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NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NOW AN FX LIMITED SERIES STREAMING ON HULU • NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER • From the author of Empire of Pain—a stunning, intricate narrative about a notorious killing in Northern Ireland and its devastating repercussions. One of The New York Times’s 20 Best Books of the 21st Century • A Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction Book of the Century • A Los Angeles Times Best Nonfiction Book of the Last 30 Years “Masked intruders dragged Jean McConville, a 38-year-old widow and mother of 10, from her Belfast home in 1972. In this meticulously reported book—as finely paced as a novel—Keefe uses McConville’s murder as a prism to tell the history of the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Interviewing people on both sides of the conflict, he transforms the tragic damage and waste of the era into a searing, utterly gripping saga.” —New York Times Book Review “Reads like a novel… . Keefe is … a master of narrative nonfiction… . An incredible story.”—Rolling Stone A Best Book of the Year: The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, TIME, NPR, and more! Jean McConville’s abduction was one of the most notorious episodes of the vicious conflict known as The Troubles. Everyone in the neighborhood knew the I.R.A. was responsible. But in a climate of fear and paranoia, no one would speak of it. In 2003, five years after an accord brought an uneasy peace to Northern Ireland, a set of human bones was discovered on a beach. McConville’s children knew it was their mother when they were told a blue safety pin was attached to the dress—with so many kids, she had always kept it handy for diapers or ripped clothes. Patrick Radden Keefe’s mesmerizing book on the bitter conflict in Northern Ireland and its aftermath uses the McConville case as a starting point for the tale of a society wracked by a violent guerrilla war, a war whose consequences have never been reckoned with. The brutal violence seared not only people like the McConville children, but also I.R.A. members embittered by a peace that fell far short of the goal of a united Ireland, and left them wondering whether the killings they committed were not justified acts of war, but simple murders. From radical and impetuous I.R.A. terrorists such as Dolours Price, who, when she was barely out of her teens, was already planting bombs in London and targeting informers for execution, to the ferocious I.R.A. mastermind known as The Dark, to the spy games and dirty schemes of the British Army, to Gerry Adams, who negotiated the peace but betrayed his hardcore comrades by denying his I.R.A. past—Say Nothing conjures a world of passion, betrayal, vengeance, and anguish.
Summary
Book One — The Clear, Clean, Sheer Thing
Chapter 1 — “An Abduction”
Jean McConville, a widowed mother of ten living in Divis Flats in West Belfast, is taken from her home in December 1972 by a masked group. Her children witness the abduction, and some recognize the attackers as neighbors. The chapter establishes the central mystery of the book: Jean’s disappearance, the terror imposed on civilians, and the culture of silence surrounding paramilitary violence.
Main point: The Troubles are introduced not through ideology first, but through a family trauma: a mother is taken, and her children are left behind.
Chapter 2 — “Albert’s Daughters”
The chapter shifts to Dolours and Marian Price, daughters of Albert Price, a committed Irish republican. Their household is saturated with IRA memory, martyrdom, prison stories, and reverence for sacrifice. Dolours grows up admiring republican heroes but initially believes nonviolent civil rights activism might achieve justice. The chapter culminates in the 1969 civil rights march from Belfast to Derry and the violent ambush at Burntollet Bridge, where loyalist attackers beat nonviolent marchers while police largely fail to intervene.
Main point: Dolours Price’s radicalization begins with inherited republican mythology, but Burntollet convinces her that peaceful protest may be futile.
Chapter 3 — “Evacuation”
This chapter gives Jean McConville’s background. Born Protestant, she marries Arthur McConville, a Catholic former British soldier, creating a “mixed” marriage that exposes her to sectarian hostility. As violence explodes in Belfast in 1969, the McConvilles are forced from East Belfast and become refugees in their own city. They eventually move into Divis Flats, a modernist housing project that becomes dangerous, overcrowded, militarized, and dominated by the conflict. The chapter also shows how the British Army initially appears to Catholics as protection but soon comes to be seen as an occupying force.
Main point: Jean’s family becomes trapped between sectarian displacement, poverty, militarization, and the collapsing civic order of Belfast.
Chapter 4 — “An Underground Army”
Dolours Price joins the Provisional IRA after losing faith in nonviolence. The chapter explains the split between the Official IRA and the Provisional IRA, with the Provisionals emphasizing armed struggle and defense of Catholic neighborhoods. Dolours resists being confined to women’s auxiliary roles and insists on becoming a full volunteer. She and Marian become useful couriers and operatives because women attract less suspicion at checkpoints. The chapter also introduces the romance and discipline of underground militancy: secrecy, obedience, weapons, bomb-making, smuggling, and the appeal of revolutionary identity.
Main point: Dolours moves from protest politics into clandestine warfare, and the IRA transforms from a weakened old organization into a younger, more militant insurgency.
Chapter 5 — “St Jude’s Walk”
After Arthur McConville dies, Jean sinks into depression while her children struggle to keep the household together. Divis Flats becomes increasingly brutal: gun battles, British raids, IRA policing, punishment rituals, and social control become ordinary. Jean allegedly helps a wounded British soldier, an act that may have made her suspicious in the eyes of local republicans. She is later beaten and warned. The chapter returns to the night of her abduction, showing that the family’s move to St Jude’s Walk did not bring safety but placed them deeper inside a community governed by fear.
Main point: Jean’s vulnerability increases after her husband’s death, and the local atmosphere makes even acts of mercy politically dangerous.
Chapter 6 — “The Dirty Dozen”
Brendan Hughes, known as “The Dark,” becomes a central figure. He leads D Company of the Provisional IRA in West Belfast, a small but aggressive unit known as the “Dirty Dozen.” Hughes is portrayed as charismatic, daring, elusive, and deeply embedded in the local community. The chapter shows guerrilla warfare from the IRA side: safe houses, weapons smuggling, street knowledge, civilian support networks, and shootouts with British forces. Hughes survives assassination attempts and becomes a legendary commander.
Main point: Brendan Hughes embodies the IRA’s urban guerrilla war: disciplined, violent, locally supported, and hard for British intelligence to penetrate.
Chapter 7 — “The Little Brigadier”
The focus shifts to British counterinsurgency, especially Brigadier Frank Kitson. Kitson brings colonial counterinsurgency methods from places like Kenya to Northern Ireland. He emphasizes intelligence, informants, psychological pressure, and disrupting the “water” in which guerrillas swim. The chapter covers mass internment in 1971, which targets Catholics almost exclusively and proves disastrous, radicalizing the population further. It also discusses the “five techniques” used in interrogation and the shadowy Military Reaction Force / Mobile Reconnaissance Force, which gathers intelligence and allegedly conducts undercover attacks.
