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

Patrick Radden Keefe’s Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland interprets the Irish “Troubles” in which clashing state and paramilitary forces in Northern Ireland fought an unofficial ethno-nationalist war. Though the monograph is a work of non-fiction investigative journalism, it unfolds like a murder mystery, focusing on the case of Jean McConville, a widowed mother of 10 that the Irish Republican Army (IRA) abducted and secretly killed in 1972. The complicated socio-politics of the Troubles, however, do not lend themselves to a straightforward plot. The history is complicated by a culture of silence, secrecy, and the muddy inaccuracies of human memory, all of which Keefe explores throughout the book. The New York Times named Say Nothing one of the “10 Best Books of 2019.”

Keefe contextualizes the McConville case within a much more comprehensive account of the Troubles and their aftermath. Between 1968 and 1998, republican revolutionaries in Northern Ireland (often working-class Catholics) violently pursued the status of a united Ireland free from British oversight. British state entities and loyalist paramilitaries (often working-class Protestants) defended the counties of Northern Ireland as British, not Irish, entities. Though Keefe never endorses a particular perspective, he focuses on the personnel and progress within the Provisional Irish Republican Army (The “Provos”) and British intelligence most acutely. The local police in cities such as Derry and Belfast, as well as loyalist paramilitary organizations, also fought in the conflict but remain on the periphery of Keefe’s storyline.  

The book revisits the most iconic and violent episodes of the conflict, such as the “Bloody Sunday” massacring of peaceful republican protestors, the “Bloody Friday” IRA retaliatory bombing raid, the notorious car-bombing of London, and the republican prison hunger strikes, alongside anecdotes from the McConvilles and others that saw and suffered from the violence more privately. Keefe derives detail from wide-ranging personal accounts, an approach that allows him to transmit the ideology and infrastructure behind IRA and British missions. Of particular interest are the Belfast IRA leader and eventual politician Gerry Adams, IRA Officer Commanding in Belfast Brendan Hughes, and two lethal subordinates: sisters Dolours and Marian Price. When diplomats negotiated the 1998 “Good Friday Agreement” that officially ended the Troubles, Adams emerged as a celebrated peace broker who avidly denied any former involvement in the IRA, Hughes and Dolours Price suffered trauma, guilt, and resentment, and Marian remained committed to outdated violent revolution. Northern Ireland remained a United Kingdom nation, but with an independent assembly and closer ties to the Republic of Ireland. Keefe explores the divisive aftermath in the story of these high-profile characters.

All the while, Keefe unfolds the story of the McConvilles in a timeline fraught with uncertainties and rumors. Jean lost her husband and fell into depression and desperation; the IRA detained and released her; she comforted a dying British soldier to the great chagrin of neighbors; the IRA “buried” her under the assumption that she had been an informer. After her disappearance, her children struggled to provide for themselves and endured institutional abuse at various homes and schools for state wards. Even into adulthood, they remained unable to reconcile what became of their mother, many of them experiencing addiction and mental health trauma in their endeavor to heal. A binational state commission eventually recovered Jean’s remains, but as of the book’s 2019 publication date, the finer details of her wartime activity and murder remain unknown. 

The book introduces its major remaining storyline in a prologue and reprises it in the book’s final section. After the Troubles, historians from Boston College and Ireland built a secret archive of oral histories with former paramilitary volunteers. Involvement in these organizations continued to warrant arrest and sentencing, so participants signed contracts to protect their identities until their deaths. The contracts did not hold up in court, and Irish detectives were able to collect several interview tapes and build a criminal case relating to the disappearance of Jean McConville. They questioned Gerry Adams and charged another former IRA leader, but both walked free. The case reveals the connections between large IRA infrastructures and everyday civilians.

The book ruminates on the elusive and subjective nature of historical truth and personal memory. It grapples with the justifiability of violence and magnitude of moral responsibility. In the end, Keefe paints the Troubles as a personal and international tragedy, unable to be easily reconciled.