posted on 01 Jul 2020

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

It’s many years since I last read anything to do with the Troubles in Northern Ireland. In the 80s I read quite widely on the subject, but almost entirely with the aim of gaining a better political understanding of the situation. I don’t remember reading anything that I felt likely to return to because it also had real and lasting literary merit. Perhaps Eamonn McCann’s War and an Irish Town. Perhaps David Beresford’s Ten Dead Men: The Story of the 1981 Irish Hunger Strike. Perhaps the later Rebel Hearts: Journeys Within the IRA’s Soul by Kevin Toolis.

But at the time, none of these were books to read for pleasure, exactly. I am, after all, talking about a period just a decade or so after the Birmingham pub bombings of the 21st November 1974, when bombs planted by the IRA in The Mulberry Bush (at the foot of the Rotunda) and The Tavern in the Town on New Street, killed 21 people and caused horrific injuries to a further 182. No one who lived through that time and the IRA’s mainland bombing campaign will ever forget it. I worked a few hundred yards from the pubs in question and I still remember going into work the following morning. It was a Friday. What now seems impossible to believe, however, is that on that morning I was unaware of the previous evening’s carnage. We didn’t have a TV set or a phone and had neglected to put the radio on for the news. In more ways than one it seems a lifetime ago but the memory still makes my stomach churn.

Anyway, when I saw an advert for the book that won the 2019 Orwell Prize for political writing, Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland by US journalist Patrick Radden Keefe, I was sufficiently intrigued to buy a copy. I’m so glad I did.

Keefe’s book, the fruit of six years’ work, is extraordinarily ambitious. What he sets out to do merits some explanation. It isn’t an in-depth political analysis of the Troubles. Countless other books have done that. This is narrative non-fiction of rare quality. It is a cliché to say that at their best such books are like reading fiction, but it is nonetheless true: this approach to history borrows heavily from the repertoire of novel writing, with an emphasis on dramatic structure, narrative momentum and fast-paced story-telling underpinned by profound research. It seems a form at which US writers excel.

Keefe tackles the Troubles by focusing on a microcosm of events and people, using this initially close and intimate focus to set the Troubles in their wider context and to give a huge and complex subject clear narrative structure.

The key figures come from a handful of Belfast streets. Brendan Hughes, the Officer Commanding of the IRA’s Belfast Brigade and one of the architects of the mainland bombing campaign which saw the first car bombs in London in March 1973; two out of four bombs exploded, one outside the Old Bailey and one outside the Ministry of Agriculture. The Price sisters, Dolours and Marian, the first women to join the IRA and part of the active service unit that made that first bombing run to London. Arrested for their part in the operation – it now seems likely it was compromised almost from the outset by informers – they were also the first women IRA hunger strikers. Former president of Sinn Féin, Gerry Adams, whom Keefe claims was Belfast IRA Commander in the 70s, as well as directly responsible for The Unknowns, the IRA’s ultra-secret squad that took care of discipline, executions and disappearances – charges that Adams denies to this day. Widowed mother of ten, Jean McConville, abducted and murdered by the IRA in 1972 as a suspected informant, her body probably disposed of by The Unknowns. It was found by walkers in 2003, over fifty years later and fifty-odd miles away at Shelling Hill Beach in County Louth. These and others are at the core of Keefe’s account.

One is struck immediately by how young they were. Brendan Hughes was twenty-five. Dolours Price was twenty-two when her active service unit bombed the Old Bailey; sister Marian was just nineteen. Adams was twenty-three when he was first interned at Long Kesh maximum security prison. Even Jean McConville was only thirty-eight when she was murdered, leaving ten orphaned children struggling to keep hold of their council flat in the labyrinth of the  Divis high-rise blocks. They were separated and placed in ‘care’. All of the institutional homes they entered were run by religious orders and physical and sexual abuse were commonplace. All of the children experienced abuse of one form or another.

I found the account of the earlier years of the Troubles – say up to about 1976 or so – particularly interesting because although I lived through those years I was little more than a teenager myself and didn't consider it important to follow the news from Northern Ireland. Reviewing the book for The New York Times Roddy Doyle says that it is full of the language and the names of his youth – and I felt exactly the same way. In my case, however, they are names and language I chose to ignore and in that sense I and others like me were amongst the audience the IRA had in mind when it decided to take the war to the mainland. Dolours Price, for instance, thought that it was all too easy for British people to ignore the spectacle of the Irish working class murdering each other in an effort to overthrow British rule. ‘Half of this is their war,’ she would say, ‘and it should be fought on their territory.’

Anyone who has read almost anything about the Troubles will be familiar with the dreadful intimacy of sectarian conflict, a level of cruelty and inhumanity all the more pronounced for its being conducted between neighbours, sometimes in huddles of grimy streets scarcely a few miles square. Indeed, one would think there couldn’t possibly be anything new to say.

But this isn’t so and Keefe’s book is explosive for two reasons. First, because in addition to Keefe’s own immense research it draws on hundreds of hours of interviews given by paramilitaries from both sides to the Belfast Project – the name that for nearly a decade served to shroud Boston College’s Oral History Archive of the Troubles in secrecy. Secrecy was essential both to secure participation and to preserve the lives of those who contributed interviews. The original concept was that the archive would be sealed until after the deaths of those interviewed. This material, or what Keefe recounts of it, is genuinely jaw-dropping. And anyone with an interest in the ethics of oral history as an academic research discipline will find this aspect of the book of profound interest for other reasons too, because the interviews were eventually subject to subpoena by the Police Service of Northern Ireland and used in legal prosecutions. It turned out that the rather ill-conceived legal protections Boston College offered its interviewees had no legal standing. Indeed, they weren’t even clear and even amongst the small group of staff who did know of the archive and its aims they were misunderstood or miscommunicated.

And second, because Keefe has found a new way to tell this tragic story and his gripping narrative gives a human face to every aspect of the Troubles. I don’t know when last I read something so compelling, so rich in detail, so revelatory. It may well be the first genuinely great book to come out of the Troubles and I think Orwell would have agreed that it is a mighty achievement in political writing.

 

Alun Severn

July 2020