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Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland
In December 1972, Jean McConville, a thirty-eight-year-old mother of ten, was dragged from her Belfast home by masked intruders, her children clinging to her legs. They never saw her again. Her 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.
Patrick Radden Keefe writes an intricate narrative about a notorious killing in Northern Ireland and its devastating repercussions.
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.
Patrick Radden Keefe writes an intricate narrative about a notorious killing in Northern Ireland and its devastating repercussions.
441 pages, Hardcover
First published November 1, 2018
About the author
Patrick Radden Keefe
11 books4,219 followersPatrick Radden Keefe is a staff writer at The New Yorker and the author of The Snakehead and Chatter. His work has also appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Slate, New York, and The New York Review of Books. He received the 2014 National Magazine Award for Feature Writing, for his story "A Loaded Gun," was a finalist for the National Magazine Award for Reporting in 2015 and 2016, and is also the recipient of an Eric and Wendy Schmidt Fellowship at the New America Foundation and a Guggenheim Fellowship.
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March 20, 2021
Harrowing. I’ve always wanted a book that could describe simply and clearly what happened in Ireland during The Troubles. Not being Irish, I’ve too often felt the pall of incomprehensibility daunting me. I never found the right book, until now. Say Nothing is indeed that longed-for book. The prose is just perfectly freighted, and the reader is hoovered into the narrative maelstrom from the very first page with the mad scene of Jean McConville being torn from the arms of her huge and loving family—never to return—by masked goons.
The hatred here is like hatred everywhere—irrational. Be it the Nazis and the Jews, the new “discoverers” of America and its indigenous peoples, the Tutsi and the Hutu—the list is abysmally long. And let’s not forget the Legacy Museum, in Montgomery, Alabama, also known as the lynching museum. I long to visit it. Why? What can I possibly do at this remove? I guess it’s as Victor Klemperer once said, or rather wrote, one must bear witness, even if it’s at second or third hand.
There were five hostile entities in Belfast in the early 1970s. There was the IRA which was Catholic Nationalist and which split into two rival camps: (1) the Official IRA, which was Communist, and sought to remove Northern Ireland from the UK and create a workers' republic; and (2) the Provisional IRA, which sought to end British rule in Northern Ireland, and bring about an independent republic, and who were known as the Provos—the largest and most active republican paramilitary group. Other bellicose parties included (3) the loyalist paramilitaries, which were Protestant militia opposed to Catholic Emancipation and supporting the British occupation; (4) the Royal Ulster Constabulary, RUC, which was a Protestant police force; and finally (5) the British Army, the key military force of a (largely Protestant) nation which had recently lost virtually all of its colonial possessions. Other paramilitaries formed later.
After Jean McConville was “snatched,” to use the tabloid argot, and her ten parentless children were left to fend for themselves in the execrable Divis flats—their father Arthur had died of cancer some time before—no one from the surrounding community took the orphans under their wing. These traumatized children received no care. Even the local parish priest was unsympathetic. With good reason, it turns out, since Jean had been taken by the papist IRA. This resulted in a culture of silence in Belfast not unlike that in the USSR under Stalin, when even next door neighbors would not speak to one another due to the mutual fear of denunciation.
In the Provisional IRA, the members were all very young. Kids, really. They generally volunteered as children, with many assuming important roles by their teenage years and early twenties. These were the snipers and bombers and hit persons then so feared. Dolours Price was eighteen when she volunteered, having been raised by parents who’d both been IRA members back in the 1950s.
It was Dolours Price’s idea to take the bombing campaign to London. ”The English public, removed on the other side of the Irish Sea, seemed only dimly aware of the catastrophe engulfing Northern Ireland. 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.” (p. 117) I abhor the religious irrationality which drives pietists and which here can be traced back to the 12th century. It is a long and labyrinthine historical view you’ve got to have to kill in the name of this very ancient idea. One wonders if everyone was a scholar here—if the origins of the conflict were as fully understood and recalled and recited chapter and verse as would seem necessary to justify so much killing?
It’s now 1973 and the IRA is about to plant four car-bombs in London near government facilities. Dolours Price is given command of the operation. I was living in America when these horrors occurred. I can almost see the headline in the Washington Post. The author is now destroying that distance. The night before the bombings Dolours and her companions go to a West End play by Brian Friel, The Freedom of the City. The next morning London police are scurrying about bright and early to locate the cars; they were tipped off 14 hours in advance by a Provo mole. That day there’s a transit strike so London is chockablock with cars. Fortuitously the cops find one vehicle and disarm it. It’s alarm-clock timer was set for 3:00 p.m. They infer that they have until then to find the three remaining cars.
However, I don’t mean to be too hard on the NRA. So how’s this for balance? “Loyalist gangs, often operating with the tacit approval or the outright logistical assistance of the British state, killed hundreds of civilians in an endless stream of terror attacks. These victims were British subjects. Yet they had been dehumanized by the conflict to the point that organs of the British state often ended up complicit in such murders, without any sort of public inquiry or internal revolt in the security services.” (p. 274)
Say Nothing is nonfiction. It’s every bit as good as, say, Killers of the Flower Moon. In some ways, one might argue, its better, which is taking nothing away from David Grann. But to my mind Killers is a little thin at the end. It almost peters out. Say Nothing by contrast has a consistent verbal density and narrative compression throughout.
How did I not know that the Irish Potato Famine has been justly laid at the feet of Britain, who was exporting food from Ireland for its own needs as one million Irish died and another million emigrated? Now Dolours and Marian Price, locked up with a sentence of twenty years each in H.M.P. Brixton, begin a hunger strike which echoes that genocide. “If the British had employed hunger as a weapon during the famine, it would now be turned around and used against them. Dolours Price had always felt that prison was where an IRA volunteer’s allegiance to the cause was truly tested. Now she told anyone who would listen, she stood more than ready to die.” (p. 151) The young women’s hunger strike will break your heart. That’s the surprise about this book. It knocks you off your moral high horse. Two-hundred and fifty people injured by the bombs—terrible!—but miraculously no one killed. So when the British decide to force feed these young women, you know this is a violation of their civil rights; you know it is wrong; only long after the fact is it condemned and prohibited by the state.
After developing an eating disorder from the 207 days of forced-feeding, Marian is released near death. She has served 8 years. Dolours is released for the same reason after serving 13 years. To have kept her in jail would’ve been to kill her. She renounces the IRA and its violence. We skip ahead to Bobby Sands’s election to Parliament on the 41st day of his hunger strike in 1981; PM Margaret Thatcher’s recalcitrance in the face of all good sense; Sands’s death, followed by nine more hunger strike deaths that summer, one every week or so; the rise of Gerry Adams—blackly tarred for giving away the store as his onetime fighters see it—and with him Sinn Féin, the Good Friday Agreement etc. One aspect of the peace that the GFA did not provide for is the truth and reconciliation process; thus the last part of the book, The Reckoning. Boston College undertakes this role when it is apparent no one else will. (The city has a large Irish-American population.) It’s called Project Belfast. The sheer tonnage of mental derangement and searing regret shouldn’t surprise us, not after a war this prolonged and bitter, but it does, it does.
Then Boston College “screws the pooch,” to quote former test pilot Chuck Yeager, when the old RUC, trying to take down General Adams, obtains the transcripts via subpoena in 2003 or so. None of Boston College’s agreements with the interviewees, it turns out, were ever vetted by in-house counsel, so the pledges to withhold the transcripts until after the interviewee(s)’s death(s) could not be honored. I was reading this and whispering: “oh God, oh my God,” which shows you how clichéd I become when dumbfounded. You may wish to brace yourself.
The hatred here is like hatred everywhere—irrational. Be it the Nazis and the Jews, the new “discoverers” of America and its indigenous peoples, the Tutsi and the Hutu—the list is abysmally long. And let’s not forget the Legacy Museum, in Montgomery, Alabama, also known as the lynching museum. I long to visit it. Why? What can I possibly do at this remove? I guess it’s as Victor Klemperer once said, or rather wrote, one must bear witness, even if it’s at second or third hand.
There were five hostile entities in Belfast in the early 1970s. There was the IRA which was Catholic Nationalist and which split into two rival camps: (1) the Official IRA, which was Communist, and sought to remove Northern Ireland from the UK and create a workers' republic; and (2) the Provisional IRA, which sought to end British rule in Northern Ireland, and bring about an independent republic, and who were known as the Provos—the largest and most active republican paramilitary group. Other bellicose parties included (3) the loyalist paramilitaries, which were Protestant militia opposed to Catholic Emancipation and supporting the British occupation; (4) the Royal Ulster Constabulary, RUC, which was a Protestant police force; and finally (5) the British Army, the key military force of a (largely Protestant) nation which had recently lost virtually all of its colonial possessions. Other paramilitaries formed later.
After Jean McConville was “snatched,” to use the tabloid argot, and her ten parentless children were left to fend for themselves in the execrable Divis flats—their father Arthur had died of cancer some time before—no one from the surrounding community took the orphans under their wing. These traumatized children received no care. Even the local parish priest was unsympathetic. With good reason, it turns out, since Jean had been taken by the papist IRA. This resulted in a culture of silence in Belfast not unlike that in the USSR under Stalin, when even next door neighbors would not speak to one another due to the mutual fear of denunciation.
In the Provisional IRA, the members were all very young. Kids, really. They generally volunteered as children, with many assuming important roles by their teenage years and early twenties. These were the snipers and bombers and hit persons then so feared. Dolours Price was eighteen when she volunteered, having been raised by parents who’d both been IRA members back in the 1950s.
It was Dolours Price’s idea to take the bombing campaign to London. ”The English public, removed on the other side of the Irish Sea, seemed only dimly aware of the catastrophe engulfing Northern Ireland. 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.” (p. 117) I abhor the religious irrationality which drives pietists and which here can be traced back to the 12th century. It is a long and labyrinthine historical view you’ve got to have to kill in the name of this very ancient idea. One wonders if everyone was a scholar here—if the origins of the conflict were as fully understood and recalled and recited chapter and verse as would seem necessary to justify so much killing?
It’s now 1973 and the IRA is about to plant four car-bombs in London near government facilities. Dolours Price is given command of the operation. I was living in America when these horrors occurred. I can almost see the headline in the Washington Post. The author is now destroying that distance. The night before the bombings Dolours and her companions go to a West End play by Brian Friel, The Freedom of the City. The next morning London police are scurrying about bright and early to locate the cars; they were tipped off 14 hours in advance by a Provo mole. That day there’s a transit strike so London is chockablock with cars. Fortuitously the cops find one vehicle and disarm it. It’s alarm-clock timer was set for 3:00 p.m. They infer that they have until then to find the three remaining cars.
However, I don’t mean to be too hard on the NRA. So how’s this for balance? “Loyalist gangs, often operating with the tacit approval or the outright logistical assistance of the British state, killed hundreds of civilians in an endless stream of terror attacks. These victims were British subjects. Yet they had been dehumanized by the conflict to the point that organs of the British state often ended up complicit in such murders, without any sort of public inquiry or internal revolt in the security services.” (p. 274)
Say Nothing is nonfiction. It’s every bit as good as, say, Killers of the Flower Moon. In some ways, one might argue, its better, which is taking nothing away from David Grann. But to my mind Killers is a little thin at the end. It almost peters out. Say Nothing by contrast has a consistent verbal density and narrative compression throughout.