Main point: British counterinsurgency tries to defeat the IRA through intelligence and coercion, but its blunt methods often strengthen republican support.
Chapter 8 — “The Cracked Cup”
Gerry Adams is arrested, interrogated, and imprisoned on the HMS Maidstone, then moved to Long Kesh. He uses silence and misdirection during interrogation, reinforcing his reputation for discipline. The chapter also covers the brief 1972 IRA-British ceasefire and secret talks, which collapse when the IRA demands British withdrawal. After violence resumes, Brendan Hughes helps plan major bombing operations, including Bloody Friday, which is intended to destroy property but kills civilians and leaves Hughes with guilt. The chapter also introduces internal IRA discipline through the case of Joe Lynskey, whose romantic and organizational betrayal leads to a likely execution by the IRA’s secretive “Unknowns,” with Dolours Price involved in transporting him.
Main point: The chapter shows both external war and internal discipline: the IRA fights the British while also policing betrayal within its own ranks.
Chapter 9 — “Orphans”
The McConville children are interviewed by the BBC after Jean has been missing for more than a month. They remain alone, hungry, frightened, and largely ignored by the community. Social services become involved, but instead of rescuing the family intact, the children are eventually separated and sent to institutions. The chapter highlights the silence around Jean’s disappearance: there is no serious police investigation, neighbors do not help, and Michael McConville is threatened by IRA youths for talking about what happened.
Main point: Jean’s abduction destroys not only her life but the lives of her children, who are abandoned by family, community, state, and church.
Chapter 10 — “The Freds”
The chapter explores British informant networks, especially the MRF and its agents, known as “Freds.” The IRA discovers that Seamus Wright and Kevin McKee have become informers. Brendan Hughes uses them to learn about British intelligence operations, including Four Square Laundry, a fake laundry service used to collect intelligence. The IRA launches coordinated attacks on British intelligence fronts, killing Ted Stuart in the laundry van. Wright and McKee later disappear and are executed after IRA court-martials. The chapter ends with Hughes and Adams being captured and brought into Long Kesh, where they are celebrated by republican prisoners.
Main point: The intelligence war becomes as important as the street war: informers, double agents, fake businesses, executions, and paranoia define the conflict.
Big Picture So Far
Book One shows how ordinary life in Belfast collapses into a world of sectarian fear, paramilitary control, British counterinsurgency, informers, punishment, and silence. Jean McConville’s disappearance is the moral center of the narrative, while Dolours Price, Brendan Hughes, Gerry Adams, and Frank Kitson represent different engines of the conflict: revolutionary idealism, guerrilla discipline, political calculation, and state counterinsurgency.
Book Two — Human Sacrifice
Chapter 11 — “Close England!”
The IRA carries out its 1973 London bombing operation, led by Dolours Price. The goal is to bring the war directly to England, because Dolours believes bombing Northern Ireland only hurts Irish civilians while the English public remains detached. The team plants car bombs near symbolic targets, including the Old Bailey and Whitehall. Police receive advance intelligence and begin locking down exits from England, but confusion and delays mean two bombs explode, injuring nearly 250 people. The bombing team is arrested at Heathrow. Dolours, Marian, and others refuse prison uniforms, insisting they are political prisoners rather than criminals.
Understanding check: Dolours thinks the IRA must force England to experience the war directly, but the operation exposes the moral and practical impossibility of “symbolic” bombing without civilian harm.
Chapter 12 — “The Belfast Ten”
The chapter follows two major threads: Brendan Hughes’s escape from Long Kesh and the trial of the London bombers. Hughes escapes prison by hiding inside a rolled-up mattress on a rubbish lorry, narrowly avoiding discovery. Meanwhile, the “Belfast Ten” are tried for the London bombings. The Price sisters become media sensations, portrayed as beautiful, dangerous female terrorists. The prosecution has strong circumstantial evidence, including Dolours’s notebook with traces of a bomb-timer diagram. Roisin McNearney cooperates with police and is acquitted, then disappears into a new identity. The rest are convicted. Dolours, Marian, and Hugh Feeney receive long sentences and announce a hunger strike demanding political-prisoner status and transfer to Northern Ireland.
Understanding check: This chapter contrasts IRA mythology and reality: Hughes’s escape looks heroic, while the trial reveals betrayal, legal defeat, and the beginning of the Price sisters’ self-destructive prison protest.
Chapter 13 — “The Toy Salesman”
After escaping Long Kesh, Brendan Hughes returns secretly to Belfast under the alias Arthur McAllister, posing as a toy salesman in a middle-class neighborhood. He changes his appearance and resumes operational command. The British eventually raid his flat and arrest him. They discover documents suggesting IRA preparations for a major “doomsday” scenario, including evacuation plans and emergency broadcasts. Instead of merely beating him, Special Branch tries to recruit him as an informer, offering him a large sum of money. Hughes refuses.
Understanding check: Hughes is shown as almost mythically committed: he can disguise himself, return to command, and withstand both coercion and bribery without breaking.
Chapter 14 — “The Ultimate Weapon”
Dolours and Marian begin their hunger strike in Brixton Prison, joined by Hugh Feeney and Gerry Kelly. Their demand is transfer to Northern Ireland and recognition as political prisoners. The chapter places hunger striking within Irish republican tradition, framing the body itself as a weapon. British authorities respond by force-feeding the sisters through tubes, a physically and psychologically degrading process. Public outrage grows. The IRA attempts pressure tactics, including kidnappings, to force the government’s hand. Eventually doctors stop force-feeding because the sisters resist so violently that the procedure becomes medically dangerous. The British government ultimately transfers them to Armagh Prison in Northern Ireland, but by then their mother Chrissie has died, and they had been denied compassionate leave for her funeral.
Understanding check: The chapter’s key idea is that the hunger strike turns weakness into power: the prisoner has no weapons except the willingness to suffer or die.
Chapter 15 — “Captives”
The McConville children are taken into care after Jean’s disappearance. They are split apart and sent to institutions, especially Nazareth Lodge, where conditions are harsh and abusive. Michael repeatedly escapes, trying to return to West Belfast, before eventually settling somewhat at Lisnevin, a juvenile facility where he finds more stability than he had known elsewhere. The chapter then shifts to the republican prisoners in Long Kesh. Gerry Adams begins developing the idea of a “long war” that combines military struggle with political strategy. Prisoners demand political status and begin escalating protests. Brendan Hughes leads the first major hunger strike, but when Sean McKenna nears death, Hughes calls it off, feeling he has failed. The prisoners immediately plan a second hunger strike, this time staggered so each man must individually decide whether to die. Bobby Sands is chosen to lead it.
