Say Nothing by Patrick Radden Keefe

The masked figure is a native of Belfast and the child of a family dedicated to the IRA and the republican cause. Her name is Dolours Price, and she came of age at the height of the Irish Troubles.

In 1969 this young student from Queen’s University joined a civil rights march from Belfast to Derry. Catholic and Protestant together, the peaceful demonstrators were set upon by a mob who attacked them viciously with sticks and stones.

Instigated from a distance by the Machiavellian preacher Ian Paisley, this unprovoked violence caused young Dolours to abandon all hope of achieving sorely-needed social change in her community through peaceful means.

The choice she made to join the Belfast Brigade of the Provisional IRA led her to dark places as she served in a top secret group called the Unknowns.

Her duties included driving people to their deaths. She was twenty-one when she and two other operatives drove Jean McConville, a widowed mother of ten, across the border into the Republic of Ireland. In County Louth, fellow members of the IRA executed Jean and buried her in a shallow unmarked grave. By the time the body washed up after a storm three decades later, Dolours Price would be dead.

Caught with the help of informers after setting four car bombs in London in 1973, Dolours was sentenced to thirty years. She and her jailed IRA comrades considered themselves political prisoners and not criminals. In a bid to be returned to Northern Ireland to serve her sentence, Dolours went on hunger strike in Brixton Prison, employing “the weapon of the powerless,” as Keefe describes it. She persisted until she was violently force fed. And the force feeding persisted until the medical establishment deemed it morally wrong. A small victory for Dolours, this ironically set the stage for the dramatic martyrdom of Bobby Sands eight years later.

Boston College was founded by Jesuits in 1863 “to educate the children of poor immigrants who had fled the potato famine in Ireland.” From 2001, the Treasure Room of its John J. Burns Library became the repository of a more recent Irish historical archive. Conceived in the nineties and begun in 2001, The Belfast Project consists of taped interviews with people directly involved in the Troubles. They agreed to spill long-held secrets one condition: that their words would not be made public while they lived.

As the author explains in this interview, the journalists and academics who undertook that solemn promise were powerless to keep it. In 2013, the library was served with a subpoena. Two detectives from the Serious Crimes Unit of the Police Service of Northern Ireland flew to Boston to pick up the tapes. They would use them to investigate murder.

When Gerry Adams, who had given Dolours Price the order to execute Jean McConnville, denied ever having been involved in the IRA, she was deeply disillusioned. As he and other Sinn Fein members turned from guns to politics, they gave up the overriding IRA goal of unifying Northern Ireland with the Republic. This deprived fellow IRA operatives of moral justification for the terrible things they had done — they felt their sacrifices in the name of loyalty had failed to achieve their aims.

Radden Keefe says in the above interview that this dissonance persuaded Dolours Price to break the hard code of silence. In 2010, she gave a Belfast Project interview in which she admitted her involvement in Jean McConville’s death. Did the young executioner foresee that the social services would ignore those orphans for months? Or that the neighbours would shun the kids as well? Had she known, it would likely have made no difference. IRA volunteers had sworn loyalty to the cause. Foot soldiers had to obey orders — or be executed themselves.

Why was Jean targeted in the first place? One sore point seems to have been that she married across the religious divide. It was said that those neighbours who failed to help her children had once seen her step into the street to comfort a dying British soldier who was shot on her doorstep. The IRA claimed she was an informer, but solid evidence was never found. And though her disappearance was reported to police, the RUC made little effort to locate her.

Northern Ireland remains deeply sectarian. Today, 23 years after the Good Friday peace accord of 1998 peace accord, 90% of primary students in Belfast still attend segregated schools. Barbed wire and metal “peace walls” demarcating neighbourhoods still stand. Recent incidents of violence suggest that the UK’s ill-advised decision to pursue Brexit is predictably stirring things up once again.

While giving a speech at a Sinn Fein rally in 1995, Gerry Adams responded to a heckler dissatisfied with the move from gun to ballot box by saying that The IRA hadn’t gone away. Nineteen years later, IRA enforcer Bobby Storey echoed his comment. The children of Jean McConnville were chilled all over again, taking this as a threat against telling their story.

Throughout its history, the IRA was hampered by informers in its ranks. In 2002, operatives broke into Castlereagh Barracks and “made off with a precious trove of highly classified information — notebooks and files containing details and codenames of informants working inside the IRA and other paramilitary groups.”

At the height of the troubles, the IRA robbed banks and post office trucks to help fund their movement. In 2004, while the IRA was purportedly decommissioning its weapons, the Northern Bank was robbed of twenty-six million pounds, in “the biggest heist in UK history.” As Raddon Keefe comments, “For critics of Sinn Fein, the robbery solidified the impression that the IRA had morphed into a mafia organization.”

In 2009, two soldiers were shot as they stepped out of Massareene Barracks to receive a pizza delivery. Two other soldiers, a young Irish lad and a Polish immigrant, were also wounded. The planner was Marian Price, sister of Dolours. Then fifty-nine, she was not yet ready to give up on killing, even as she acknowledged that her “recalcitrance on this matter was fundamentally anti-democratic” and “only a tiny minority of people in Northern Ireland were supportive of further bloodshed in the name of expelling the British.”

This masterful work of journalism is a page-turner as well as an enlightening history course. Raddon explains the underlying factors leading to the conundrum of the Troubles. The reader sees how governments in Britain, Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland all faced near-impossible choices as the bitter and intractable politico-religious conflict escalated. Only the first four fifths of the Raddon’s book comprise the story; in the rest, the author lays out his extensive research notes, bibliography and index.

Going beyond the particularity of the Irish Troubles, the author sheds light on the problem of religious, political and ethnic absolutism and the internecine struggles they generate. Old attitudes are not easily changed, and old enmities have a way of lingering. Yet, as the Good Friday Accord shows, compromise can be achieved.

The author also discusses the problem of the “moral injury,” felt by people (usually in combat) who violate moral convictions they hold dear. In his review of Say Nothing, Mark Melton summarizes the regret Dolours Price experienced. For her, the Good Friday Agreement was a failure, because it “meant the whole of Ireland would not unify.'“ This deprived her of “ethical justification” for the socially transgressive acts she had committed for the cause. Melton comments that “when people use ends-justify-the-means logic, the means become intolerable when the ends become improbable.”

By nationality, Patrick Radden Keefe is not Irish. His mother is Australian and he grew up in Boston. With no direct experience of the Troubles, he brings a balanced perspective, providing facts and details on many aspects of the intractable conflict that dogged Northern Ireland for so long, and has still not entirely gone away.