Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland (Book) (2019)

Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland, by Patrick Radden Keefe

New York: Doubleday, February 2019

List of main characters:

Jean McConville

The McConville children: Anne, Robert, Arthur (aka Archie), Helen, Agnes, Michael (aka Mickey), Thomas (aka Tucker), Susan, Billy (twin), Jim (twin)

Dolours Price

Marian Price

Stephen Rea, Dolours’s husband

Gerry Adams, leader of the Irish Republican Army (IRA) and Sinn Féin

Brendan Hughes, IRA soldier and hunger striker

Bobby Sands, first of ten hunger strikers to die in 1981; elected to Parliament while on hunger strike

I wanted to read Say Nothing after hearing how the author, Patrick Radden Keefe, described his experience writing the book. Keefe was investigating the abduction and disappearance of Jean McConville, a thirty-eight-year-old widowed mother of ten, that had never been solved. In the course of writing about this crime, which took place in November or December 1972, during Northern Ireland’s Troubles, he had learned the identity of McConville’s killer.

I was intrigued.

But the book is more than a real-life murder mystery; it is also an account of rather recent historical events. It examines the personal histories of many of the republican soldiers who fought to remove the English from Irish soil—and in more detail than I had thought after hearing what Keefe had to say about writing the book. These close examinations are necessary because the story about Jean McConville’s disappearance is intimately linked with the Irish Republican Army (IRA).

I would have sworn that I heard a National Public Radio (NPR) interview with Patrick Radden Keefe describing what it was like to write the book, but I couldn’t find a link. However, a short article, “How an Author Accidentally Solved an Infamous Murder Case While Writing a Book About It,” from Time magazine, comes pretty close. Click here to read it.

For me, and I would assume other fans of film noir, the story that Keefe tells is fascinating also because he uses a lot of noir terminology. Some of the defining characteristics of film noir—femme fatale, betrayal, angst, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), fate—are part of this story about Jean McConville and members of the IRA.

The Price sisters, Dolours and Marian, were two of the most infamous IRA foot soldiers. They were members of a splinter group called the Unknowns, described by Keefe as “a handpicked team that did dangerous, secretive, sometimes unsavory work” (page 92). As just one example, Dolours and Marian were responsible for, and arrested in connection with, the March 8, 1973, car bombings in London. They had many sympathizers in Ireland, where their violent exploits made them legendary: They were female war heroes. Keefe calls the two sisters femmes fatale:

Stories about the Price sisters [Dolours and Marian] began to circulate among British troops stationed in Belfast and to find their way into the accounts of visiting war correspondents. They developed an outsize reputation as deadly femme[s] fatale who would venture into the mean streets of Belfast with an assault rifle hidden “down a bell-bottomed trouser leg.” Marian was said to be an expert sniper and was referred to, among British squaddies, as “the Widowmaker.” Dolours would become known in the press as “one of the most dangerous young women in Ulster.” (page 46)

Dolours and Marian Price were glamourized for their lifestyle and for the work they did for their country. The fact that their work caused such misery was minimized. The misery didn’t fit the legend growing up around them, and it didn’t suit the purposes of the IRA.

In addition to car bombings and other acts of general mayhem, Dolours Price was often responsible for delivering IRA members who had violated the IRA’s strict codes of conduct to their executioners. Transgressors were put on trial by the IRA, and a guilty verdict almost always meant a death sentence. One of Dolours’s friends and fellow IRA member, Joe Lynskey, had ordered an IRA underling to shoot and kill his lover’s husband. This “extracurricular” use of force, and acting without any orders, had to be punished. Lynskey was found guilty of his crime, and he seemed to accept the verdict as though fate had ordained it. Keefe describes Dolours Price’s role in carrying out the verdict and uses the word fate to describe Lynskey’s final day:

. . . Dolours Price arrived at Lynskey’s sister’s house to take him across the border. She did not tell Lynskey that he was being summoned to his execution. She said there was a meeting in the Republic that he needed to attend.

                Lynskey descended the stairs, freshly bathed and shaven and clutching an overnight bag, as if he were leaving for a weekend in the country. They got into the car and drove south toward the Republic. Lynskey did not say anything much, but Price realized that he knew exactly where they were going. It was just the two of them in the car. He was stronger than she was; he could have overpowered her. But instead he sat there meekly, holding his little bag in his lap. At one point, he tried to explain to her what had happened, and she said, “I don’t want to know, Joe. I don’t want to know. I just have this very difficult thing to do.”

                He was sitting in the back seat, and she looked at him in the rearview mirror. I’ll take him to the ferry, she thought. I’ll take him to the ferry and say he ran off. He could escape to England and never come back. But instead she kept driving. Why doesn’t he jump out of the car? she wondered. Why doesn’t he smack me on the head and run away? Why doesn’t he do something to save himself? But as she drove on, she realized that he could not act to save himself for the same reason that she could not act to save him. Their dedication to the movement would not allow it. She had vowed to obey all orders, and Lynskey, it seemed, had chosen to accept his fate. . . . (page 94)

The violence, the Troubles, in Northern Ireland took its toll on the region’s inhabitants. Jean McConville was depressed after her husband’s death, which occurred against the backdrop of the unrest and the fighting. Her disappearance would exact a heavy toll on her children, who spent much of their childhood trying to avoid danger and abuse. Most of their neighbors also suffered from the constant anxiety of living under siege. Keefe describes the stress that was well known at the time:

. . . Jean McConville, who had been delicate by temperament to begin with, fell into a heavy depression after her husband’s death. “She had sort of given up,” her daughter Helen later recalled. Jean did not want to get out of bed and seemed to subsist on cigarettes and pills. Doctors in Belfast had taken to prescribing “nerve tablets”—sedatives and tranquilizers−to their patients, many of whom found that they were either catatonically numb or crying uncontrollably, unable to get a handle on their emotions. Tranquilizer use was higher in Northern Ireland than anywhere else in the United Kingdom. In some later era, the condition would likely be described as post-traumatic stress, but one contemporary book called it “the Belfast syndrome,” a malady that was said to result from “living with constant terror, where the enemy is not easily identifiable and the violence is indiscriminate and arbitrary.” Doctors found, paradoxically, that the people most prone to this type of anxiety were not the active combatants, who were out on the street and had a sense of agency, but the women and children stuck sheltering behind closed doors. At night, through the thin walls of their apartment in Divis Flats, the McConville children would hear their mother crying. (page 52)

Of course, the combatants themselves also suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Keefe describes what life was like for many of the IRA members when the fighting came to an end. For Dolours Price, who was said to have led such a glamorous life of rebellion and adventure, had to wrestle with her past, too:

. . . [Doulors Price] was troubled by her experiences as a young woman—by things she had done to others, and to herself. Many of her old comrades were suffering from PTSD, flashing back to nightmarish encounters from decades earlier, waking with a start in a cold sweat. From time to time, when Price was driving her car with her sons in the back seat, she would glance up at the rearview mirror and, instead of Danny or Oscar, see her dead comrade Joe Lynskey staring back at her. One day, during a lecture at Trinity on political prisoners, Price stood up in a fury and began to rattle off the names of republican hunger strikers, before storming out of the classroom. She never came back. (page 253)

Keefe also describes how these symptoms of PTSD were exacerbated by the letdown of the peace process. Many IRA fighters felt betrayed by the political wing of the IRA, Sinn Féin, and by its leader, Gerry Adams. They wanted to be able to justify their use of violence, but they often felt that they had fought for nothing at all because Sinn Féin had agreed to terms that allowed the British to remain on Irish soil.

Accountability in wartime is a very difficult thing to come by. Many in the IRA and in the civilian population became informants for the British. The level of betrayal and intrigue became increasingly dangerous if people decided to work as double or even triple agents. Being an informer was considered especially egregious by the IRA. Accusations about being an informer for the British got Jean McConville kidnapped and murdered. But both sides were playing at betrayal, at enormous costs:

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 [IRA member and double agent] efforts saved 180 lives. But they allowed that this number was a “guesstimate,” and this sort of thinking can degenerate pretty quickly into a conjectural mathematics of means and ends. Scappaticci would ultimately be linked to as many as fifty murders. If a spy takes fifty lives but saves some larger number, can that countenance his actions? This kind of logic is seductive, but perilous. You start out running numbers in your head, and pretty soon you are sanctioning mass murder. (page 273)

The end of Keefe’s book is not just a neat wrap-up of a murder mystery. He gives some connections to the present day, with a brief discussion of Brexit and how resolving it might affect Ireland and Northern Ireland. And he draws some parallels to the concept of radicalization:

In my career as a journalist, I [Keefe] had never written about the Troubles, or felt any particular urge to do so, until January 2013, when Dolours Price died and I read her obituary in The New York Times. The article related the dramatic contours of her biography but also mentioned the battle, which was then still brewing, over the secret archive at Boston College. One theme that I had become fascinated with as a journalist was collective denial: the stories that communities tell themselves in order to cope with tragic or transgressive events. I became intrigued by the idea that an archive of the personal reminiscences of ex-combatants might be so explosive: what was it about these accounts that was so threatening in the present day? In the intertwining lives of Jean McConville, Dolours Price, Brendan Hughes, and Gerry Adams, I saw an opportunity to tell a story about how people become radicalized in their uncompromising devotion to a cause, and about how individuals—and a whole society—make sense of political violence once they have passed through the crucible and finally have time to reflect. (pages 339–340)

This paragraph really struck me because it seems radicalization isn’t such a new phenomenon. The term itself may be used today in a new way, in the context of terrorism, and the methods of radicalization may be a bit different because of the pervasiveness of the Internet and social media, but radicalization itself is really nothing new at all.

For more about the secret archive at Boston College that Patrick Radden Keefe alludes to in the quotation above, click on the following links:

◊ How Boston College’s Oral History of the Troubles Fell Victim to an International Murder Investigation

◊ Boston Tapes: Ex-IRA ManLoses Fight over Secret Tapes

◊ The Closure of the Boston College Troubles Archive Is Historical Loss

Or read Keefe’s book!

It is easy to feel empathy for almost all the main characters in this nonfictional story. Patrick Radden Keefe treats all of them fairly. Even Dolours Price, who worked in one of the most violent and secretive factions of the IRA, devoted herself to a cause that was very personal for her. Dolours spent some of her childhood tending her Aunt Bridie, who was blinded and lost both hands when a bomb she was making blew up prematurely. Dolours was intimately familiar with violence and its consequences from an early age.

You can call violence what you want—World War II, civil action, the Troubles—but it still leaves people emotionally scarred and traumatized. Keefe’s book is worth a read not just for the murder mystery aspect of Jean McConville’s story but also for the way it reminds us—reminded me—that violence, in any time and by any method, could be just a heartbeat away.

Part of the book’s title, Say Nothing, is a reference to the poem “Whatever You Say, Say Nothing,” by Seamus Heaney. Click here to read the poem and some interpretation of its meaning, part by part.