Understanding check: The chapter links two forms of captivity: the McConville children are trapped by abandonment and institutions, while IRA prisoners turn imprisonment into a political battlefield.
Chapter 16 — “A Clockwork Doll”
Dolours and Marian arrive at Armagh Prison as republican celebrities, but their hunger strike and force-feeding have permanently damaged their relationship with food. Both develop severe eating disorders, especially Marian, who is eventually released on medical grounds in 1980. Dolours feels abandoned when Marian leaves prison without her. The chapter then shifts to Bobby Sands’s 1981 hunger strike. Sands runs for Parliament while starving, and Gerry Adams recognizes the political opportunity: republicanism can combine armed struggle with electoral politics. This becomes the “Armalite and ballot box” strategy. Sands wins election but still dies, followed by nine other hunger strikers. Shortly before Sands’s death, Dolours is released on medical grounds. She later reflects that her own successful hunger strike helped end force-feeding in British prisons, which indirectly made it possible for the later hunger strikers to die.
Understanding check: Dolours wins survival through self-starvation, while Bobby Sands wins political power through martyrdom. The chapter asks whether earlier victories created later deaths.
Chapter 17 — “Field Day”
After her release, Dolours struggles to adjust to life outside prison. She gradually recovers physically and moves toward Dublin, which feels more open and culturally alive than Belfast. She reconnects with Stephen Rea, the actor she had known from the civil rights era, and they eventually marry. Rea is part of a cultural movement called Field Day, which tries to rethink Irish identity through literature, theatre, and politics. Dolours distances herself from active IRA violence but remains tied to republican identity. Meanwhile, Gerry Adams moves further into electoral politics. In 1983, he runs for Parliament in West Belfast, with Dolours campaigning for him. Adams wins, though he refuses to take his seat at Westminster.
Understanding check: This chapter shows the transition from armed struggle to cultural and electoral politics, but the old militant networks and loyalties remain underneath.
Chapter 18 — “The Bloody Envelope”
The chapter centers on the late 1980s and the cycle of funeral, retaliation, and political violence. In 1988, IRA members Mairéad Farrell and others are killed by British forces in Gibraltar. Their funeral in Belfast is attacked by loyalist Michael Stone, causing more deaths and chaos. At another funeral, two British soldiers accidentally drive into the procession and are dragged from their car, beaten, and killed. Father Alec Reid tries to intervene and is photographed giving last rites, his bloodied envelope becoming an iconic image. The chapter also follows secret peace efforts involving Reid, John Hume, and Gerry Adams. At the same time, Adams remains a hated figure to loyalists and is nearly assassinated by the Ulster Freedom Fighters.
Understanding check: The chapter shows the Troubles at their most ritualized and horrifying: funerals become political theater, targets, and catalysts for further death, even as secret peace channels begin forming.
Chapter 19 — “Blue Ribbons”
Brendan Hughes is released after nearly thirteen years in prison and struggles to adjust to a changed Belfast. He remains loyal to Gerry Adams but notices that Adams is increasingly political, while Hughes still thinks like a soldier. Hughes helps support Adams’s credibility with hardline republicans. The chapter also returns to the issue of the “Disappeared,” including Jean McConville. Families of those secretly killed and buried by the IRA begin publicly demanding answers. Blue ribbons become a symbol of their campaign. This creates a political problem for Adams and Sinn Féin during the peace process, because the families directly challenge Adams to help locate the bodies. Adams eventually issues a cautious statement calling for information about the missing.
Understanding check: The chapter brings Jean McConville’s story back into the political present: the IRA’s hidden crimes become harder to suppress once Sinn Féin seeks democratic legitimacy.
Big Picture of Book Two
Book Two tracks the transformation of the Troubles from armed insurgency into prison protest, propaganda, martyrdom, and electoral politics. The central pattern is sacrifice: Dolours and Marian sacrifice their bodies through hunger strike; Bobby Sands sacrifices his life and becomes politically powerful in death; Brendan Hughes sacrifices family and freedom for the IRA; the McConville children sacrifice childhood and stability because of Jean’s abduction.
The deeper argument is that republican violence did not simply happen on the streets. It moved through prisons, courts, funerals, elections, newspapers, families, and bodies. The IRA’s war becomes less purely military and more symbolic, but the human cost keeps accumulating.
Book Three —A Reckoning
Chapter 20 — “A Secret Archive”
The chapter begins with the peace process: Clinton’s 1995 visit to Derry, the ceasefires, and the Good Friday Agreement. Keefe emphasizes that the agreement helped end the conflict but did not create a real truth-and-reconciliation process. That missing reckoning leads to the Boston College oral-history project, designed to secretly record interviews with former republican and loyalist paramilitaries. Ed Moloney directs the project, Anthony McIntyre interviews former IRA members, and the participants are promised that their testimony will remain sealed until after death.
Understanding check: Peace ends much of the violence, but it does not resolve the question of truth. The Boston Project is created to preserve what people still cannot publicly admit.
Chapter 21 — “On the Ledge”
Brendan Hughes, now living in Divis Tower, is physically alive but psychologically trapped by the past. He feels betrayed by Gerry Adams and the Good Friday Agreement, believing the IRA settled for less than what men like him killed and suffered for. In his Boston College interviews, Hughes says Adams was a central IRA commander, approved the London bombing campaign, and ordered Jean McConville’s disappearance. Hughes also reflects on Bloody Friday, the hunger strikes, and the crushing guilt of sending people to their deaths.
Understanding check: Hughes becomes the embodiment of postwar disillusionment: the soldier who sacrificed everything now feels used, discarded, and morally abandoned.
Chapter 22 — “Touts”
This chapter examines informers, or “touts,” in the Troubles. Keefe explains how British intelligence and the RUC cultivated informants inside paramilitary groups, often through pressure, money, blackmail, or manipulation. Trevor Campbell, a Special Branch handler, represents the logic that “everyone is recruitable.” The chapter also describes the IRA’s internal-security unit, the “Nutting Squad,” which interrogated and executed suspected informers. Freddie Scappaticci, later alleged to be both an IRA spy-hunter and a British agent, symbolizes the moral corruption and paranoia of the intelligence war. The chapter then returns to Jean McConville: Brendan Hughes claims she was killed because she was an informer, but the evidence remains contested.