How did I not know that the Irish Potato Famine has been justly laid at the feet of Britain, who was exporting food from Ireland for its own needs as one million Irish died and another million emigrated? Now Dolours and Marian Price, locked up with a sentence of twenty years each in H.M.P. Brixton, begin a hunger strike which echoes that genocide. “If the British had employed hunger as a weapon during the famine, it would now be turned around and used against them. Dolours Price had always felt that prison was where an IRA volunteer’s allegiance to the cause was truly tested. Now she told anyone who would listen, she stood more than ready to die.” (p. 151) The young women’s hunger strike will break your heart. That’s the surprise about this book. It knocks you off your moral high horse. Two-hundred and fifty people injured by the bombs—terrible!—but miraculously no one killed. So when the British decide to force feed these young women, you know this is a violation of their civil rights; you know it is wrong; only long after the fact is it condemned and prohibited by the state.
After developing an eating disorder from the 207 days of forced-feeding, Marian is released near death. She has served 8 years. Dolours is released for the same reason after serving 13 years. To have kept her in jail would’ve been to kill her. She renounces the IRA and its violence. We skip ahead to Bobby Sands’s election to Parliament on the 41st day of his hunger strike in 1981; PM Margaret Thatcher’s recalcitrance in the face of all good sense; Sands’s death, followed by nine more hunger strike deaths that summer, one every week or so; the rise of Gerry Adams—blackly tarred for giving away the store as his onetime fighters see it—and with him Sinn Féin, the Good Friday Agreement etc. One aspect of the peace that the GFA did not provide for is the truth and reconciliation process; thus the last part of the book, The Reckoning. Boston College undertakes this role when it is apparent no one else will. (The city has a large Irish-American population.) It’s called Project Belfast. The sheer tonnage of mental derangement and searing regret shouldn’t surprise us, not after a war this prolonged and bitter, but it does, it does.
Then Boston College “screws the pooch,” to quote former test pilot Chuck Yeager, when the old RUC, trying to take down General Adams, obtains the transcripts via subpoena in 2003 or so. None of Boston College’s agreements with the interviewees, it turns out, were ever vetted by in-house counsel, so the pledges to withhold the transcripts until after the interviewee(s)’s death(s) could not be honored. I was reading this and whispering: “oh God, oh my God,” which shows you how clichéd I become when dumbfounded. You may wish to brace yourself.
October 25, 2023
Very impressive, Radden Keefe. Very impressive, indeed.
Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland is an intricate and moving piece of narrative nonfiction concerning The Troubles in the North of Ireland.
It follows events, particularly centered in Belfast, beginning in 1969 through the Good Friday Agreement of 1998.
Bookending Radden Keefe's extraordinary compilation of this history is the story of a mother of ten, Jean McConville, who was forcibly taken from her home in late 1972, becoming one of the disappeared during this bitter conflict.
McConville had been accused of being a paid informant for the British Army and it was widely believed, at the time, that the IRA was responsible for her disappearance.
This book seems remarkably researched and indeed, Radden Keefe, provides copious notes at the end of the main story detailing where his information is coming from, etc.
During the course of his 4-years of research, he interviewed around 100 people, although many more refused to speak with him, as talking about The Troubles can still hold repercussions.
I was so impressed with how he was able to bring such a sensitive and emotional topic to life on the page.
Weaving together an immersive narrative of a time fraught with violence, betrayals and loss.
There are descriptive accounts of the roles of various players at the time such as Gerry Adams, Brendan Hughes, Bobby Sands and the Price Sisters, Dolours and Marian.
One of the most interesting areas explored, for me, was the hunger strikes carried out by many of the volunteers captured and imprisoned by the British.
I hadn't really heard too much about that before and found it a horrifying and fascinating avenue of resistance, which the author handled so well.
I would absolutely recommend this book to anyone interested in 20th century Irish history or anyone interested in The Troubles in particular.
I definitely have a couple of people in my own life that I will be purchasing this book for as a gift.
Thank you so much to the publisher, Doubleday Books, for providing me with a copy to read and review. I truly appreciate having the opportunity to read this one.
A big thank you as well to the author, Patrick Radden Keefe, for taking on this project as I feel this is a part of history that deserves to be remembered. Well done.
Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland is an intricate and moving piece of narrative nonfiction concerning The Troubles in the North of Ireland.
It follows events, particularly centered in Belfast, beginning in 1969 through the Good Friday Agreement of 1998.
Bookending Radden Keefe's extraordinary compilation of this history is the story of a mother of ten, Jean McConville, who was forcibly taken from her home in late 1972, becoming one of the disappeared during this bitter conflict.
McConville had been accused of being a paid informant for the British Army and it was widely believed, at the time, that the IRA was responsible for her disappearance.
This book seems remarkably researched and indeed, Radden Keefe, provides copious notes at the end of the main story detailing where his information is coming from, etc.
During the course of his 4-years of research, he interviewed around 100 people, although many more refused to speak with him, as talking about The Troubles can still hold repercussions.
I was so impressed with how he was able to bring such a sensitive and emotional topic to life on the page.
Weaving together an immersive narrative of a time fraught with violence, betrayals and loss.
There are descriptive accounts of the roles of various players at the time such as Gerry Adams, Brendan Hughes, Bobby Sands and the Price Sisters, Dolours and Marian.
One of the most interesting areas explored, for me, was the hunger strikes carried out by many of the volunteers captured and imprisoned by the British.
I hadn't really heard too much about that before and found it a horrifying and fascinating avenue of resistance, which the author handled so well.
I would absolutely recommend this book to anyone interested in 20th century Irish history or anyone interested in The Troubles in particular.
I definitely have a couple of people in my own life that I will be purchasing this book for as a gift.
Thank you so much to the publisher, Doubleday Books, for providing me with a copy to read and review. I truly appreciate having the opportunity to read this one.
A big thank you as well to the author, Patrick Radden Keefe, for taking on this project as I feel this is a part of history that deserves to be remembered. Well done.
February 9, 2023
“[A] pair of dispassionate [IRA] gunmen were sent from Belfast. Before the killing, they summoned a priest. This was not unusual: there were certain priests in that era who grew accustomed to the late-night phone call. They would be summoned outside by gruff men who were about to perform an execution and asked to deliver the last rites. The act of killing itself had a ritual character, a practiced choreography…A bag is placed over your head. Your hands are bound behind your back. You kneel in the soft grass. Then you flop forward when the bullet hits your brain…”
- Patrick Radden Keefe, Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland
Patrick Radden Keefe’s Say Nothing is a remarkable book. It bills itself as a murder mystery of sorts, centered on the December 1972 abduction – and subsequent “disappearance” – of a widowed mother in front of her ten children. But it is much more than that. It is, in fact, a retelling of “the Troubles” – the sectarian conflict in Northern Ireland – through four distinct characters: Gerry Adams, the morally malleable political leader of Sinn Fein; Brendan “the Dark” Hughes, the deadly brigade leader of the Provisional Irish Republican Army; Dolours Price, who joined the IRA as a young woman and embarked on the type of celebrity-terrorist career that brings to mind Patty Hurst without the trust fund; and finally, Jean McConville, who may or may not have been a British informant, but was certainly murdered for no good reason. Each is memorable in their own way, their lives intersecting, often fatefully, in a web of violence, ideals, and memory far larger than themselves.
Say Nothing is elegantly structured, using the McConville murder as a narrative touchstone from which to embark on a larger exploration of the vicious, long-lasting, and incredibly intimate conflict pitting loyalists (mainly Protestants) who wanted Northern Ireland to remain in the United Kingdom, and republicans (mainly Catholics) who wanted it to become part of a united Ireland. This conflict was marked by kidnappings, extralegal confinements, torture, assassinations, and bombings.
In terms of sheer numbers, the violence in Northern Ireland was low-grade. The numbers I’ve seen put total fatalities at around 3,500 over a roughly 30-year period. In our own Age of Terror, those numbers – unfortunately – barely make you blink. (By way of comparison: the Omagh Bombing, carried out by an IRA splinter group, killed around 30; on September 11, 2001, al-Qaeda killed around 3,000).
In terms of viciousness, though, the Troubles still manage to shock and unsettle. This was a civil war pitting neighbor against neighbor. The violence was personal and every bullet had a name. When Jean McConville was taken, many of her abductors were recognized by her children, who saw them around for years later.
When I picked up Say Nothing, the things I knew about the Troubles – about Irish history in general – could fit into a pint glass. Indeed, most of the things I knew revolved around pint glasses. I think that’s important to mention, because part of my reaction to this book is a function of the thrill of discovery. With the exception of Adams, Bloody Sunday, and a couple of the IRA’s most famous bombings, I did not have a lot of foreknowledge about this subject. It is quite possible that a person who has studied these times before will be less enthralled.
That said, Keefe has still done an excellent job here. He is a consistently engaging writer with a really good grasp on what he is trying to do. He recognizes that the McConville murder itself can probably be covered comfortably in a long magazine article (and I believe it has been, by Keefe himself, in The New Yorker). Thus, he weaves the crime into the overall tapestry of the Troubles. But he never resorts to mere filler. Instead, all the different storylines inform each other. While there are some pretty long stretches in which McConville is absent from Say Nothing, Keefe never forgets her (or her children), and he is always returning to her final moments, gradually revealing certain aspects of it that he has uncovered (including, in the final pages, the possible identity of her actual shooter).
Keefe is also a dogged researcher and interviewer, and he has gone to great lengths to tell this tale right. His endnotes are extensive and reveal his efforts to get people to give up their secrets, in a land in which touts – informers or snitches – are still reviled. He tries extremely hard to remain unbiased, writing with a controlled sense of outrage about both loyalist and republican atrocities. There is no single villain here. Certainly, there is no unblemished hero. Both sides did appalling things. Undoubtedly, there will be partisans who say Keefe hasn’t told the truth, but that is to be expected. The “truth” is dead in an unmarked grave, and we are left with many competing remembrances. As Keefe demonstrates, many eyewitness accounts are at odds with each other and with contemporary reports; yet for the eyewitness, that account has become gospel.
For me, one of the best measures of a book is how often I am unconsciously bringing it up in conversation. During the week in which I tore through Say Nothing, I probably said the words “I’m reading this book called Say Nothing” a dozen times. And that’s not even counting St. Patrick’s Day, when I attempted to steer all bar conversations toward the ethics of political violence. Without ever indulging a lecture, Say Nothing has a lot of things to say about idealism and brutality; about national memory; and about which ends justify which means.
Say Nothing is in part possible because of a secret oral history endeavor called the “Belfast Project,” in which interviewers spoke with former IRA men and women, collecting their stories (and their crimes) and placing them under seal at Boston College. When word of the project leaked, prosecutors in Northern Ireland subpoenaed these records, and Boston College hastily complied.
What Keefe found in a lot of these reminisces is the concept of moral injury: the damage to a person’s soul for transgressive acts taken in the name of a cause. Many of these old fighters/terrorists felt betrayed by the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, because they sensed that the awful things they’d done had been done for no reason. In the end, all their efforts ended in a compromise that probably could have been attained without the bloodshed.
Yet someday, Ireland will be unified from top to bottom. Someday, the relatively recent history covered in Say Nothing will be old history. From that distant vantage, the answers to some extremely difficult questions will seem self-evident. It will be easy to shrug and say that the car bombs, the kidnappings, even the killing of a mother of ten children, were nothing more than minor speed-bumps on the road to unification. To that end, Say Nothing will serve as an important reminder of the terrible complexities of the Troubles. It is an indelible portrait of four participants living in a moral bog, where otherwise-decent men and women saw their choice as between killing a person and hiding their body, or killing a person and leaving their body on the street. It is a study of the cost of belief, to both victim and perpetrator alike.
