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

by Patrick Radden Keefe

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.”