Understanding check: The war is no longer just bombs and guns; it is also an intelligence war where betrayal, coercion, and counter-betrayal blur the line between state and terrorist violence.
Chapter 23 — “Bog Queen”
The search for the Disappeared becomes more organized. Geoff Knupfer, a forensic expert experienced in finding buried bodies, assists the Independent Commission for the Location of Victims’ Remains. The chapter explains the cruelty of disappearance: families are denied burial, mourning, certainty, and social closure. The McConville children are divided over what Jean’s recovery would mean and how directly they should confront the IRA. Other families of the Disappeared, such as the relatives of Kevin McKee, are shown suffering similar long-term torment. The title evokes Ireland’s peat bogs, where the past can be preserved and suddenly unearthed.
Understanding check: The bodies of the Disappeared become physical evidence of a buried history that Northern Ireland has tried, but failed, to move past.
Chapter 24 — “An Entanglement of Lies”
The chapter turns to state collusion and the unresolved moral mess of the Troubles. A major security breach at Castlereagh raises questions about intelligence files and paramilitary penetration. Keefe explores the case of Freddie Scappaticci, alleged to be “Stakeknife,” a British agent embedded inside the IRA’s internal-security apparatus. If true, British intelligence may have protected or tolerated a man involved in torture and murder because he provided valuable information. The chapter also points out that the Good Friday Agreement did not create a comprehensive legal or moral framework for handling past crimes, leaving families, victims, former combatants, and officials trapped in fragmented investigations and partial truths.
Understanding check: The chapter’s core issue is complicity. If the state used murderers as agents, then the clean division between law enforcement and terrorism collapses.
Chapter 25 — “The Last Gun”
The IRA’s decommissioning process is described through Father Alec Reid and Methodist minister Harold Good, who witness the destruction of weapons. For republican hardliners, giving up arms feels like surrender; for the peace process, it is essential. The chapter also focuses on Dolours Price, who is increasingly unstable, haunted, drinking heavily, and resentful of Gerry Adams. She begins speaking more openly about her role in the Unknowns and about Jean McConville’s disappearance. In interviews, Price says she drove McConville across the border and that Adams was involved in the decision to disappear her.
Understanding check: The IRA gives up its weapons, but not its secrets. Dolours becomes one of the people through whom the buried past starts leaking into public view.
Chapter 26 — “The Mystery Radio”
The chapter examines the central allegation used to justify Jean McConville’s killing: that she was an informer with a British radio transmitter. The McConville family rejects this as a lie. Police Ombudsman Nuala O’Loan’s 2006 report finds no evidence that Jean was ever a British agent and concludes she was an innocent woman abducted and murdered. The IRA, Moloney, McIntyre, Hughes, and others continue to believe or claim that she was an informer. Keefe then investigates the plausibility of the alleged radio itself, asking whether such a device would have made sense, whether Jean had the capacity to use it, and whether the story may have functioned as a post-hoc justification.
Understanding check: This chapter asks whether the IRA’s stated reason for killing Jean was evidence-based truth or a narrative invented to make an indefensible murder seem militarily necessary.
Chapter 27 — “The Boston Tapes”
The secret Boston College archive becomes a legal crisis. After public reports about Dolours Price’s admissions, police seek access to the interviews as evidence in the Jean McConville murder investigation. Moloney and McIntyre argue that the project’s confidentiality must be protected, while Boston College is criticized for weak legal safeguards and eventually turns over some material. The courts reject the idea that academic promises of confidentiality can override criminal subpoenas. The chapter also reveals that Dolours did not mention Jean McConville in her McIntyre interviews, but did discuss the case in a separate interview with Ed Moloney.
Understanding check: The archive was built to preserve truth for history, but once the law discovers it, historical testimony becomes criminal evidence.
Chapter 28 — “Death by Misadventure”
The chapter begins with the 2009 Real IRA attack at Massereene Barracks, showing that dissident republican violence still exists after the peace settlement. It then returns to Gerry Adams, who is arrested in 2014 in connection with Jean McConville’s murder. Adams denies IRA membership and denies involvement in the killing. Keefe contrasts Adams’s political survival with the trauma of former comrades like Hughes and Price. The chapter then follows Dolours’s decline: depression, alcohol, medication, and physical deterioration. She dies in 2013 from a toxic combination of prescribed drugs. Her death is ruled “death by misadventure.”
Understanding check: The chapter contrasts political survival with personal ruin. Adams moves through public life, while Dolours collapses under the psychological burden of the past.
Chapter 29 — “This Is the Past”
Keefe surveys Northern Ireland after the peace process. The violence has mostly ended, but the old structures and memories remain: peace walls still divide communities, paramilitary organizations still exist in reduced form, and unresolved crimes continue to haunt public life. The chapter discusses Freddie Scappaticci, legal efforts by victims’ families, and the continued search for the Disappeared. In 2015, bodies are found that turn out to be Seamus Wright and Kevin McKee, not Joe Lynskey as expected. The chapter also turns to cultural memory, including Stephen Rea’s later acting work in Cyprus Avenue, a dark play about loyalist paranoia and the persistence of sectarian obsession.
Understanding check: The Troubles are officially “past,” but they remain embedded in geography, law, politics, memory, and identity.
Chapter 30 — “The Unknown”
Keefe closes by reflecting on his own path into the story and the problem of collective denial. He frames the book as a study of how people radicalize, justify violence, and then struggle—or refuse—to reckon with what they have done. The chapter revisits Jean McConville’s murder and the role of the Unknowns. Keefe weighs the evidence about who physically killed Jean and concludes that Marian Price may have been the shooter, though the claim remains legally unproven. The book ends not with full legal closure, but with a moral reckoning: Jean’s death, Dolours’s guilt, Hughes’s bitterness, Adams’s denial, and Northern Ireland’s unresolved relationship with its own history.
Understanding check: The final chapter argues that silence protects movements and reputations, but it also poisons memory, families, and societies.
Big Picture of Book Three
Book Three is about reckoning after violence. The war is mostly over, but the truth remains dangerous. The Good Friday Agreement brings political peace without a full moral accounting. The Boston College archive tries to preserve hidden testimony, but becomes evidence in criminal investigations. Brendan Hughes and Dolours Price speak because they feel betrayed by Gerry Adams and haunted by their own actions. The McConville family continues searching not only for Jean’s body, but for the truth about why she was killed.
The central idea: ending a conflict is not the same as resolving it. Northern Ireland achieves peace, but the buried bodies, informers, secret archives, denials, and half-confessions show that the past remains active.