- Patrick Radden Keefe, Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland
Patrick Radden Keefe’s Say Nothing is a remarkable book. It bills itself as a murder mystery of sorts, centered on the December 1972 abduction – and subsequent “disappearance” – of a widowed mother in front of her ten children. But it is much more than that. It is, in fact, a retelling of “the Troubles” – the sectarian conflict in Northern Ireland – through four distinct characters: Gerry Adams, the morally malleable political leader of Sinn Fein; Brendan “the Dark” Hughes, the deadly brigade leader of the Provisional Irish Republican Army; Dolours Price, who joined the IRA as a young woman and embarked on the type of celebrity-terrorist career that brings to mind Patty Hurst without the trust fund; and finally, Jean McConville, who may or may not have been a British informant, but was certainly murdered for no good reason. Each is memorable in their own way, their lives intersecting, often fatefully, in a web of violence, ideals, and memory far larger than themselves.
Say Nothing is elegantly structured, using the McConville murder as a narrative touchstone from which to embark on a larger exploration of the vicious, long-lasting, and incredibly intimate conflict pitting loyalists (mainly Protestants) who wanted Northern Ireland to remain in the United Kingdom, and republicans (mainly Catholics) who wanted it to become part of a united Ireland. This conflict was marked by kidnappings, extralegal confinements, torture, assassinations, and bombings.
In terms of sheer numbers, the violence in Northern Ireland was low-grade. The numbers I’ve seen put total fatalities at around 3,500 over a roughly 30-year period. In our own Age of Terror, those numbers – unfortunately – barely make you blink. (By way of comparison: the Omagh Bombing, carried out by an IRA splinter group, killed around 30; on September 11, 2001, al-Qaeda killed around 3,000).
In terms of viciousness, though, the Troubles still manage to shock and unsettle. This was a civil war pitting neighbor against neighbor. The violence was personal and every bullet had a name. When Jean McConville was taken, many of her abductors were recognized by her children, who saw them around for years later.
When I picked up Say Nothing, the things I knew about the Troubles – about Irish history in general – could fit into a pint glass. Indeed, most of the things I knew revolved around pint glasses. I think that’s important to mention, because part of my reaction to this book is a function of the thrill of discovery. With the exception of Adams, Bloody Sunday, and a couple of the IRA’s most famous bombings, I did not have a lot of foreknowledge about this subject. It is quite possible that a person who has studied these times before will be less enthralled.
That said, Keefe has still done an excellent job here. He is a consistently engaging writer with a really good grasp on what he is trying to do. He recognizes that the McConville murder itself can probably be covered comfortably in a long magazine article (and I believe it has been, by Keefe himself, in The New Yorker). Thus, he weaves the crime into the overall tapestry of the Troubles. But he never resorts to mere filler. Instead, all the different storylines inform each other. While there are some pretty long stretches in which McConville is absent from Say Nothing, Keefe never forgets her (or her children), and he is always returning to her final moments, gradually revealing certain aspects of it that he has uncovered (including, in the final pages, the possible identity of her actual shooter).
Keefe is also a dogged researcher and interviewer, and he has gone to great lengths to tell this tale right. His endnotes are extensive and reveal his efforts to get people to give up their secrets, in a land in which touts – informers or snitches – are still reviled. He tries extremely hard to remain unbiased, writing with a controlled sense of outrage about both loyalist and republican atrocities. There is no single villain here. Certainly, there is no unblemished hero. Both sides did appalling things. Undoubtedly, there will be partisans who say Keefe hasn’t told the truth, but that is to be expected. The “truth” is dead in an unmarked grave, and we are left with many competing remembrances. As Keefe demonstrates, many eyewitness accounts are at odds with each other and with contemporary reports; yet for the eyewitness, that account has become gospel.
For me, one of the best measures of a book is how often I am unconsciously bringing it up in conversation. During the week in which I tore through Say Nothing, I probably said the words “I’m reading this book called Say Nothing” a dozen times. And that’s not even counting St. Patrick’s Day, when I attempted to steer all bar conversations toward the ethics of political violence. Without ever indulging a lecture, Say Nothing has a lot of things to say about idealism and brutality; about national memory; and about which ends justify which means.
Say Nothing is in part possible because of a secret oral history endeavor called the “Belfast Project,” in which interviewers spoke with former IRA men and women, collecting their stories (and their crimes) and placing them under seal at Boston College. When word of the project leaked, prosecutors in Northern Ireland subpoenaed these records, and Boston College hastily complied.
What Keefe found in a lot of these reminisces is the concept of moral injury: the damage to a person’s soul for transgressive acts taken in the name of a cause. Many of these old fighters/terrorists felt betrayed by the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, because they sensed that the awful things they’d done had been done for no reason. In the end, all their efforts ended in a compromise that probably could have been attained without the bloodshed.
Yet someday, Ireland will be unified from top to bottom. Someday, the relatively recent history covered in Say Nothing will be old history. From that distant vantage, the answers to some extremely difficult questions will seem self-evident. It will be easy to shrug and say that the car bombs, the kidnappings, even the killing of a mother of ten children, were nothing more than minor speed-bumps on the road to unification. To that end, Say Nothing will serve as an important reminder of the terrible complexities of the Troubles. It is an indelible portrait of four participants living in a moral bog, where otherwise-decent men and women saw their choice as between killing a person and hiding their body, or killing a person and leaving their body on the street. It is a study of the cost of belief, to both victim and perpetrator alike.
February 27, 2019
I wish it weren't only February because the statement 'this is the best book I've read all year' does not carry very much weight when we still have 10 months to go. But, nonetheless, this is my reigning book of 2019. And it ended up being one of those rare cases when the book turned out so differently from what I expected, but I ended up liking it all the more for that. From the blurb I got the impression that this was going to focus on the disappearance of a woman called Jean McConville, with details about the Troubles setting the background context, but instead it's primarily a narrative account of the Troubles which occasionally, haltingly zeroes in on McConville's story. So it's less true crime than it is historical nonfiction, but the final product is focused and compelling.
Say Nothing, whose title comes from a line from a Seamus Heaney poem which examines the treacherous precedent of speaking plainly about the Troubles, paints a comprehensive picture of twentieth century Belfast and introduces us to a few of the main players responsible for much of the devastation caused by the IRA - Brendan Hughes, Gerry Adams, Dolours and Marian Price, et al. Radden Keefe explores the lives and family histories and philosophies and interpersonal dynamics of these individuals and I found it refreshing that he didn't have an interest in moralizing in his approach to this story; while I think true objectivity is probably impossible, this is about as multifaceted as it gets. Driven primarily by an interest in the human cost of the conflict, Radden Keefe turns four years of research into a richly detailed account of Northern Ireland's fraught history, particularly examining how difficult it is to cultivate a historical record when different accounts contain conflicting information, and when everyone is afraid to speak openly about a conflict that's officially been resolved, but is a strong force in cumulative living memory. (If you loved Milkman, or if you didn't understand Milkman, this is such a valuable nonfiction supplement.)
Certain anecdotes and images in this book were just arresting, and I think it's telling that the two stories that affected me the most had victims on opposite sides of the conflict. The first was about an IRA man who ordered a hit on another IRA man, whose wife he was having an affair with; the first man was sentenced to death, and Dolours Price, driving him to his execution, was struck with the thought that she could let him go, or that he could attack her and escape, but neither of those possibilities was going to happen because they both wholly accepted their devotion to the cause. The chapter ends with the flat and haunting lines "'I'll be seeing you Joe,' Price said. But she knew that she wouldn't be, and she cried the whole way home." The second story that got under my skin was about two young British soldiers who had accidentally found themselves in the middle of an IRA funeral; because of a recent attack by loyalists, their presence was met with suspicion and they were dragged from their car and beaten, and eventually taken across the road and shot. A Catholic priest ran over and when he noticed that one of the men was still breathing, asked if anyone knew CPR, but he was met with silence from the crowd, and a photograph was captured of him kneeling over this soldier's body and staring into the camera, his lips bloody from trying to resuscitate him.
As for the significance of Jean McConville, the mother of ten who went missing in 1972, and whose body wasn't recovered until her bones were found on a beach in 2003: at first I did worry that this element was being shoehorned as a bizarre piece of human interest (I say 'bizarre' due to the little attention that's paid to McConville and her children throughout). However, I needn't have worried, as everything does eventually dovetail in a way that fully justifies this book's premise. Running alongside the historical account of the Troubles, Radden Keefe introduces the reader to something called the Boston College Tapes, an aborted project in which heads of the college's Irish History department endeavored to curate an oral history of the Troubles, to be accessed by the college's students in future generations. Due to the fact that discussing past paramilitary activity is an incriminating act, participants in the project were granted a sort of amnesty and promised that the tapes would not be released until after the participant's death. This promise was violated in the form of a lengthy legal battle between BC and the UK government, and ended up playing a key role in getting to the bottom of McConville's disappearance.
While I'd first and foremost recommend Say Nothing to those with an interest in Irish history and wouldn't dream of selling this as a true crime book, I don't want to downplay how enthralling this was. Granted, its focus is something I already had an interest in, but what Radden Keefe brought to this narrative was a fiercely human angle, and I found this as deeply moving as it was informative.
Thank you to Netgalley and Doubleday for the advanced copy provided in exchange for an honest review.
Say Nothing, whose title comes from a line from a Seamus Heaney poem which examines the treacherous precedent of speaking plainly about the Troubles, paints a comprehensive picture of twentieth century Belfast and introduces us to a few of the main players responsible for much of the devastation caused by the IRA - Brendan Hughes, Gerry Adams, Dolours and Marian Price, et al. Radden Keefe explores the lives and family histories and philosophies and interpersonal dynamics of these individuals and I found it refreshing that he didn't have an interest in moralizing in his approach to this story; while I think true objectivity is probably impossible, this is about as multifaceted as it gets. Driven primarily by an interest in the human cost of the conflict, Radden Keefe turns four years of research into a richly detailed account of Northern Ireland's fraught history, particularly examining how difficult it is to cultivate a historical record when different accounts contain conflicting information, and when everyone is afraid to speak openly about a conflict that's officially been resolved, but is a strong force in cumulative living memory. (If you loved Milkman, or if you didn't understand Milkman, this is such a valuable nonfiction supplement.)
Certain anecdotes and images in this book were just arresting, and I think it's telling that the two stories that affected me the most had victims on opposite sides of the conflict. The first was about an IRA man who ordered a hit on another IRA man, whose wife he was having an affair with; the first man was sentenced to death, and Dolours Price, driving him to his execution, was struck with the thought that she could let him go, or that he could attack her and escape, but neither of those possibilities was going to happen because they both wholly accepted their devotion to the cause. The chapter ends with the flat and haunting lines "'I'll be seeing you Joe,' Price said. But she knew that she wouldn't be, and she cried the whole way home." The second story that got under my skin was about two young British soldiers who had accidentally found themselves in the middle of an IRA funeral; because of a recent attack by loyalists, their presence was met with suspicion and they were dragged from their car and beaten, and eventually taken across the road and shot. A Catholic priest ran over and when he noticed that one of the men was still breathing, asked if anyone knew CPR, but he was met with silence from the crowd, and a photograph was captured of him kneeling over this soldier's body and staring into the camera, his lips bloody from trying to resuscitate him.
