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

by Patrick Radden Keefe

press became particularly fixated on Dolours and Marian. They were dubbed the “Sisters of Terror” and depicted as hugely dangerous. To The Times, Dolours became a paradigm of political radicalism and countercultural instability, with her “enthusiasm for the wider concept of violent world revolution and support for the diverse aims of Che Guevara, the Black Panthers and the Palestinian guerrillas.” She

The tabloid drew a direct line from the Price sisters to Leila Khaled, the Palestinian hijacker, and diagnosed the violence of these women as a dangerous by-product of feminism—“a lethal liberation.”

There were vastly more Irish Americans than there were people in Ireland itself. This demographic anomaly was a testament to centuries of migration caused by poverty, famine, and discrimination, and there was strong support for the cause of Irish independence among the Irish in America.

If an agent is a murderer, and his handlers know that he is murdering people, does that not make the handlers—and, as such, the state itself—complicit? British Army sources would subsequently claim that Scappaticci’s efforts saved 180 lives. But

British authorities would ever really get to the bottom of the Stakeknife conspiracy, because to do so would thoroughly implicate the British state.