Highlights
Epigraph
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‘All wars are fought twice, the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory.’–VIET THANH NGUYEN
2 Albert’s Daughters
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In the Price family–as in Northern Ireland in general–people had a tendency to talk about calamities from the bygone past as though they had happened just last week. As a consequence, it could be difficult to pinpoint where the story of the ancient quarrel between Britain and Ireland first began. Really, it was hard to imagine Ireland before what the Prices referred to simply as ‘the cause’. It almost didn’t matter where you started the story: it was always there. It pre-dated the distinction between Protestant and Catholic; it was older than the Protestant Church. You could go back nearly a thousand years, in fact, to the Norman raiders of the twelfth century, who crossed the Irish Sea on ships, in search of new lands to conquer. Or to Henry VIII and the Tudor rulers of the sixteenth century, who asserted England’s total subjugation of Ireland. Or to the Protestant emigrants from Scotland and the North of England who filtered into Ireland over the course of the seventeenth century and established a plantation system in which the Gaelic-speaking natives became tenants and vassals on land that had previously been their own.
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Easter Rising of 1916,
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After the Irish War of Independence led to the partition of Ireland, in 1921, the island was split in two: in the South, twenty-six counties achieved a measure of independence as the Irish Free State, while in the North, a remaining six counties continued to be ruled by Great Britain.
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Northern Ireland was home to a million Protestants and half a million Catholics, and it was true that the Catholics faced extraordinary discrimination: often excluded from good jobs and housing, they were also denied the kind of political power that might enable them to better their conditions.
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Like a lot of young people in Belfast, she was also inspired by Che Guevara, the photogenic Argentine revolutionary who fought alongside Fidel Castro.
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It was true that the history of the IRA was in some ways a history of failure: just as Patrick Pearse had said, every generation staged a revolt of one sort or another, but by the late 1960s, the IRA was largely dormant.
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Bunting may have been a bigot, but some of his anxieties were widely shared. ‘The basic fear of Protestants in Northern Ireland is that they will be outbred by Roman Catholics,’ Terence O’Neill, the prime minister of Britain’s devolved government in Northern Ireland, said that year.
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One English journalist writing at the time described the unionists in Northern Ireland as ‘a society more British than the British about whom the British care not at all’. To ‘loyalists’–as especially zealous unionists were known–this created a tendency to see oneself as the ultimate defender of a national identity that was in danger of extinction.
3 Evacuation
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But during the 1960s, the mutual suspicion between Catholics and Protestants gradually intensified. When members of the local Orange Order conducted their triumphal summertime marches, they would make a point of starting right outside the McConvilles’ door.
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Nearly two thousand families fled their homes in Belfast that summer, the overwhelming majority of them Catholic. Some 350,000 people lived in Belfast. Over the ensuing years, as much as 10 per cent of the population would relocate.
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For all the chaos, the number of people actually killed in the Troubles was initially quite low: in 1969, only nineteen people were killed, and in 1970, only twenty-nine. But in 1971, the violence accelerated, with nearly two hundred people killed. By 1972, the figure was nearly five hundred.
4 An Underground Army
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For an army, they were also conspicuously unarmed. In a surpassingly ill-timed decision, the IRA had actually sold off some of its remaining weapons in 1968, to the Free Wales Army. There was still some residual expertise in how to manufacture crude explosives, but the IRA had developed a reputation as an outfit whose bombers had a tendency to blow themselves up more often than their targets.
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But something had changed in her after the ambush at Burntollet Bridge. Both Dolours and Marian had been altered by that experience, their father would later say. After they got back to Belfast, ‘they were never the same’.
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Youths who joined the IRA tended not to tell their parents about it. In some cases, parents might disapprove: Belfast was dangerous enough already; to sign on as a paramilitary was simply tempting fate. Occasionally a young IRA gunman would go out on a sniper mission, only to round a corner and bump smack into his own mother. Unfazed by the assault rifle in his hands, she would drag him home by the ear.
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A special meeting of the Provisionals’ Army Council was convened, and it was determined that for the first time in history, women could join the organisation as full members. This is likely to have been driven in large measure by the ambition (and unimpeachable republican lineage) of Dolours Price. But Price herself would speculate that another factor may have played a role: because men were being locked up en masse by the authorities, the Provos may have felt that they had little choice but to start admitting women.
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women who might deploy their own sexuality as a weapon–was threatening, even mildly scandalous. Some Cumann veterans referred to these frontline IRA women as ‘Army girls’, and insinuated that they were promiscuous. As tactics evolved in the conflict, IRA women occasionally set so-called honey traps, trolling bars in the city for unsuspecting British soldiers, then luring them into an ambush.
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While Belfast was burning in the summer of 1969, a twenty-five-year-old Palestinian terrorist named Leila Khaled hijacked a TWA flight from Rome to Tel Aviv and, with it, the attention of the world. Khaled diverted the flight to Damascus, becoming the first woman to hijack a plane.
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As a fund-raising initiative, the Provos took to robbing banks. Lots of banks.
5 St Jude’s Walk
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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’.
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In an environment where many married men were being locked up for long stretches, leaving their wives alone, and where cocky young British soldiers were patrolling the neighbourhoods, deep-seated fears of infidelity, both marital and ideological, took hold. Tarring and feathering became an official policy of the Provisional IRA, which the leadership publicly defended as a necessary protocol of social control.
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At a certain point, the family dogs, Provo and Sticky vanished. Someone had shoved the animals down a rubbish chute, where they died.
6 The Dirty Dozen
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There was a quote attributed to Mao that Hughes was partial to, about how the guerrilla warrior must swim among the people as a fish swims through the sea.
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He cultivated the community, knowing that without the sea, the fish cannot survive.
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Hughes used a ship named after the British queen to smuggle weapons to the IRA. When the guns arrived, fresh graffiti on the walls of West Belfast heralded a game change: GOD MADE THE CATHOLICS, BUT THE ARMALITE MADE THEM EQUAL.
7 The Little Brigadier
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Kitson advanced an argument that would become a cornerstone of later counter-insurgency thinking: it is important not merely to put down an uprising but to win the hearts and minds of the local population.
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The number of British troops in Northern Ireland had escalated dramatically in a short period of time: during the summer of 1969, there were 2,700; by the summer of 1972 there were more than 30,000.
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Just before dawn one morning in August 1971, three thousand British troops descended on nationalist areas across Northern Ireland. Soldiers broke down doors and dragged men from their beds, hauling them off to internment. Under the Special Powers Act, it was legal to hold someone indefinitely without trial, and internment had been used periodically in Northern Ireland. But not on this scale. Of the nearly 350 suspects arrested that day, not a single one was a loyalist, though there were plenty of loyalist paramilitaries engaged in terrorism at the time. This disparity in treatment only compounded the impression, in the minds of many Catholics, that the army was simply another instrument of sectarian oppression.