As for the significance of Jean McConville, the mother of ten who went missing in 1972, and whose body wasn't recovered until her bones were found on a beach in 2003: at first I did worry that this element was being shoehorned as a bizarre piece of human interest (I say 'bizarre' due to the little attention that's paid to McConville and her children throughout). However, I needn't have worried, as everything does eventually dovetail in a way that fully justifies this book's premise. Running alongside the historical account of the Troubles, Radden Keefe introduces the reader to something called the Boston College Tapes, an aborted project in which heads of the college's Irish History department endeavored to curate an oral history of the Troubles, to be accessed by the college's students in future generations. Due to the fact that discussing past paramilitary activity is an incriminating act, participants in the project were granted a sort of amnesty and promised that the tapes would not be released until after the participant's death. This promise was violated in the form of a lengthy legal battle between BC and the UK government, and ended up playing a key role in getting to the bottom of McConville's disappearance.
While I'd first and foremost recommend Say Nothing to those with an interest in Irish history and wouldn't dream of selling this as a true crime book, I don't want to downplay how enthralling this was. Granted, its focus is something I already had an interest in, but what Radden Keefe brought to this narrative was a fiercely human angle, and I found this as deeply moving as it was informative.
Thank you to Netgalley and Doubleday for the advanced copy provided in exchange for an honest review.
January 12, 2024
When a non-fiction book reads as engaging and swiftly as a fast paced novel, you know you’ve found a winner. Truthfully, I’ve never been a big non-fiction reader unless it’s in service of an essay so when I landed on non-fiction for my book club choice (we made a giant wheel of categories to spice things up) I wasn’t sure what to pick. But I’ve long been fascinated by the IRA without much working knowledge and I’d been impressed by Patrick Radden Keefe for basically telling the Sackler family to eat shit and then writing a massive book, Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty, showing us all why we should also tell them to eat shit, so I figured this would be interesting.
Reader, I loved it.
Say Nothing by Patrick Radden Keefe is an in-depth and infectiously written account of The Troubles that threads the story of a specific murder through a long history of the Irish Republican Army. Political violence claimed the lives of 4000 people from the late 1960s to the Good Friday Agreement in 1998, though 17 others were “disappeared” during this time. One such disappearance was Jean McConville in Belfast, and Say Nothing uses the investigation of her murder as the focal point to branch into key figures such as Dolours Price and her sister Marian,Gerry Adams, Bobby Sands, and others as well as the key events of The Troubles to craft a very dynamic look at the uneasy history. Through an impressive breadth of research that took four years and effective journalist skills to get the stories out of people who lived their lives around the principal of keeping silent, Say Nothing is a wealth of fascinating stories and such a well-structured and well told book that is impossible to set down.
Now-famous photo of a woman volunteer of the IRA with a rifle
Oh, you should probably read this review with some accompaniment of IRA folk songs
Patrick Radden Keefe had previously written about McConville’s murder in an article for The New Yorker and was briefly granted access to to the Belfast Project records—a secret oral history of The Troubles that were stored under seal at Boston College—when the tapes were subpoenaed by Northern Ireland for the McConville case. What Keefe found in them were personal narratives on the complex history of the IRA, stories of pride, of betrayal, of frustration with the Good Friday Agreement or Gerry Adams distancing himself from his IRA past, and conflicting accounts of events. Say Nothing manages to navigate the complexities (wall graffiti in Belfast reading ‘If you’re not confused you don’t know what’s going on’ is used as a good quip on how complicated the politics sometimes got) in a really accessible and organized way and becomes a rather chilling presentation on the ethics of political violence. It is a reminder how nationalism or even well-founded frustrations can be steered towards violence, and how when the dust settles many people are left feeling that the extreme measures they took—be it violence or having spent a large portion of their lives in prison for a cause—feels like a wasted effort.
President of Sinn Féin, Gerry Adams
This book is absolutely fascinating and I couldn’t put it down. The stories are wild. There is a great detective-style narrative that recurs through the book but honestly the best parts are the detours into IRA history and all the interesting people involved. Central to the book is Dolours Price who had joined the IRA with her sister and became part of “The Unknown”, an elite taskforce of the IRA. Price spent time in prison for carbombings in England, held a hunger strike, and admitted to many acts of violence. But was she behind the killing of Jean McConville? Readers will have to find out!
Dolours and Marian Price
The sections on Price’s activism are quite intense and engaging. The British police come across like the Keystone Cops here, and it is rather amusing to see, for instance, Price getting cops to look the other way by showing her leg so they don’t notice the car full of explosives behind her. Also this covers one of my other favorite things: art heists! There are some great stories of art heists being used to draw attention to the cause or ransom the paintings for the release of Dolours Price. I was also fascinated to learn she was married to Stephen Rea, who you may recognize from films such as The Crying Game, Michael Collins, or V for Vendetta. And I learned that there was a ban on the voices of Sinn Féin members on British television, which explains the joke in the show Derry Girls (if you have not watched Derry Girls drop all plans for your weekend to do so) where the grandfather claims Adams voice was dubbed on tv because the British thought it was too sexy and would seduce all their women.
Dolours Price with husband Stephen Rea
Even if you aren’t normally a non-fiction history reader like me, Say Nothing is sure to blow you away. I mean like as in impress you, not IRA explosives. It is a fascinating history and often a very tragic story. We experience McConville’s children, for instance, who recognized her captures and would see them around town for years after knowing the people likely killed their mother. We experience all the anger, frustrations and feelings of resentment, and we experience a rather well-told and dynamic history of The Troubles. Plus everyone in my book club loved it, so that was nice. Highly recommended.
4.5/5
Reader, I loved it.
Say Nothing by Patrick Radden Keefe is an in-depth and infectiously written account of The Troubles that threads the story of a specific murder through a long history of the Irish Republican Army. Political violence claimed the lives of 4000 people from the late 1960s to the Good Friday Agreement in 1998, though 17 others were “disappeared” during this time. One such disappearance was Jean McConville in Belfast, and Say Nothing uses the investigation of her murder as the focal point to branch into key figures such as Dolours Price and her sister Marian,Gerry Adams, Bobby Sands, and others as well as the key events of The Troubles to craft a very dynamic look at the uneasy history. Through an impressive breadth of research that took four years and effective journalist skills to get the stories out of people who lived their lives around the principal of keeping silent, Say Nothing is a wealth of fascinating stories and such a well-structured and well told book that is impossible to set down.
Now-famous photo of a woman volunteer of the IRA with a rifle
Oh, you should probably read this review with some accompaniment of IRA folk songs
Patrick Radden Keefe had previously written about McConville’s murder in an article for The New Yorker and was briefly granted access to to the Belfast Project records—a secret oral history of The Troubles that were stored under seal at Boston College—when the tapes were subpoenaed by Northern Ireland for the McConville case. What Keefe found in them were personal narratives on the complex history of the IRA, stories of pride, of betrayal, of frustration with the Good Friday Agreement or Gerry Adams distancing himself from his IRA past, and conflicting accounts of events. Say Nothing manages to navigate the complexities (wall graffiti in Belfast reading ‘If you’re not confused you don’t know what’s going on’ is used as a good quip on how complicated the politics sometimes got) in a really accessible and organized way and becomes a rather chilling presentation on the ethics of political violence. It is a reminder how nationalism or even well-founded frustrations can be steered towards violence, and how when the dust settles many people are left feeling that the extreme measures they took—be it violence or having spent a large portion of their lives in prison for a cause—feels like a wasted effort.
President of Sinn Féin, Gerry Adams
This book is absolutely fascinating and I couldn’t put it down. The stories are wild. There is a great detective-style narrative that recurs through the book but honestly the best parts are the detours into IRA history and all the interesting people involved. Central to the book is Dolours Price who had joined the IRA with her sister and became part of “The Unknown”, an elite taskforce of the IRA. Price spent time in prison for carbombings in England, held a hunger strike, and admitted to many acts of violence. But was she behind the killing of Jean McConville? Readers will have to find out!
Dolours and Marian Price
The sections on Price’s activism are quite intense and engaging. The British police come across like the Keystone Cops here, and it is rather amusing to see, for instance, Price getting cops to look the other way by showing her leg so they don’t notice the car full of explosives behind her. Also this covers one of my other favorite things: art heists! There are some great stories of art heists being used to draw attention to the cause or ransom the paintings for the release of Dolours Price. I was also fascinated to learn she was married to Stephen Rea, who you may recognize from films such as The Crying Game, Michael Collins, or V for Vendetta. And I learned that there was a ban on the voices of Sinn Féin members on British television, which explains the joke in the show Derry Girls (if you have not watched Derry Girls drop all plans for your weekend to do so) where the grandfather claims Adams voice was dubbed on tv because the British thought it was too sexy and would seduce all their women.
Dolours Price with husband Stephen Rea
Even if you aren’t normally a non-fiction history reader like me, Say Nothing is sure to blow you away. I mean like as in impress you, not IRA explosives. It is a fascinating history and often a very tragic story. We experience McConville’s children, for instance, who recognized her captures and would see them around town for years after knowing the people likely killed their mother. We experience all the anger, frustrations and feelings of resentment, and we experience a rather well-told and dynamic history of The Troubles. Plus everyone in my book club loved it, so that was nice. Highly recommended.
4.5/5
August 2, 2023
got me FUCKED up
December 24, 2020
how PRK has structured this work of narrative nonfiction is an architectural feat. at the heart of this book is the disappearance of a single women and the multiple factors and people that played into her murder. the way the lives of so many key individuals weave in and out of this is really quite exciting.
the troubles are only something i have vaguely heard about, which could be due to the culture of silence surrounding the times (see title), as well as my own lack of researching. but because of that, even though i know this is nonfiction, i am still so surprised that the people i read about are real, so surreal to google them and see photographs and actual video footage of them. i love how the writing made this feel like an engaging true crime novel. the storytelling is accessible, its concise, and, again, compiled in a way that doesnt feel like nonfiction. which is exactly what i needed to enjoy this.
this is a highly informative book that taught me so much about a brutal period of time in a way that didnt feel like learning, but more like i was seeing a complex investigation play out from beginning to end.
↠ 4.5 stars
the troubles are only something i have vaguely heard about, which could be due to the culture of silence surrounding the times (see title), as well as my own lack of researching. but because of that, even though i know this is nonfiction, i am still so surprised that the people i read about are real, so surreal to google them and see photographs and actual video footage of them. i love how the writing made this feel like an engaging true crime novel. the storytelling is accessible, its concise, and, again, compiled in a way that doesnt feel like nonfiction. which is exactly what i needed to enjoy this.
this is a highly informative book that taught me so much about a brutal period of time in a way that didnt feel like learning, but more like i was seeing a complex investigation play out from beginning to end.
↠ 4.5 stars
May 28, 2022
The Troubles in Northern Ireland were constantly in the background as I grew up. From the age of about ten or so (in 1970) I remember constant news footage of bombed out streets, soldiers patrolling in armoured vehicles, political killings and groups of kids throwing stones at the police.
Say Nothing, the award winning work by journalist Patrick Radden Keefe has added greatly to my perspective.
Britain has for centuries had an uneasy and often disastrous relationship with Ireland.
The seemingly unsolvable problem that came to a head at the end of the 60’s was that, although a majority of people in the island of Ireland wanted independence from Britain, the majority of those in Northern Ireland wanted to remain part of the U.K. (Ireland was partitioned in 1921)
In 1968 a civil rights demonstration was ambushed by loyalists in Derry - thus began the terrible cycle of violence that would last for about 30 years.
