choice. But until that time, Northern Ireland would remain part of the U.K., and Sinn Féin agreed to set aside its principle of abstention and allow its representatives to serve in the newly created assembly.

The Belfast Project, as it became known, seemed to address an obvious shortcoming in the Good Friday Agreement. In their effort to bring about peace, the negotiators had focused on the future rather than the past. The accord provided for the release of paramilitary prisoners, many of whom had committed atrocious acts of violence. But there was no provision for the creation of any sort of truth-and-reconciliation mechanism that might allow the people of Northern Ireland to address the sometimes murky and often painful history of what had befallen their country over the previous three decades.

The Troubles, by contrast, concluded in a stalemate. The Good Friday Agreement envisioned a “power sharing” arrangement. But there was a sense in which neither side had really emerged triumphant. There were some cosmetic changes: the RUC was rebranded the Police Service of Northern Ireland; the structural discrimination that the civil rights protests sought to challenge had mostly gone away. Northern Ireland had always been devoted to the theater of historical commemoration. But there was no formal process for attempting to figure out how to commemorate, or even to understand, the Troubles.

when he reflected on the notion that Adams might have cynically determined that a steady supply of martyrs was indispensable in launching Sinn Féin as a viable political party, O’Rawe was forced to concede a jarring possibility: were it not for that decision, the war might never have ended. As Ed Moloney subsequently wrote, “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.” To O’Rawe it seemed that anyone capable of playing such a long and calculating game and dispatching six men to an unnecessary death must be a genius of political strategy—but also a sociopath.

To Price, the Good Friday Agreement felt like an especially personal double cross. “The settlement betrayed what she had been born into,” her friend Eamonn McCann recalled. “It had a more intense and deep-seated effect on Dolours than it did on many other people.” She had set bombs and robbed banks and seen friends die and nearly died herself, in the expectation that these violent exertions would finally achieve the national liberation for which generations of her family had fought. “For what Sinn Féin has achieved today, I would not have missed a good breakfast,” she said in an interview on Irish radio. “Volunteers didn’t only die,” she pointed out. “Volunteers had to kill, as well, you know?”

There is a concept in psychology called “moral injury,” a notion, distinct from the idea of trauma, that relates to the ways in which ex-soldiers make sense of the socially transgressive things they have done during wartime. Price felt a sharp sense of moral injury: she believed that she had been robbed of any ethical justification for her own conduct. This sense of grievance was exacerbated by the fact that the man who steered republicanism on a path to peace was her own erstwhile friend and commanding officer, Gerry Adams. Adams had given her orders, orders that she faithfully obeyed, but now he appeared to be disowning the armed struggle in general, and Dolours in particular. It filled her with a terrible fury.

Now Price was having trouble reconciling herself to peace. Mackers had started a magazine called The Blanket, which featured writing by disaffected republicans, and Price became a regular contributor. Her columns often took the form of poison pen letters addressed directly to Adams. “What Gerry Adams is saying, and saying gently so as not to panic the grass-roots, is, ‘They will go away, you know,’ ” she wrote in 2004. “The IRA will disband…the guns will be sealed in concrete…A few will get the political jobs, others will get satisfactory jobs (community work and the like), some will get shops to run, taxis to drive, a racket here, a scam there. It is the way of the world.”

Whether we cremate a loved one or inter her bones, humans possess a deep-set instinct to mark death in some deliberate, ceremonial fashion. Perhaps the cruelest feature of forced disappearances as an instrument of war is that it denies the bereaved any such closure, relegating them to a permanent limbo of uncertainty. “You cannot mourn someone who has not died,”

Loyalist gangs, often operating with the tacit approval or outright logistical assistance of the British state, killed hundreds of civilians in an endless string of terror attacks. These victims were British subjects.

All those bright lines that bureaucrats and legal scholars draw to delimit the government’s monopoly on the legitimate use of force, those boundaries that are meant to separate order from barbarism, had been transgressed. “We were not there to act like an army unit,” one former British officer who served in the MRF later acknowledged. “We were there to act like a terror group.”

