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

by Patrick Radden Keefe

To be sure, there was a doomed romance in the notion of republican failure, a poetry in those archetypes of futility. But Gerry Adams was not a romantic.

The foot soldiers of the Provos had been beaten by loyalists, shot at by the army, and tortured by the police.

The interviewer asked him if political change could happen without violence. “I don’t know,” Rea said. “Does it ever?”

“Physical force is a sign of the desperation of the poor.”

“They bomb factories and shout about unemployment,”

The IRA issued a statement, eloquently capturing the strategic advantage of terrorism: “Today we were unlucky, but remember, we only have to be lucky once. You will have to be lucky always.”

There were vastly more Irish Americans than there were people in Ireland itself.

Lately he had taken to joking, darkly, that, like the weapons of the IRA, he had been used and then discarded—“decommissioned.”

Hughes hated the Good Friday Agreement. He joked that GFA, the acronym by which the accord had become known, actually stood for Got Fuck All.

The tout occupies an outsize place in the Irish imagination, as a folk devil—a paragon of treachery.

The biggest challenge of running touts in Northern Ireland was the petri-dish dimensions of the place.

admire the petri-dish metaphor

Heaney grew up harvesting peat as a boy on his family’s farm. He once described the bogs of Ireland as “a landscape that remembered everything that had happened in and to it.”

During the years when they were compiling the oral history archive, they had never believed that British authorities might seriously endeavor to access the recordings.

Hmm. Seems like an oversight

In fact, there were more peace walls now than there had ever been at the height of the Troubles.

more than 90 percent of children in Northern Ireland continued to attend segregated elementary schools.

Over the decades since he disappeared, Wilson’s family had often visited that beach, little knowing.

for Adams, democratic action “was a way of liquidating the otherwise unrecoverable political capital amassed by the gunmen.”