This very readable account of the turbulent years of strife has a famous mystery at its heart. The disappearance of Jean McConville.
On a bleak, winters evening in 1972 a disparate group of people turned up at the McConvilles door in the the Divis Flats (‘a dank and hulking public housing complex in West Belfast’.) They burst in and dragged Jean, a single mother of ten, out of the building at gunpoint, leaving her children alone and very frightened. Were they the IRA, neighbours?
Jean was never seen again.
In telling these stories of The Troubles, Keefe focuses largely on the personal testimony of key republican figures, much of which has recently come into the public domain - the accounts are fascinating, chilling and sad.
We get acquainted with the Price sisters who become key IRA members at a young age, Brendan Hughes the hard line IRA leader and Gerry Adams IRA leader who became a Sinn Fein politician. We hear terrible things from all sides. Persecution of communities, segregation, internment without trial, executions, bombing campaigns, the killing of innocent bystanders, hunger strikes etc. Much research also went into the stories of a number of people, including Jean McConville, who disappeared without a trace at this time.
We also hear interesting stuff about the hard line republicans turning on Gerry Adams as he worked for a political solution ........ and washed his hands of the past. So many red lines crossed and sacrifices made, they thought, for nothing.
We eventually get to Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, the decommissioning of arms and the Good Friday Agreement which signalled an end to (most of) the hostilities and (some of) the unease.
Patrick Radden Keefe is an American author and is able to add a tone of impartiality to the writing. He talks about the many injustices and wrongs perpetrated by the British and loyalist paramilitaries over the years (the horror of Bloody Sunday etc), but he is certainly no apologist for the atrocities carried out by the IRA, whose combination of ‘vindictiveness and clumsiness’ were often their hallmark. He also discusses the dangerous naivety of American benefactors of the IRA, and writes in detail about the Boston College based ‘Belfast Project’ which attempted to secure and store testimonies of leading republicans, to be released after their deaths.
Say Nothing is a gripping and accessible way to get some understanding of The Troubles in Northern Ireland .......... and you may ask - is the terrible mystery of what happened to Jean McConville solved by the end of this account?
Best read the book and find out. Much recommended.
Ps I recently visited Belfast, it’s a wonderful, friendly city. It’ll be a tragedy if the the unrest sparked by Brexit complications intensifies.
Say Nothing, the award winning work by journalist Patrick Radden Keefe has added greatly to my perspective.
Britain has for centuries had an uneasy and often disastrous relationship with Ireland.
The seemingly unsolvable problem that came to a head at the end of the 60’s was that, although a majority of people in the island of Ireland wanted independence from Britain, the majority of those in Northern Ireland wanted to remain part of the U.K. (Ireland was partitioned in 1921)
In 1968 a civil rights demonstration was ambushed by loyalists in Derry - thus began the terrible cycle of violence that would last for about 30 years.
This very readable account of the turbulent years of strife has a famous mystery at its heart. The disappearance of Jean McConville.
On a bleak, winters evening in 1972 a disparate group of people turned up at the McConvilles door in the the Divis Flats (‘a dank and hulking public housing complex in West Belfast’.) They burst in and dragged Jean, a single mother of ten, out of the building at gunpoint, leaving her children alone and very frightened. Were they the IRA, neighbours?
Jean was never seen again.
In telling these stories of The Troubles, Keefe focuses largely on the personal testimony of key republican figures, much of which has recently come into the public domain - the accounts are fascinating, chilling and sad.
We get acquainted with the Price sisters who become key IRA members at a young age, Brendan Hughes the hard line IRA leader and Gerry Adams IRA leader who became a Sinn Fein politician. We hear terrible things from all sides. Persecution of communities, segregation, internment without trial, executions, bombing campaigns, the killing of innocent bystanders, hunger strikes etc. Much research also went into the stories of a number of people, including Jean McConville, who disappeared without a trace at this time.
We also hear interesting stuff about the hard line republicans turning on Gerry Adams as he worked for a political solution ........ and washed his hands of the past. So many red lines crossed and sacrifices made, they thought, for nothing.
We eventually get to Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, the decommissioning of arms and the Good Friday Agreement which signalled an end to (most of) the hostilities and (some of) the unease.
Patrick Radden Keefe is an American author and is able to add a tone of impartiality to the writing. He talks about the many injustices and wrongs perpetrated by the British and loyalist paramilitaries over the years (the horror of Bloody Sunday etc), but he is certainly no apologist for the atrocities carried out by the IRA, whose combination of ‘vindictiveness and clumsiness’ were often their hallmark. He also discusses the dangerous naivety of American benefactors of the IRA, and writes in detail about the Boston College based ‘Belfast Project’ which attempted to secure and store testimonies of leading republicans, to be released after their deaths.
Say Nothing is a gripping and accessible way to get some understanding of The Troubles in Northern Ireland .......... and you may ask - is the terrible mystery of what happened to Jean McConville solved by the end of this account?
Best read the book and find out. Much recommended.
Ps I recently visited Belfast, it’s a wonderful, friendly city. It’ll be a tragedy if the the unrest sparked by Brexit complications intensifies.
November 30, 2019
Audiobook, read by Matthew Blaney.
Matthew has an engaging Irish accent and was easy to understand.
WOW & YIKES (as for this book)....
TRUE CRIME.....ha,....
in just 14 hours and 40 minutes!!!
.....I had no idea what I was getting into.
MY MOUTH DROPPED at the start.....( horrific tragedy).... not something I ever got over.
The storytelling was intimate with ordinary but real characters... who were IN TROUBLE!
.....fascinating & informative —most of the time—-
I started to zone out in parts of my listening....
but then I’d come back.
There is a lot to digest... but I’m glad I tackled it.
The history, (education for me), suspense, and intensity was HEARTBREAKING and just so
SAD!!!
....SO MUCH history of political violence in Northern Ireland.
I still don’t understand everything ....but I understand the nightmare that religion and nationalism can be. And I understand when somebody is trying to save their ass and not admit the truth.
I don’t read a lot of true crime whodunit non-fiction books that read like a thriller, so when I do, they stand out... as this one does.
Incredible research, details, and atmosphere....
I learned a lot about what encompassed ‘the troubles’,
and the repercussions that followed.
Heartbreak storytelling!
Matthew has an engaging Irish accent and was easy to understand.
WOW & YIKES (as for this book)....
TRUE CRIME.....ha,....
in just 14 hours and 40 minutes!!!
.....I had no idea what I was getting into.
MY MOUTH DROPPED at the start.....( horrific tragedy).... not something I ever got over.
The storytelling was intimate with ordinary but real characters... who were IN TROUBLE!
.....fascinating & informative —most of the time—-
I started to zone out in parts of my listening....
but then I’d come back.
There is a lot to digest... but I’m glad I tackled it.
The history, (education for me), suspense, and intensity was HEARTBREAKING and just so
SAD!!!
....SO MUCH history of political violence in Northern Ireland.
I still don’t understand everything ....but I understand the nightmare that religion and nationalism can be. And I understand when somebody is trying to save their ass and not admit the truth.
I don’t read a lot of true crime whodunit non-fiction books that read like a thriller, so when I do, they stand out... as this one does.
Incredible research, details, and atmosphere....
I learned a lot about what encompassed ‘the troubles’,
and the repercussions that followed.
Heartbreak storytelling!
April 8, 2024
tread carefully
☘️ For you tread on my dreams.
🇮🇪 Keefe says this is not a history but a work of narrative nonfiction.
Even though The Troubles delved into in these pages ended decades ago the story still crackles with tension. You get the feeling it could all erupt again with a single incident.
Keefe works hard to come at The Troubles from every angle, give everyone a voice, give everyone their day in court. Every group - the IRA, the UDA and other loyalist groups, the British army, the police in England and Northern Ireland.
It moves forward well enough and it chills the blood. I came to thinking that there are horror stories that are fiction and there are horror stories that are nonfiction. The latter are more terrifying for being real.
It was a civil war and that war hasn’t quite died away in people’s hearts and minds yet. That humans do these things to their neighbors over religion and politics should surprise no one. Consider the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s. Consider the Balkan Wars of the 1990s. Neighbors tearing neighbors apart.
That was The Troubles. That is what humans are capable of anywhere in the world whether they wear uniforms or T-shirts and blue jeans.
A sobering thought.
☘️ For you tread on my dreams.
🇮🇪 Keefe says this is not a history but a work of narrative nonfiction.
Even though The Troubles delved into in these pages ended decades ago the story still crackles with tension. You get the feeling it could all erupt again with a single incident.
Keefe works hard to come at The Troubles from every angle, give everyone a voice, give everyone their day in court. Every group - the IRA, the UDA and other loyalist groups, the British army, the police in England and Northern Ireland.
It moves forward well enough and it chills the blood. I came to thinking that there are horror stories that are fiction and there are horror stories that are nonfiction. The latter are more terrifying for being real.
It was a civil war and that war hasn’t quite died away in people’s hearts and minds yet. That humans do these things to their neighbors over religion and politics should surprise no one. Consider the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s. Consider the Balkan Wars of the 1990s. Neighbors tearing neighbors apart.
That was The Troubles. That is what humans are capable of anywhere in the world whether they wear uniforms or T-shirts and blue jeans.
A sobering thought.
February 24, 2020
National Book Award nominee 2019
National Book Critics Circle nominee 2019
Fantastic history about The Troubles. I listened to the audiobook and was enthralled from page one.
The book really gave a good historical account of Northern Island during the difficulties with Britain. I thoroughly enjoyed listening to the history and getting a more balanced account of what was going on. I felt for the individuals going through all the trauma. The Sisters were so amazing. They gave so much to their country. Odd that I just saw Steven Rea on a show last evening. Husband to one of the Sisters...
If you want any knowledge about Northern Island and The Troubles, do read. Fantastic.
5 out of 5 stars
National Book Critics Circle nominee 2019
Fantastic history about The Troubles. I listened to the audiobook and was enthralled from page one.
The book really gave a good historical account of Northern Island during the difficulties with Britain. I thoroughly enjoyed listening to the history and getting a more balanced account of what was going on. I felt for the individuals going through all the trauma. The Sisters were so amazing. They gave so much to their country. Odd that I just saw Steven Rea on a show last evening. Husband to one of the Sisters...
If you want any knowledge about Northern Island and The Troubles, do read. Fantastic.
