Say Nothing – An Immersive Account of Lives Caught in the Web of Violence and Political Skulduggery

“When it came to the Troubles, a phenomenon known as ‘whataboutery’ took hold. Utter the name Jean McConville and someone would say, What about Bloody Sunday? To which you could say, What about Bloody Friday? To which they could say, What about Pat Finucane? What about the La Mon bombing? What about the Ballymurphy massacre? What about Enniskillen? What about McGurk’s bar? What about. What about. What about.”

Investigative writer and staff writer at the New Yorker, Patrick Radden Keefe’s narrative non-fiction, Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland (published February 2019) chronicles the complex and messy history of the bloody warfare in Northern Ireland with a great deal of clarity. Troubles is the descriptor of the brutal sectarian violence that haunted Northern Ireland in the late 20^th century. More than 3,500 people were killed during the Troubles and at least half of them were civilians. The Irish republicans/nationalists, predominantly Catholics (minorities), fought for a United Ireland (for the Northern Ireland to leave UK) whereas the Protestant loyalists were determined to keep Northern Ireland under British rule. The British government brought in the troops to serve as peacekeepers  although they ended up running their own campaign of terror by infiltrating IRA (the republican paramilitary organization that sough to end British rule in Ireland) and adopting other ruthless ways to curb the rebellion.

Patrick Radden Keefe looks at this most discussed conflict in modern history through the unresolved case of one victim. On one cold December night in 1972, 38-year-old Belfast resident, Jean McConville, a recently widowed mother of ten children living in the sprawling public housing complex, Divis Flats (described as the ‘slum in the sky’) was abducted by a gang of masked intruders. The neighbors in this overcrowded projects not only watched Jean's abduction with a air of indifference, but as one of her son says some of their neighbors were among the gang. Before leaving the house and getting into a van, Jean McConville put on her coat and said to one of her older kids, “Watch the children until I come back.” The missing mother’s bones were found on a beach in 2003. The human interest story of what happened to Jean McConville serves as  a entry point to this mesmerizing as well as devastating historical account of Troubles.

Patrick acknowledges that the key information related to McConville’s disapperance and murder emerged due to Boston College’s The Belfast Project, a controversial and aborted project which endeavored to curate an oral history of the Troubles, supposed to be accessed by students of future generations. For the covert project, the members of Loyalist and Republican paramilitaries were extensively interviewed with a promise that the tapes would not be released until after all the participant’s death. But when the existence of such a project was leaked, British government engaged in a lengthy legal dispute, demanding the Boston College to turn over the tapes since it might provide answers to unsolved crimes. But of course the Police Service of Northern Ireland and UK government’s generous commitment to see that the justice is served reeked of double standards and political intrigue.

The impact of Jean’s disapperance on the McConville children is explored alongside the complex lives of IRA members Dolours Price, Marian Price (the Price Sisters), Brendan Hughes, and Gerry Adams (people allegedly responsible for Jean’s murder), who were the chief architects of IRA’s violent resistance in the 1970s. Gerry Adams eventually transformed himself into a politician and became the leader of Sinn Fein, the political arm of IRA. After the 1998 Good Friday Agreement which ended the bloodshed (alongside the republican dreams of United Ireland), Adams was hailed in some quarters as the ‘Irish Nelon Mandela’. But he is also a most hated figure in some other quarters, christened as a traitor who betrayed the true republican cause. Adams is the most divisive and compelling personality in the history of Ireland, and Patrick offers a three-dimensional portrait of the well-known public figure, dispensing with the black-and-white narrative and retaining the many shades in between. It’s not just Adams, but Patrick’s portrayal of the Price Sisters, Brendan Hughes, IRA are neither positive nor negative.

Say Nothing is as multifaceted as a historical account can be. We may not condone the philosophical discourse offered by Dolours Price in choosing a particular form of violent resistance against the British imperialism (by planting four car-bombs near London’s government buildings which injured 250 people but, fortunately, caused no deaths).  But when you read the passages where the British government decides to force-feed her to break her hunger strike inside the prison (demanding to be moved to a Northern Ireland prison) you can’t stop yourself from getting enraged by such civil rights violations (despite the force-feeding, the strike lasted for 203 days and Dolours was eventually moved to Northern Ireland prison). Patrick transports us to the foul-smelling corridors of Northern Ireland’s Long Kesh prison (in 1981), chronicling how the moral dilemma of Brendan Hughes partly led to the wider campaign of hunger strike, spearheaded by Bobby Sands. Later, Dolours Price also reminisces on the martyrdom of Bobby Sands (after 66 days of hunger strike) and wonders if she has indirectly caused his death. The author presents each of these well-documented historical events from a unique perspective which befittingly complicates the moral dimensions. Say Nothing may offer some sort of emotional catharsis for the McConville family but post-confict reconciliation still remains a distant dream.

Patrick Keefe unremittingly captures all the complexities surrounding a historical account of armed insurrection, martyrdom, state-sanctioned terrorism, and societal repression. The lingering bitterness and agony in the aftermath of armed struggle, the fine art of political backstabbing, the atmosphere of silence and denial aren’t just relevant in the context of Troubles, but could be detected in any ethnic, sectarian conflicts happened/happening across the globe [Patrick rightly quotes Claude Levi-Strauss: “for the majority of the human species, and for tens of thousands of years, the idea that humanity includes every human being on the face of the earth does not exist at all. The designation stops at the border of each tribe, or linguistic.”] Hence I recommend this narrative fraught with violence, betrayals and loss to anyone interested in history and politics.