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Now the people who had caught him were hustling him into a mysterious facility. It was a remote barracks on an old Second World War airfield in County Derry. But Francie McGuigan did not know that at the time, since he was still hooded, and, technically, it was an undisclosed location, selected by the army because it was remote, anonymous, and far from any mechanism of accountability. McGuigan and his fellow detainees were stripped naked and examined by a doctor, then subjected to a series of procedures that were classified, in the army’s euphemistic bureaucratese, as ‘interrogation in depth’.
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For days, the prisoners were deprived of food, water and sleep and made to stand for long periods in stress positions, unable to see anything because of the hoods over their heads. They were also subjected to piercing, high-pitched noises. The British had learned these techniques by studying the experiences of soldiers who were held as prisoners of war by the Nazis or by the North Koreans and the Chinese during the Korean War.
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When the torture ended, after a week, some of the men were so broken that they could not remember their own names. Their eyes had a haunted, hollow look to them, which one of the men likened to ‘two pissholes in the snow’. Another detainee, who had gone into the interrogation with jet-black hair, came out of the experience with hair that was completely white. (He died not long after being released, of a heart attack, at forty-five.) When Francie McGuigan was finally returned to Crumlin Road jail, he saw his father, and the older man broke down and cried.
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A subsequent investigation by the British government found that some of the interrogation techniques used against the so-called Hooded Men constituted criminal assault. But in a controversial 1978 decision, the European Court of Human Rights held that the techniques, while ‘inhuman and degrading’, did not amount to torture. (In the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, when the American administration of George W. Bush was fashioning its own ‘enhanced interrogation’ techniques, officials relied explicitly on this decision
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But perhaps the most concrete application of Frank Kitson’s colonial philosophies in the context of the Troubles was the MRF. This was an elite unit so murky and clandestine that nobody seemed to agree even on the baseline matter of what precisely the acronym MRF stood for. It might have been Mobile Reconnaissance Force. Or Military Reconnaissance Force. Or Military Reaction Force. The MRF consisted of thirty or so special operators, both men and women, who were hand-picked from all across the British Army. They dressed in plain clothes, wearing bell-bottoms and denim jackets, and grew their hair long. Within the army, they were known as the ‘Bomb Squad’, because one of their responsibilities was reconnaissance, and they would stake out locations where they expected paramilitaries to plant a bomb. Soldiers of Irish origin were deliberately recruited, in order to blend in with the locals.
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But the unit was doing more than gathering intelligence. It was assassinating people, too. Men in plain clothes would drive around in an unmarked Ford Cortina, with a Sterling sub-machine gun hidden under the seat. They had to keep the weapon out of sight, one MRF member would later explain, because they were camouflaged so effectively that if they passed an army outpost and were spotted with a gun, their own British colleagues ‘would open fire and we would be shot’. It was an MRF team that had burst out of the green van in West Belfast and attempted to murder Brendan Hughes. These hit squads deliberately carried particular makes of weapons that were used by the paramilitaries, so that when someone was murdered, the ballistics would suggest that it was the IRA or loyalist killers who were responsible, rather than the army.
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But the Provos were not the only ones to keep a death list. As the MRF conducted its surveillance and developed intelligence, the unit had its own catalogue of targets whom the operatives were authorised to shoot on sight. In the MRF’s secret briefing room in the heart of Palace Barracks, the walls were plastered with surveillance shots of the biggest ‘players’ among the Provos–their targets. According to an account by one former member of the MRF, the key figures on the wall included Brendan Hughes, Gerry Adams, and Dolours and Marian Price.
8 The Cracked Cup
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channel had been developing between the Provos and the British government. After some preliminary contacts, it seemed that an opportunity might exist to negotiate a possible ceasefire. One of Adams’s confederates in the IRA, a hard man named Ivor Bell, had insisted that a necessary precondition for any discussions with the British was the release from internment of Gerry Adams. He was still only twenty-three years old, but Adams had become such an instrumental figure in the IRA that there could be no peace talks without him. ‘No fucking ceasefire unless Gerry is released,’ Bell said.
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If this mode of conveyance seemed ostentatiously swanky, it was also grounds for suspicion. Adams was a former bartender. Ivor Bell had worked as a mechanic. McGuinness had trained as a butcher’s assistant. Hyper-attuned to any hint of British pomposity, the rebels would not allow themselves to be patronised or cowed. In advance of the trip, Bell had announced that, while they might be an official delegation to a peace summit, he, for one, would not be putting on a suit and tie. If history had taught him anything, Bell said, it was that the British liked nothing more than to make the Irish feel ill at ease. If their hosts were conspicuously formal, he would answer with extravagant informality. Let them feel uncomfortable for a change. Gerry Adams took a similar view on the wardrobe issue: he selected a pullover with a hole in it for the occasion.
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One of the British participants, an intelligence officer named Frank Steele, watched this presentation with quiet dismay. Mac Stíofáin was laying down his demands as if the IRA had already fought the British to a standstill. When Steele was initially sent to Northern Ireland, the view of the British government had been that it didn’t want to talk to the IRA–they wanted to defeat it. After the massacre on Bloody Sunday, many British officials were forced to realise that they were unlikely to win the war through military might alone. Steele had been working, in great secrecy, with the IRA representatives in advance of the meeting. He regarded these men with a certain disdainful amusement, particularly for their insistence on adopting the lingo and trappings of a conventional military organisation. ‘It was all rather sweet, really,’ Steele later observed. ‘They wanted to depict themselves as representing an army and not a bunch of terrorists.’
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As the meeting progressed, Whitelaw grew frustrated. In his memoirs, he described the encounter as ‘a non-event’, sabotaged by the ‘absurd ultimatums’ of the IRA.
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Nine people were killed, including a fourteen-year-old boy; 130 were wounded.
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‘This city has not experienced such a day of death and destruction since the German blitz of 1941,’ the Belfast Telegraph declared, citing the ‘callous lack of remorse now so typical of the Provos’. The Irish Times pointed out, in an editorial, that the main victims of the attack were not the British Army or even big business, but ‘the plain people of Belfast and Ireland’.
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One winter night, a major gun battle broke out in Ballymurphy, and some of his young volunteers grabbed their weapons and announced that they were going to join the fight. ‘No, you’re not,’ McClure told them. The British soldiers had been trained to shoot at night, but the volunteers hadn’t, he pointed out. ‘You’ll be shooting at newspapers blowing in the street,’ he said. ‘If they take the gloves off, you have no idea. They’ll wipe you out.’