5 out of 5 stars
March 18, 2019
After reading a history-rich fictional pentalogy about the Irish struggles, I could not help but turn to Patrick Radden Keefe’s book. Keefe takes the reader into the heart of the Anglo-Irish conflict, particularly as it developed in Northern Ireland (or the North of Ireland, depending on which side you support). Keefe explores how the simmering tensions of the Irish Republican Army (IRA) against the British Army and Ulster (Protestant) majority in the six remaining counties turned out to be some of the bloodiest clashes of the entire push for a freed Ireland. Keefe explores all aspects of the fighting, from the creation of plots to harm and kill, to turning those who would otherwise be seen as British sympathisers, and even into the negotiations to bring about a lasting peace. Keefe lays out much of the details as seen through the eyes of the Northerners, painting degrees of abject poverty and constant concern by the Catholics, as well as their attempts to use blood and terror to bring British and the Ulsters to their knees. While the IRA and Sinn Fein (the political embodiment of the Cause) are not synonymous, Keefe connects some fairly large dots, particularly as it relates to Gerry Adams, long seen as the face of the fight in the 1970s through to 1999. A man who would not break, even when tortured, Adams did all he could to bring about a better understanding to the world about the plight of the Catholics in the North and how horrid things were for them under the British thumb. The campaign began to work, though the constant reporting of IRA violence or Ulster targeting of the Catholic population soured much of the support that began. As Keefe explores throughout, the IRA—both its long-standing version and the newer Provisional form—had its own internal problems, particularly power struggles as to how things ought to go. For some, no peace without all 32 counties united, while others saw that this could not happen with any degree of ease. There was also a strong push to make comparisons between the violence meted out on the streets of (London)Derry and Belfast and the cruel punishments that would be condemned elsewhere in the world. How could the British and Protestants act and the world would turn a blind eye? Keefe turns also to some of the revelations of the Boston College interviews, headed up by academics after a formal peace was secured. Stories that emerged when amnesty was provided helped flesh-out some of the darker and more violent aspects to life in the North over the close to three decades of hardcore fighting. However, some of the interviews were used by the British in legal settings to bring members of the IRA to justice for crimes committed, using a large loophole in the process. Even with peace established, new wars emerged, continuing to pit the IRA against the British. Told in raw and unapologetic honesty, Keefe tells a story that many readers would not otherwise believe while also being compelled to learn more. I strongly suggest anyone with an interest in learning more about the struggles in Ireland from the 1970s through to the present find this book and discover trove of sources and details likely not part of the mainstream narrative.
As I mentioned above, reading this book complemented my previous binge reading of a powerful five-novel series about the Irish struggles. I remember some of the heightened struggles in Ireland, mostly from news reports and loose historical documents. What Patrick Redden Keefe provides here is a strong and well-documented approach to the plight of the Irish in the North at the hands of the majority, providing the reader with a look at the oppressed that sought to push back against the majority. Keefe does not shield the bias, though some would say that this is the only way to get the story out there, to focus on those who were fighting for a cause, even if they also sought to use violence as a means to success. I have often wondered why sides must shed blood and bomb one another, how that could ever lead to lasting peace and change. Keefe’s book left me sympathising with some of the plight, though the use of random violence that took the lives of the innocent to prove a point does not sit well with me. Even two decades after formal peace has been established, this book rocked me and brought much of the buried narrative back to light. Stories and sentiments, as well as giving the reader and inside view into how things were run and what happened to those who did not obey. More than a primer on the subject, Keefe drawls on many sources and depicts the struggle as being not only real, but somewhat essential in order to have their voices heard. Through the blood and the bombing, the violence and the vindication, Keefe provides the reader with something sobering to give a difference perspective than many may have had. Long chapters provide the core of the book, though it sometimes takes a while to get the true sentiment across, thereby educating the reader effectively. The mighty British may appear prim and proper, but this St. Patrick’s Day, as I nurse a pint or two of Guinness, I’ll think a little harder about how the colonial power sought to control one of the last vestiges wanting independence and self-rule.
Kudos, Mr. Keefe, for a stunning book. I could not have asked for more and hope others will be as shocked and gobsmacked as I was while reading.
Love/hate the review? An ever-growing collection of others appears at:
http://pecheyponderings.wordpress.com/
A Book for All Seasons, a different sort of Book Challenge: https://www.goodreads.com/group/show/...
As I mentioned above, reading this book complemented my previous binge reading of a powerful five-novel series about the Irish struggles. I remember some of the heightened struggles in Ireland, mostly from news reports and loose historical documents. What Patrick Redden Keefe provides here is a strong and well-documented approach to the plight of the Irish in the North at the hands of the majority, providing the reader with a look at the oppressed that sought to push back against the majority. Keefe does not shield the bias, though some would say that this is the only way to get the story out there, to focus on those who were fighting for a cause, even if they also sought to use violence as a means to success. I have often wondered why sides must shed blood and bomb one another, how that could ever lead to lasting peace and change. Keefe’s book left me sympathising with some of the plight, though the use of random violence that took the lives of the innocent to prove a point does not sit well with me. Even two decades after formal peace has been established, this book rocked me and brought much of the buried narrative back to light. Stories and sentiments, as well as giving the reader and inside view into how things were run and what happened to those who did not obey. More than a primer on the subject, Keefe drawls on many sources and depicts the struggle as being not only real, but somewhat essential in order to have their voices heard. Through the blood and the bombing, the violence and the vindication, Keefe provides the reader with something sobering to give a difference perspective than many may have had. Long chapters provide the core of the book, though it sometimes takes a while to get the true sentiment across, thereby educating the reader effectively. The mighty British may appear prim and proper, but this St. Patrick’s Day, as I nurse a pint or two of Guinness, I’ll think a little harder about how the colonial power sought to control one of the last vestiges wanting independence and self-rule.
Kudos, Mr. Keefe, for a stunning book. I could not have asked for more and hope others will be as shocked and gobsmacked as I was while reading.
Love/hate the review? An ever-growing collection of others appears at:
http://pecheyponderings.wordpress.com/
A Book for All Seasons, a different sort of Book Challenge: https://www.goodreads.com/group/show/...
May 1, 2019
Everything you have heard or read about this book is true. Say Nothing is THE nonfiction book of 2019. My review specifically will focus on my experience with the Audiobook.
In Belfast, history is alive-and dangerous
What compels an American journalist living in the United States to bring forth to readers the political violence that held the Irish public in a vice grip from 1916-1998? For Patrick Radden Keefe, it wasn't his 19th century Irish roots on his father's side. It was to bring to readers attention how exactly radicalization can not only make people do anything and everything to achieve their cause, but it can also lead a whole society to stay silent on all that happens. Even when innocent civilians are caught in its midst.
Keefe opens his novel with the disappearance of mother of ten, Jean McConville, in 1972. Her disappearance serves as a vehicle in which Keefe unfolds his story. This is not a true crime novel. Rather, Keefe peels back the layers of secrecy and focuses his attention on some of the major players of the IRA (Irish Republican Army) and their actions during this time. To borrow from an online book reviewer, Say Nothing provides readers with a panoramic analysis that leads us down many dark alleys and even into the political forum as well.
Considering the author has four years of research, seven trips to Ireland, and interviews with over 100 people to weave into a book. The reader and or listener is given a very detailed perspective of the events. There were places where I would have to "playback," just to make sure that I got my facts straight. But what added to the experience was the rich narration provided by Matthew Blaney, a man whose Northern Irish accent immediately transported me from my kitchen to all the events in Belfast.
As I finished this novel Northern Ireland is seeing more tension along their border as its citizens deal with the turmoil over Brexit and the recent killing of Irish journalist Lyra McKee earlier this month has caused many of its citizens to remember the times of the Troubles. Just today I read an article online that asked if Northern Ireland could ever move beyond their troubled past. If I was to take away anything from this book, is that there never will be closure if everyone takes their secrets to the grave and say nothing.
Audiobook narrated by Matthew Blaney 14h 40 minutes 38secs
In Belfast, history is alive-and dangerous
What compels an American journalist living in the United States to bring forth to readers the political violence that held the Irish public in a vice grip from 1916-1998? For Patrick Radden Keefe, it wasn't his 19th century Irish roots on his father's side. It was to bring to readers attention how exactly radicalization can not only make people do anything and everything to achieve their cause, but it can also lead a whole society to stay silent on all that happens. Even when innocent civilians are caught in its midst.
Keefe opens his novel with the disappearance of mother of ten, Jean McConville, in 1972. Her disappearance serves as a vehicle in which Keefe unfolds his story. This is not a true crime novel. Rather, Keefe peels back the layers of secrecy and focuses his attention on some of the major players of the IRA (Irish Republican Army) and their actions during this time. To borrow from an online book reviewer, Say Nothing provides readers with a panoramic analysis that leads us down many dark alleys and even into the political forum as well.
Considering the author has four years of research, seven trips to Ireland, and interviews with over 100 people to weave into a book. The reader and or listener is given a very detailed perspective of the events. There were places where I would have to "playback," just to make sure that I got my facts straight. But what added to the experience was the rich narration provided by Matthew Blaney, a man whose Northern Irish accent immediately transported me from my kitchen to all the events in Belfast.
As I finished this novel Northern Ireland is seeing more tension along their border as its citizens deal with the turmoil over Brexit and the recent killing of Irish journalist Lyra McKee earlier this month has caused many of its citizens to remember the times of the Troubles. Just today I read an article online that asked if Northern Ireland could ever move beyond their troubled past. If I was to take away anything from this book, is that there never will be closure if everyone takes their secrets to the grave and say nothing.
Audiobook narrated by Matthew Blaney 14h 40 minutes 38secs
July 19, 2020
IRA Terrorists kill innocent victim
Being of Irish heritage, my grandfather was a Quinn, I've always been intrigued by "The Troubles", but have never read a non-fiction book about it until now. This is a fine place to start. Keefe's story is heartbreaking and impeccably researched.
In 1972, Jean McConville was kidnapped from her home by a dozen women and men in disguise. She had about 8 of her 10 children living at home who witnessed her abduction. Her son Archie, 16 at the time, tried to go to with her, but the gun men told him to "f. . .off" back to their apartment. He did. His mother's last words to him were, "Look after the children. "
They never saw her again. The McConvilles had just lost their father, who died right before this and Jean was not doing well. They lived in abject poverty. She was keeping the family together, though. Now they would be split apart. After a while of being on their own The children were farmed out to various Catholic children's homes in which they endured physical and sexual abuse under what have been derided as "The Sisters of No Mercy".
A true innocent, Jean has been vilified then and still today as an informant by the IRA. Here the author wishes to clear her name for her children and also get a measure of justice denied her all these years by the IRA and the people of Belfast, and the British government. No one cared about her disappearance, except for her children whose lives depended on her. This is a tragedy and an in depth look into the terrorist and what he or she is willing to do for an idea. Are innocents to be slaughtered for the greater good? Who are they to decide? And what if she were an informant? Is death an appropriate response?The particular role of female terrorists is particularly looked at here. How can they go on to become wives and mothers, which many did, while advocating the death of a mother?
Being of Irish heritage, my grandfather was a Quinn, I've always been intrigued by "The Troubles", but have never read a non-fiction book about it until now. This is a fine place to start. Keefe's story is heartbreaking and impeccably researched.
In 1972, Jean McConville was kidnapped from her home by a dozen women and men in disguise. She had about 8 of her 10 children living at home who witnessed her abduction. Her son Archie, 16 at the time, tried to go to with her, but the gun men told him to "f. . .off" back to their apartment. He did. His mother's last words to him were, "Look after the children. "
They never saw her again. The McConvilles had just lost their father, who died right before this and Jean was not doing well. They lived in abject poverty. She was keeping the family together, though. Now they would be split apart. After a while of being on their own The children were farmed out to various Catholic children's homes in which they endured physical and sexual abuse under what have been derided as "The Sisters of No Mercy".
A true innocent, Jean has been vilified then and still today as an informant by the IRA. Here the author wishes to clear her name for her children and also get a measure of justice denied her all these years by the IRA and the people of Belfast, and the British government. No one cared about her disappearance, except for her children whose lives depended on her. This is a tragedy and an in depth look into the terrorist and what he or she is willing to do for an idea. Are innocents to be slaughtered for the greater good? Who are they to decide? And what if she were an informant? Is death an appropriate response?The particular role of female terrorists is particularly looked at here. How can they go on to become wives and mothers, which many did, while advocating the death of a mother?
July 18, 2022
Lectura apasionante. Un trabajo periodístico de primer nivel.
