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.