9 Orphans
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But where one might expect the close-knit community in Belfast to rally around and care for such a family, dropping by with a hot meal or assisting Helen with the children, nobody did. Instead, it was as if the whole community in Divis simply chose to ignore the flatful of abandoned children on St Jude’s Walk.
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The neighbours, rather than help, started to complain to the authorities that they couldn’t sleep at night because the children were making so much noise, with nobody to supervise them, and you could hear the racket through the walls. Even the Catholic Church declined to intervene. One report from the social worker, just a week before Christmas, noted that a local parish priest was aware of the children’s predicament but was ‘unsympathetic’.
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The children started getting into trouble. Michael would stay out late and shoplift food. Eventually he was caught, along with one of his brothers, stealing chocolate biscuits from a shop in town. Asked by the police why he had done it, he said that he and his siblings had not eaten in several days. They were starving. Michael was eleven years old.
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There is no record in the files of the Royal Ulster Constabulary of any investigation into the disappearance of Jean McConville. She was abducted at the end of the most violent year of the conflict, and this sort of incident, horrible though it was, may not have risen to such a level that the police felt the need to concern themselves. A detective from Springfield Road police station did stop by the flat on 17 January, but the police were not able to offer any substantive clues and do not appear to have pursued the matter.
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Archie McConville would later conclude that all that pernicious whispering amounted to more than just salt in the wound. It was a kind of poison, he decided, ‘an attempt to wreck our minds’.
10 The Freds
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When Frank Kitson was recruiting captured Mau Mau in Kenya to work in counter-gangs, he found that they needed to be ‘tamed’, in a process he described as if it were the breaking of a horse. He avoided fanatical believers, who were too difficult to bring across to the other side, and focused instead on recruiting people who had joined the movement for a reason that was essentially social: because their friends were joining. In one of his books, Kitson noted that the very best recruits were the ones with ‘a spirit of adventure’, people who ‘thought that it would be fun to be a gangster and carry a pistol’. They were ‘the easiest to handle because they were the easiest to satisfy’. In Kenya, these were the types of recruits to whom Kitson would give his own gun, letting them carry it on patrol to indulge their sense of adventure and make them feel like a trusted part of the team. In Belfast, the MRF gave Kevin McKee a pistol and a shoulder holster, which he wore around, flaunting the costume as if he were a Chicago gangster. As a Fred, he was entitled to carry the weapon and make use of the firing ranges on the army base.
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Four Square Laundry operated an actual door-to-door laundry service, picking up clothing and linens and then subcontracting to an industrial laundry in Belfast to wash the clothes. But before they got there, the clothes were analysed by British authorities. Traces of explosives could be detected on garments in order to determine whether bombs were being made or stored at a property.
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The moment the simultaneous raids were complete, Wright and McKee no longer possessed any leverage. Brendan Hughes may have assured them that they had immunity, but this was not really an assurance he was authorised to give. By initially betraying the Provos, they had committed an unforgivable sin–one that was not diminished by their subsequent work as triple agents.
11 Close England!
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The plan to bring the bombing campaign to England had been, at least in part, Dolours Price’s idea. The IRA had detonated hundreds of bombs in commercial centres throughout Northern Ireland. If the goal was to cripple the economy, this effort had been a success. But the collateral damage was considerable. For civilians in Northern Ireland, whether Catholic or Protestant, the routine bombings could make life impossible: suddenly you were taking your life into your hands when you went to the shop for a dozen eggs.
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It was a case study in strategic insanity: the Irish were blowing up their own people in a misguided attempt to hurt the English, and the English hardly even noticed.
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They were right: decades after the bombing mission, a retired Special Branch officer would reveal that he had been tipped off fourteen hours before the bombs were set to blow, and that his source had been a senior member of the Provisionals. The officer knew in advance that there would be four bombs rather than six. He also knew that the bombing team would include a young Provo named Gerry Kelly and ‘two sisters named Price’.
12 The Belfast Ten
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This may have been disappointing for Hughes at the time, but it would turn out to be a stroke of exceptionally good luck: when another prisoner, Mark Graham, tried to escape using a similar method some months later, the lorry went over a ramp and snapped his spine, leaving him paralysed for life.
14 The Ultimate Weapon
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In 1920, an Irish republican poet and politician named Terence MacSwiney, who had been imprisoned in Brixton on charges of sedition, refused food for seventy-four days, demanding that he be released. The British would not let him go, and he perished. MacSwiney’s death sparked an international furore, and before he was buried, in the uniform of the IRA, tens of thousands of people filed past his coffin to pay their respects, and thousands more rallied in protest in cities around the world. He had eloquently articulated a philosophy of self-sacrifice that would help define the emerging traditions of Irish republican martyrdom.
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The brinksmanship between the Price sisters and the British was described in language that recalled not just MacSwiney, but the Great Famine of the nineteenth century, in which a million people in Ireland were allowed to die of disease and starvation, and another million or more were forced to migrate. Even as the Irish starved during the famine, ships laden with food were leaving Irish harbours–for export to the English. Many in Ireland and elsewhere had taken the view that the British bore a responsibility for the famine, one that exceeded callous neglect and began to look more like deliberate murder. One of the first widely circulated tracts about the famine described it as ‘The Last Conquest of Ireland’.
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Terrorism was a ‘contagion’, Jenkins believed. Bending to the demands of the hunger strikers would only validate their methods and encourage others to adopt them.
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explain the change in policy, and he announced that after carrying out the ‘distasteful task’ of artificial feeding for 167 days, the doctors at Brixton had stopped because ‘the minimal cooperation necessary for this process was withdrawn by the sisters’.
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Albert Price, after a visit to his daughters in the terminal ward, emerged and told the press that they were ready to meet their fate. ‘They are happy,’ he said. ‘Happy about dying.’ The Provisionals braced for violence, warning that if the sisters died, ‘the consequences for the British Government will be devastating’.
15 Captives
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They were physically assaulted by the older kids and Billy was sexually abused by the grown-ups. The boys could not turn to any of the adults for help, because so many of the staff were molesting children that the behaviour was silently tolerated.