He aprendido muchísimo con esta lectura.
Como dice el autor al final, se basa más en la parte republicana que en la unionista, pero esto no perjudica al libro, sino que te obliga a buscar y a aprender más cosas sobre el tema.
Un trabajo exhaustivo y muy objetivo, lo que, en esta circunstancia concreta, es algo sumamente difícil ya que este conflicto es en su propia naturaleza un "o estás conmigo o estás contra mi".
Exciting reading. A high level journalistic work.
I have learned a lot from this reading.
As the author says in the end, it is based more on the republican side than on the unionist side, but this does not harm the book, but forces you to look for and learn more about the subject.
An exhaustive and very objective work, which, in this specific circumstance, is something extremely difficult since this conflict is in its own nature a "either you are with me or you are against me ".
He aprendido muchísimo con esta lectura.
Como dice el autor al final, se basa más en la parte republicana que en la unionista, pero esto no perjudica al libro, sino que te obliga a buscar y a aprender más cosas sobre el tema.
Un trabajo exhaustivo y muy objetivo, lo que, en esta circunstancia concreta, es algo sumamente difícil ya que este conflicto es en su propia naturaleza un "o estás conmigo o estás contra mi".
Exciting reading. A high level journalistic work.
I have learned a lot from this reading.
As the author says in the end, it is based more on the republican side than on the unionist side, but this does not harm the book, but forces you to look for and learn more about the subject.
An exhaustive and very objective work, which, in this specific circumstance, is something extremely difficult since this conflict is in its own nature a "either you are with me or you are against me ".
May 1, 2020
“All wars are fought twice, the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory.” - Viet Thanh Nguyen.
Back in school when I was selecting which subjects I wanted to progress with for A-Level, my History teacher at the time tried to convince me to continue to study History. I told him that although I loved his classes, I knew we would cover more Northern Irish history and I just couldn’t face it. I had heard enough. It didn’t feel like “history” when it was still looming over our lives - relations have improved greatly, but a divide still exists.
Fast forward 15 years later and frankly I’m surprised that I even wanted to pick this up. Yet I’m glad I did because it has cemented itself as one of the best non-fiction books I’ve ever read - it was informative, accessible, and the story just felt human. Historical books can often feel like a lot of names and dates, coming across as cold and factual, but Keefe manages to narrate the story of The Troubles through focusing on a number of the key players and telling the story of the abduction and murder of Jean McConville, a widowed mother of ten who was lifted from her home one night and never seen again.
One of my main concerns about any of the books about The Troubles, including this one, was that they would be biased. And although Say Nothing primarily focuses on the IRA and the republican side of the fighting, their actions are presented factually - at no point did I feel like Keefe‘s own personal feelings toward either side were apparent. Although in the very final chapter he does highlight those who he thinks should be held accountable for the murder of McConville.
If you know nothing, or very little, about The Troubles in Northern Ireland, this is a fantastic book to start with. Or even if you feel like you already know a lot, like I did, you’ll still learn a few things.
Hands down, my favourite book of the year so far. The ease with which Keefe handled such a complex and sensitive topic has floored me. 5 stars.
Back in school when I was selecting which subjects I wanted to progress with for A-Level, my History teacher at the time tried to convince me to continue to study History. I told him that although I loved his classes, I knew we would cover more Northern Irish history and I just couldn’t face it. I had heard enough. It didn’t feel like “history” when it was still looming over our lives - relations have improved greatly, but a divide still exists.
Fast forward 15 years later and frankly I’m surprised that I even wanted to pick this up. Yet I’m glad I did because it has cemented itself as one of the best non-fiction books I’ve ever read - it was informative, accessible, and the story just felt human. Historical books can often feel like a lot of names and dates, coming across as cold and factual, but Keefe manages to narrate the story of The Troubles through focusing on a number of the key players and telling the story of the abduction and murder of Jean McConville, a widowed mother of ten who was lifted from her home one night and never seen again.
One of my main concerns about any of the books about The Troubles, including this one, was that they would be biased. And although Say Nothing primarily focuses on the IRA and the republican side of the fighting, their actions are presented factually - at no point did I feel like Keefe‘s own personal feelings toward either side were apparent. Although in the very final chapter he does highlight those who he thinks should be held accountable for the murder of McConville.
If you know nothing, or very little, about The Troubles in Northern Ireland, this is a fantastic book to start with. Or even if you feel like you already know a lot, like I did, you’ll still learn a few things.
Hands down, my favourite book of the year so far. The ease with which Keefe handled such a complex and sensitive topic has floored me. 5 stars.
June 5, 2019
I couldn't finish this audiobook. I FEEL TERRIBLE. But I had a difficult time following along between the narration and the plotline. It kept jumping between the murder and then the history of Belfast. So by the time you reconnected with the murder, the details were fuzzy because you had just listened to an hour of religion versus state historical facts. Does that make sense?
June 18, 2019
It took me a long time to get through this audiobook, but it was definitely worth it. I grew up in Canada hearing about the “troubles” in Northern Ireland, but I only had the vaguest idea of Irish history. Last summer, I was in the Republic of Ireland and really appreciated the vivid introduction to Irish history and culture. I seem to have caught the bug, because this summer I will be traveling to Northern Ireland. Say Nothing is a great look at some of the causes and consequences of the North’s fraught history. The author has done in depth research into the plight of two women on different sides of the conflict. Jean McConville, the mother of 10 children, disappeared in 1972. Dolres Price was a young active member of the IRA in the 1970s, imprisoned for many years. Keefe makes no apologies for anyone’s behaviour but he gives context to the events. It’s an intense deep dive into recent history. It felt a bit too dense at times, but it really comes together at the end as Keefe ties some loose ends as best he can. Strongly recommended to anyone with an interest in this part of history.
If you listen to the audio, the narrator has a lovely Irish accent.
If you listen to the audio, the narrator has a lovely Irish accent.
December 6, 2018
From the description of this book, I thought it was mostly about Jean McConville, the woman who disappeared during the Troubles. And I thought that the history of the Troubles would come second, but I was much mistaken. Jean is barely mentioned in the first half of the book and instead we are treated to an in depth discussion of what the Troubles were and what led to them, with introductions to far too many characters for me to keep track of. The more I read, the more I wished the author would finally start telling us about Jean, as that is what drew me to this book in the first place. It's not until 40% that we start to find out more about Jean, and since the notes section starts at 60% of the total book, this is 2/3 of the way through.
The book itself is well-written and filled with interesting information. My main issues lies with the way it is marketed, or more accurately, what I perceived the book to be about. It is not a true crime book where we follow around detectives or amateur sleuths. More than anything, it is a modern history book about the Troubles, their legacy, and a few key players during this time. The McConvilles as a whole have a rather small part, despite what the description and the introduction would have you believe. Every time a new chapter started that introduced a new character and pushed the actual solving of the crime farther off, I found myself wanting to skim since I knew there was no way I was going to remember yet another name.
2.5 stars rounded up since it was more of a perception issue than an issue with the book itself.
I received a free copy of this book through Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.
The book itself is well-written and filled with interesting information. My main issues lies with the way it is marketed, or more accurately, what I perceived the book to be about. It is not a true crime book where we follow around detectives or amateur sleuths. More than anything, it is a modern history book about the Troubles, their legacy, and a few key players during this time. The McConvilles as a whole have a rather small part, despite what the description and the introduction would have you believe. Every time a new chapter started that introduced a new character and pushed the actual solving of the crime farther off, I found myself wanting to skim since I knew there was no way I was going to remember yet another name.
2.5 stars rounded up since it was more of a perception issue than an issue with the book itself.
I received a free copy of this book through Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.
September 23, 2021
The stories surrounding the decades-long conflict in Northern Ireland (euphemistically called "the Troubles") are numerous and varied. In this book, Patrick Radden Keefe shares several by shining a spotlight on both IRA militants and victims, with one victim in particular, Jean McConville, getting special attention. It would be all too easy to write Say Nothing with an obvious bias, but Keefe didn't. He laid out the facts--background, political belief, personal details--about the main players just enough to give them dimension and trusted that his readers are smart enough to draw their own conclusions. With the militants in particular, he walked the finest line--presenting them as human but without triggering sympathy for them.
This is a complex work but not complicated. Out of what was probably a staggering amount of information, Keefe pulled the most relevant facts to fashion a taut and riveting account. The long, involved timeline is organized in such a way that connections are easy to keep straight and events unfold and then build on each other naturally. Keefe’s writing stands out as intelligent and smooth. This is a multifaceted examination of the time, but it flows with ease.
Of course, this book is also stunningly tragic. The violence was relentless, and Keefe didn't hesitate to write about it--although, thankfully, never in graphic detail. What he really hammered home was that at the height of the conflict, fear was everyone’s most loyal companion. Life was utter hell; there was no guarantee of surviving even a routine trip to the grocery store.
Importantly, extensive understanding of the Troubles isn't necessary before starting this book. In these pages, readers will learn a great deal about the conflict, at least about the republican side. (The author states in the afterword that he purposely narrowed down the book in this way and provided sources for those wanting to learn about the loyalist side.) It’s an intense but not overwhelming read well worth the time for anyone wanting details about this devastating period.
April 12, 2019
"Must it be the case that who one perceives a tragedy will forever depend on where one sits? The anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss once observed that, 'for a 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 group, sometimes even at the edge of a village.' When it came to the Troubles, a phenomenon known as "whataboutery" took hold. Utter the name Jean McConville and someone will 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." (333)
Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland is an crowning achievement in Irish history, investigative journalism, and nonfiction in general. What author Patrick Radden Keefe has done is written about a topic so murky in truth and so widely opinionated with an unbiased perspective that is so welcome to readers looking for a good starting place to begin. Keefe focuses on the Provisional IRA and the murder of a mother of ten, interweaving the storylines of both groups set against the tension and violence of the second half of 20th century Ireland and into present day. Famous (or rather infamous) people are brought in, from Jean McConville's own children to Dolours and Marion Price, and others amongst both sides of the conflict.
What is so significant about this book is how immersive it becomes. Say Nothing is such an effective page-turner you almost would think these are made-up characters inhabited a fictional setting and storyline. Keefe illuminates the reader with a gripping sense of heartrending character, peeling back the many layers of governments trying to keep stability in the most unstable of ways and radicals bent on political violence mudding the waters until they become the monsters they believe they are up against all against the backdrop of Belfast and wider English controlled Northern Ireland. A definite must read.
Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland is an crowning achievement in Irish history, investigative journalism, and nonfiction in general. What author Patrick Radden Keefe has done is written about a topic so murky in truth and so widely opinionated with an unbiased perspective that is so welcome to readers looking for a good starting place to begin. Keefe focuses on the Provisional IRA and the murder of a mother of ten, interweaving the storylines of both groups set against the tension and violence of the second half of 20th century Ireland and into present day. Famous (or rather infamous) people are brought in, from Jean McConville's own children to Dolours and Marion Price, and others amongst both sides of the conflict.
What is so significant about this book is how immersive it becomes. Say Nothing is such an effective page-turner you almost would think these are made-up characters inhabited a fictional setting and storyline. Keefe illuminates the reader with a gripping sense of heartrending character, peeling back the many layers of governments trying to keep stability in the most unstable of ways and radicals bent on political violence mudding the waters until they become the monsters they believe they are up against all against the backdrop of Belfast and wider English controlled Northern Ireland. A definite must read.
August 19, 2020
5 stars overall! 4 stars for narration.