The Good Friday Agreement had contained a few specific clauses on criminal justice. There was a provision to free paramilitary prisoners who were being held at the time of the agreement, and under this framework, any sentence delivered in the future for Troubles-related crimes would be capped at two years. Beyond that, however, there were no suggestions in the peace agreement for how to address the crimes of the past. There was no mechanism through which amnesty might be granted in exchange for testimony. Nor would the kinds of murders that Scappaticci and Nelson engaged in—and the state facilitated and condoned—be prosecuted as war crimes, because, whatever the reality on the ground might have been, the Troubles was never declared a war. What this meant was that the many unsolved murders of the Troubles would remain open criminal cases, in which ex-paramilitaries and ex-soldiers might yet be prosecuted.

“The IRA imposes a code of silence akin to the concept of ‘omerta’ in the Mafia,” the brief noted. As such, people like Dolours Price were willing to participate in the oral history only with the assurance “that the interviews would be kept locked away.” In an affidavit, Moloney noted that “it is an offense punishable by death” for IRA members to reveal details of their paramilitary careers to outsiders.

And yet half of them were informers??? That's what y'all said in an earlier chapter...

Adams acknowledged that there was a “culture of concealment” in Irish life regarding the issue of sexual predation. But he was going public now, he said, to help “other families who are in the same predicament.” On the one hand, this was an astounding turn, and a window into how Adams became the cipher that he did: here was a man who had grown up in a penumbral world of secrets and who had cultivated the quick and unsentimental reflexes of a survivalist. At the same time, some observers detected in this jarring announcement the deft hand of public relations. 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 why come forward with the story of his father now, days after the exposure of his brother? As one political journalist in Belfast noted, “He must have known, and been advised by his media handlers, that it could move the story on from Liam.” Adams possessed an uncanny grasp of the metabolism of the news media. The new story “would provide a follow-up, give things a new twist,” perhaps even “attract sympathy for Adams.”

In the police station at Antrim, the cops asked Adams about the Boston College interviews. Presumably, they walked through the statements by Price and Hughes and others and spelled out what they knew about the structure of the Belfast Brigade. But Adams had a simple, implacable answer to all of 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. Describing his own theory of how best to survive under interrogation, Adams had once recalled the time he was arrested as a young man and questioned before being locked up on the Maidstone. That was the interview in which he stubbornly insisted that his name was not Gerry Adams. The whole pretense had been an obvious charade, he conceded later, but it was also “a crutch to withstand their inquisition.” To remain silent was the best policy, he had decided as a young man. “So even though they knew who I was, it was irrelevant. I couldn’t answer their questions, on the basis that I wasn’t who they said I was.”

Even as Sinn Féin had thrived as a political party, not just in Northern Ireland but in the Republic, and achieved stature and influence beyond the most ambitious imaginings of its leaders, the party’s fortunes still seemed tied, inextricably, to those of its charismatic president. Sinn Féin had plenty of young, polished representatives who, having grown up after the worst of the Troubles were over, bore no compromising taint of paramilitary violence. This new cohort did not lack for ambition. But they were unwilling, or unable, to shuffle the old men of the IRA off the stage.

“We cannot keep pretending forty years of cruel war, of loss, of sacrifice, of prison, of inhumanity, has not affected each and every one of us in heart and soul and spirit,” Price’s old friend Bernadette Devlin, who had led the student protests in the 1960s, said when the mourners reached the grave. “It broke our hearts and it broke our bodies. It changed our perspectives, and it makes every day hard.”

“All the main paramilitary groups operating during the period of the Troubles remain in existence,” the report announced, specifying that this included the Provisional IRA. The Provos continued to function, albeit in “much reduced form,” and still had access to weapons. Big Bobby Storey was right: they hadn’t gone away. Gerry Adams dismissed the report as “nonsense.” But it caused a firestorm. One claim Villiers made was that, in the view of rank-and-file Provos, the IRA’s Army Council—the seven-member leadership body that for decades directed the armed struggle—continues to control not just the IRA, but also Sinn Féin, “with an overarching strategy.” Secretly, behind the scenes, the army was still calling the shots. The report was careful to indicate that the organization 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.”

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. 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. 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.