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If Thatcher seemed poised to be a hard-liner on the Irish question, her position was only reaffirmed by something that happened shortly before she took office. On 30 March 1979, Airey Neave was driving his car out of an underground car park at the House of Commons when a bomb under the driver’s seat exploded, killing him. The bomb was set not by the Provos but by a different republican group, the Irish National Liberation Army, which took credit for the attack. Shortly after learning the news, a stricken Thatcher, labouring to preserve her trademark calm, said that Neave had been ‘one of freedom’s warriors: courageous, staunch and true’. The murder, less than two months before she became prime minister, would set the stage for her staunchly uncompromising posture towards any form of Irish republicanism.
16 A Clockwork Doll
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In February 1978, the IRA attacked the La Mon House hotel, outside Belfast, while it was crowded with civilians. The bomb killed twelve people and severely burned dozens more. ‘Things like that happened and you have to say, What is going on?’ Dolours recalled.
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On 5 May 1981, Bobby Sands died. It was the sixty-sixth day of his strike, and just as Terence MacSwiney’s death had six decades earlier, the story made headlines around the world. Gerry Adams later recalled Sands’s death as having ‘a greater international impact than any other event in Ireland in my lifetime’.
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After Sands died, another nine followed, starving to death one by one throughout that summer.
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By triumphing in the particular manner that she had back in 1974, Dolours Price had unwittingly given rise to the circumstances that would allow ten hunger strikers to starve to death seven years later.
18 The Bloody Envelope
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But as Adams refashioned his persona from guerrilla leader to statesman, he took this gambit one step further: he began to tell people that he had always been a purely political figure, an ardent republican and a Sinn Féin leader
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Just before Christmas in 1983, the Provos detonated a bomb at Harrods in London, killing five people and injuring ninety. (Adams said that the bomb ‘had not gone right’.) The following October, a volunteer placed a time bomb in a room at the Grand Hotel in Brighton, where Margaret Thatcher and many of her cabinet would be staying during the Conservative Party conference. The bomb exploded, killing five people, but not Thatcher.
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Not long after the car left the court, it slowed in traffic on Howard Street, and a brown vehicle appeared, pulling alongside it. Two gunmen fired a dozen shots at Adams and his associates. Adams was hit three times, in the neck, shoulder and arm, but not killed. (Three others in the car were also wounded, but none of them died.) ‘Christ said that those that take the sword shall perish by the sword,’ the Reverend Ian Paisley declared upon hearing of the shooting. ‘I have followed too many coffins over which Gerry Adams has rejoiced to feel any pain and sorrow over what has taken place today.’
19 Blue Ribbons
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There were places in Belfast where hard men congregated, and Hughes could go and sit and be accepted among such men, but Adams could not, because even before his rote denials of IRA membership, he had never been perceived as much of a soldier.
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Fewer than twenty people disappeared during the Troubles. Because the country is so small, however, the impact of each disappearance reverberated throughout the society.
20 A Secret Archive
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The ceasefire would eventually end, in 1996, when the IRA detonated a bomb in London’s Docklands, injuring more than one hundred people. The group issued a statement blaming the British government’s refusal to negotiate with Sinn Féin until the IRA had decommissioned its weapons. There was some speculation in the press that Gerry Adams might not have known about the bombing in advance–that in his dedication to the peace process, he may have grown alienated from the IRA’s armed wing. But a second ceasefire was initiated in 1997, and this one held.
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The key principle was ‘consent’: if, at some juncture, a majority of people in the North wanted to unite with Ireland, then the governments of the UK and Ireland would have a ‘binding obligation’ to honour that choice. But until that time, Northern Ireland would remain part of the UK, and Sinn Féin agreed to set aside its principle of abstention and allow its representatives to serve in the newly created assembly.
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Moloney had grown convinced that Adams was deliberately misleading the rank and file of the IRA. He suspected that Adams had privately resolved early on to give up the army’s weapons in the interests of the peace process but that he and the people around him had kept this closely guarded secret from the rest of the organisation.
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The accord provided for the release of paramilitary prisoners, many of whom had committed atrocious acts of violence. But there was no provision for the creation of any sort of truth-and-reconciliation mechanism that might allow the people of Northern Ireland to address the sometimes murky and often painful history of what had befallen their country over the previous three decades. After apartheid ended in South Africa, there had been such a process, in which people came forward and told their stories. The explicit understanding in that case was that there was an exchange: if you told the truth, then you could receive legal immunity. The South African model had flaws: critics claimed that the accounting was incomplete, and often political. But at least there was some effort at an accounting.
23 Bog Queen
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To Brendan Hughes, it was appalling that Adams would go to Jean McConville’s children and pledge to get to the bottom of what had happened to their mother, as though it were some great mystery to him. ‘He went to this family’s house and promised an investigation into the woman’s disappearance,’ Hughes told Mackers in one of his Boston College sessions. ‘The man that gave the fucking order for that woman to be executed! Now tell me the morality in that.’ Only a ‘Machiavellian monster’ could do such a thing, Hughes concluded.
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On another occasion, Michael climbed into the back of a black taxi on the Falls Road, only to look up and see that the driver was one of Jean’s abductors. The car pulled away from the kerb and the two men rode in silence. Michael didn’t say a word. What could he say? Instead he sat, unspeaking, until they reached his destination, then he handed the man the money for his fare.
24 An Entanglement of Lies
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For the IRA, this was a devastating paradox: the man the organisation had entrusted to root out moles was a mole himself.
28 Death by Misadventure
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Dolours might have loathed the Good Friday Agreement, but she could not commit herself to any of the republican splinter groups that were devoted to continuing the violence. Her sister had no such compunction. ‘Armed struggle does have a place in the present and in the future,’ Marian would say. She was in her late fifties, with grown daughters and arthritis, but she was not yet ready to put down the gun. After two days of interrogation about the barracks shooting, she was released without charge. But eighteen months later, she was detained by the authorities again, and this time they did not let her go. Marian was ultimately charged with ‘providing property for the purposes of terrorism’. There was another charge as well, relating to a dissident rally in Derry, at which a masked Real IRA man read a statement threatening police officers, saying that, as an occupying force, they were ‘liable for execution’. While he recited the statement, Marian Price stood beside him, holding his script, unmasked.
29 This Is the Past
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But the truth was that most residents still lived in neighbourhoods circumscribed by religion, and more than 90 per cent of children in Northern Ireland continued to attend segregated primary schools.
30 The Unknown
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collective denial: the stories that communities tell themselves in order to cope with tragic or transgressive events.
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One Irish writer likened such flourishes to ‘Charles Manson showing you his collection of tea cosies’, and it could seem, at times, that this assertive expression of whimsy was a form of cynical calculation. The West Belfast journalist Malachi O’Doherty suggested, in a biography of Adams, that the Sinn Féin leader is prone to ‘propagandising for his own humanity’.