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

by Patrick Radden Keefe

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?