“The existence and cohesion of these paramilitary groups since their cease-fires has played an important role in enabling the transition from extreme violence to political progress,” it asserted. This was a counterintuitive finding, and a subtle enough point that it was overlooked in the storm of press coverage that greeted the report. The continued existence of republican and loyalist outfits didn’t hurt the peace process—but helped it. It was because of the “authority” conferred by these persisting hierarchies that such groups were able to “influence, restrain and manage” their members, the report maintained, noting that there have been only “limited indications of dissent to date,” which were quickly dealt with “by the leadership.”

Who should be held accountable for a shared history of violence? It was a question that was dogging Northern Ireland as a whole.

Would the British soldiers who shot unarmed civilians on Bloody Sunday be subjected to the same justice? he asked. “Why is everybody not being treated equally for conflict-related offences?” Because there was never any mechanism established for dealing with the past, the official approach to decades-old atrocities was entirely ad hoc, which left everyone unhappy. There were inquests and investigations by the police ombudsman and special government inquiries. The past was big business for criminal justice. Every day, the Belfast papers carried reports of some new cold case that would now be reexamined. The PSNI had a “legacy” unit devoted exclusively to investigating Troubles-related crimes. It had a backlog of nearly a thousand cases. Even if one took for granted the good faith and intentions of the police—which many didn’t—there was no way to undertake such a project without being accused of bias.

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. But was that not itself a kind of bias? Was it possible to appropriately calibrate the number of investigations of republican murders with those of loyalist murders? Would anything but a perfect one-to-one ratio suffice? People in Northern Ireland talked about the danger of a “hierarchy of victims.” 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 cops to a higher standard than paramilitaries?

Must it be the case that how one perceives a tragedy will forever depend on where one sits? 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.

In one of his conversations with Anthony McIntyre, Brendan Hughes said something similar, in the form of a metaphor. Think of the armed struggle as the launch of a boat, Hughes said, “getting a hundred people to push this boat out. This boat is stuck in the sand, right, and get them to push the boat out and then the boat sailing off and leaving the hundred people behind, right. That’s the way I feel. The boat is away, sailing on the high seas, with all the luxuries that it brings, and the poor people that launched the boat are left sitting in the muck and the dirt and the shit and the sand, behind.” It is hard not to sympathize with Hughes emotionally. But politically, it would be folly not to sympathize with Adams. He may have possessed a sociopathic instinct for self-preservation, and there is something chilling about how Adams, secure in his place on the boat, does not cast so much as a backward glance at those comrades, like Hughes, who are left behind. But, really, it was history that was leaving Hughes behind. Northern Ireland had suffered enough. Whatever callous motivations Adams might have possessed, and whatever deceptive machinations he might have employed, he steered the IRA out of a bloody and intractable conflict and into a brittle but enduring peace.

In the long run, the war may be won by demography. By some estimates, Catholics may outnumber Protestants in Northern Ireland as soon as the year 2021. This doesn’t necessarily mean that the British will soon be voted off the island. After the 2008 fiscal crisis and the subsequent recession in Dublin, some polls found that most Catholics in the North preferred to remain part of the United Kingdom.

Since the Good Friday Agreement, the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic has seemed, at times, to have virtually disappeared. The soldiers and sandbagged checkpoints are long gone, and every day, tens of thousands of people and countless trucks full of goods crisscross the national boundary in one direction or the other. Northern Ireland is able to enjoy the benefits of being part of the United Kingdom and part of Europe at the same time. But Brexit, inevitably, complicates that split identity, and, depending on how the measure is implemented, it might ultimately force Northern Ireland to make a choice.

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 bedeviled Dolours Price and Brendan Hughes, but in his final years, Adams seemed free of any such tortured introspection.

This is not a history book but a work of narrative nonfiction. No dialogue or details have been invented or imagined; in instances where I describe the inner thoughts of characters, it is because they have related those thoughts to me, or to others, as detailed in the notes. Because I have elected to tell this particular story, there are important aspects of the Troubles that are not addressed. The book hardly mentions loyalist terrorism, to take just one example. If you’re feeling whataboutish, I would direct you to one of the many excellent books cited in the notes that address the Troubles more broadly or your favored subject in particular.