And 10 million stars for content, research and a well written book on a complicated topic!
Even though I’m an American citizen, I’ve always been fascinated by the Troubles in Northern Ireland.
I’m not that knowledgeable about the political and bloody war that happened for almost 3 decades, so take this review for what it is. I did not live through this complicated time or raised in Ireland.
I AM of Irish and Scottish decent and think that’s why I’ve always been fascinated by the topic for years. When this book came to my attention last year, I just knew that I needed to read it. I was not disappointed in the least!
On to the book!
Although the Troubles primarily took place in Northern Ireland, the violence spread to other parts of the Republic of Ireland, England, and mainland Europe.
Most Catholics tended to be Irish and most Protestants were British. It wasn’t necessarily a religious war such as Israel and Palestine, but the results and devastation to the communities couldn’t be much different.
Most Catholics were of Irish decent and wanted to leave the United Kingdom.
Most Protestants were of British decent and wanted to stay in the United Kingdom.
And this was the problem.
No one knew how to fix this complicated situation in a diplomatic and non-aggressive way.
Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland is an unflinching report of what went down during this time between the Catholics, the Protestants, and all the innocent bystanders on the edge just trying to survive.
I listened to the audiobook and felt Matthew Blaney did a decent enough job. I loved the Irish accent but I did experience some sleepiness and spacing out while I was listening.
I’m pretty sure it was the lyrical, musical accent of his and it made me relaxed and peaceful.
I do think I would have preferred a different approach for a narrator (still Irish but more blunt with some drama!).
I will have to remember this when I have insomnia in the future! hahaha
Enter the Troubles.
Say Nothing introduces you to all the main characters in the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) and the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC), along with famous politicians in Ireland and Britain at this time.
All the research and in-depth interviews that Patrick Radden Keefe did in this book blew me away! He really dug down deep with getting information along with trying to keep a balanced view in his investigative reporting.
I really appreciated this approach because he never really comes out and says, “Who is to blame and who is not to blame?”
It’s more of a look into a complicated and deadly political issue with no winner.
I think the real victims are the innocent on the sidelines who did not pick a side.
And one possible innocent victim was Jean McConville. She was a widower and mother of 10 children. One night during a massive fight with the Provos and RUC, Jean helps an injured British soldier. After the incident, she is dragged out of her house and never seen again.
Was Jean McConville a spy relating information to the RUC?
Or is she an innocent bystander that was doing a good deed and is in the wrong place at the wrong time?
Jean was just one of many victims that disappeared during the Troubles and Keefe does a fantastic job of relating all of this.
I also think the paramilitary individuals are their own victims as well. They go through a lot of heartbreak and anguish in later years and I picked up on it in interviews. Was the acts of war worth it or were they just committing murders?
Read this if you are a fan of books that are non-fiction, historical or true crime. This is all three so bonus!
And if you love all things related to Ireland, you definitely need to pick this up! It’s well worth the time!
And 10 million stars for content, research and a well written book on a complicated topic!
Even though I’m an American citizen, I’ve always been fascinated by the Troubles in Northern Ireland.
I’m not that knowledgeable about the political and bloody war that happened for almost 3 decades, so take this review for what it is. I did not live through this complicated time or raised in Ireland.
I AM of Irish and Scottish decent and think that’s why I’ve always been fascinated by the topic for years. When this book came to my attention last year, I just knew that I needed to read it. I was not disappointed in the least!
On to the book!
Although the Troubles primarily took place in Northern Ireland, the violence spread to other parts of the Republic of Ireland, England, and mainland Europe.
Most Catholics tended to be Irish and most Protestants were British. It wasn’t necessarily a religious war such as Israel and Palestine, but the results and devastation to the communities couldn’t be much different.
Most Catholics were of Irish decent and wanted to leave the United Kingdom.
Most Protestants were of British decent and wanted to stay in the United Kingdom.
And this was the problem.
No one knew how to fix this complicated situation in a diplomatic and non-aggressive way.
Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland is an unflinching report of what went down during this time between the Catholics, the Protestants, and all the innocent bystanders on the edge just trying to survive.
I listened to the audiobook and felt Matthew Blaney did a decent enough job. I loved the Irish accent but I did experience some sleepiness and spacing out while I was listening.
I’m pretty sure it was the lyrical, musical accent of his and it made me relaxed and peaceful.
I do think I would have preferred a different approach for a narrator (still Irish but more blunt with some drama!).
I will have to remember this when I have insomnia in the future! hahaha
Enter the Troubles.
Say Nothing introduces you to all the main characters in the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) and the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC), along with famous politicians in Ireland and Britain at this time.
All the research and in-depth interviews that Patrick Radden Keefe did in this book blew me away! He really dug down deep with getting information along with trying to keep a balanced view in his investigative reporting.
I really appreciated this approach because he never really comes out and says, “Who is to blame and who is not to blame?”
It’s more of a look into a complicated and deadly political issue with no winner.
I think the real victims are the innocent on the sidelines who did not pick a side.
And one possible innocent victim was Jean McConville. She was a widower and mother of 10 children. One night during a massive fight with the Provos and RUC, Jean helps an injured British soldier. After the incident, she is dragged out of her house and never seen again.
Was Jean McConville a spy relating information to the RUC?
Or is she an innocent bystander that was doing a good deed and is in the wrong place at the wrong time?
Jean was just one of many victims that disappeared during the Troubles and Keefe does a fantastic job of relating all of this.
I also think the paramilitary individuals are their own victims as well. They go through a lot of heartbreak and anguish in later years and I picked up on it in interviews. Was the acts of war worth it or were they just committing murders?
Read this if you are a fan of books that are non-fiction, historical or true crime. This is all three so bonus!
And if you love all things related to Ireland, you definitely need to pick this up! It’s well worth the time!
August 27, 2019
I married a Belfast man and was astonished and enthralled by his, and his family's, stories about the euphemistically named "Troubles". His uncle was a prison guard in Long Kesh and told how the opposing factions in jail would put on a show of aggression and enmity for camera-wielding reporters and, once they had left, go back to joking and chatting. He thought they were all idiots - "even those Orange bastards. Sure, they're no better than the other ones". His cousin was in the RUC and told of having to check his car for explosive devices every day, living at a level of stress I still find unfathomable. Another cousin worked for the Dept of Social Security and reckoned she had the safest job in Belfast as most of the IRA were on the dole and would, therefore, never blow up the DSS office being their primary source of income. They told of checkpoints and daily bombings and reports of suspect devices. Northern Ireland was undoubtedly a war zone.
I was by no means sympathetic to the IRA but I could imagine how degrading and enraging it must have been for the Catholics to be treated as a second class citizen in their own country, unable even to get a job in the government like my husband's family members. I needed it explained to me how anyone could even tell a Catholic from a Protestant. They all look alike. How could anyone know? Easy, they told me. By their name, their address, where they went to school... all the most basic details of a person's life stacked the deck against the Catholics in Northern Ireland. I would be angry too.
Intrigued by how it had all come to that sad state of affairs, I started reading all I could about Irish social and political history. This book is one of the very best. It is hard to put down and even harder to forget once you've finished. I was intrigued to read that, from the outset, it seemed to be Gerry Adams' aim to take the conflict out of the realm of violent conflict and place it into the political arena. Love or loathe him - he achieved his goal. I highly recommend this book. Haunting, sobering stuff.
I was by no means sympathetic to the IRA but I could imagine how degrading and enraging it must have been for the Catholics to be treated as a second class citizen in their own country, unable even to get a job in the government like my husband's family members. I needed it explained to me how anyone could even tell a Catholic from a Protestant. They all look alike. How could anyone know? Easy, they told me. By their name, their address, where they went to school... all the most basic details of a person's life stacked the deck against the Catholics in Northern Ireland. I would be angry too.
Intrigued by how it had all come to that sad state of affairs, I started reading all I could about Irish social and political history. This book is one of the very best. It is hard to put down and even harder to forget once you've finished. I was intrigued to read that, from the outset, it seemed to be Gerry Adams' aim to take the conflict out of the realm of violent conflict and place it into the political arena. Love or loathe him - he achieved his goal. I highly recommend this book. Haunting, sobering stuff.
June 30, 2019
Right now, the only visible sign that you've crossed the border between the United Kingdom and Ireland is the change on road signs from miles to kilometers. In the twenty-one years since the Good Friday Agreement was signed in Belfast, signaling an end to the decades-long conflict known as the 'Troubles', the checkpoints have come down, the armed border patrols have been decommissioned, the observation towers are nowhere to be seen.
With Brexit looming, however, the visible division between the two countries may return, and with it, renewed calls to remove Northern Ireland from the United Kingdom and reunite it with the Republic. The prospect of reopening old wounds that are still so very close to the surface is so very real for communities on both sides of the border. Patrick Radden Keefe's incendiary modern history of the bloody sectarian conflict in Northern Ireland could not be more perfectly timed. Say Nothing is part murder mystery, part political thriller, and all true. It reveals not just the cost of war, but the costs of peace.
On a cold winter's night in a dreary ghetto apartment block outside Belfast's city center, a widowed mother of ten is forcibly removed from her apartment by masked gunmen. It is December 1972 and Jean McConville is never seen again. Her body was found at last in 2003, but who murdered Jean and why was buried with her over thirty years before. By following the trail of Jean's disappearance, Keefe leads us into an epic history of the tearing apart of Northern Ireland by religious and political strife. He weaves together the stories of the most influential actors in this most complex and layered of plays, among them Brendan Hughes and Gerry Adams, the tactician and politician who revived and controlled the IRA, Dolours Price and her sister Marian, who became IRA warriors and folk heroes, and many others who contributed their personalities, voices, and/or weapons to the struggle to either unify the two Irelands or protect the might of the British crown.
Keefe holds both sides in balance, showing the IRA and its political arm, Sinn Fein, in as glaring a light as the British army- both sides committed atrocities that they later excused as the price of war. Keefe follows former members of the IRA as they age into regret or defiance, compounding the tragedy of lives given for a cause that seems bewildering in retrospect.
Gerry Adams may have been an architect of the peace agreement, but his bizarre denials of involvement in the IRA, when all evidence shows him as its principal leader in the 70s and 80s, render him a sociopathic figure. His Judas betrayal of his IRA contemporaries adds to the emotional haunting of many of this story's central figures and makes mockery of what these young people thought they stood for- several of whom died during the course of this book's writing.
Say Nothing is a riveting, gut-wrenching work of investigative journalism that explores a complex and devastating episode of modern Irish history through intimate portraits of lives deeply affected by the conflict. It is outstanding. Easily one of the best books I will read all year.
With Brexit looming, however, the visible division between the two countries may return, and with it, renewed calls to remove Northern Ireland from the United Kingdom and reunite it with the Republic. The prospect of reopening old wounds that are still so very close to the surface is so very real for communities on both sides of the border. Patrick Radden Keefe's incendiary modern history of the bloody sectarian conflict in Northern Ireland could not be more perfectly timed. Say Nothing is part murder mystery, part political thriller, and all true. It reveals not just the cost of war, but the costs of peace.
On a cold winter's night in a dreary ghetto apartment block outside Belfast's city center, a widowed mother of ten is forcibly removed from her apartment by masked gunmen. It is December 1972 and Jean McConville is never seen again. Her body was found at last in 2003, but who murdered Jean and why was buried with her over thirty years before. By following the trail of Jean's disappearance, Keefe leads us into an epic history of the tearing apart of Northern Ireland by religious and political strife. He weaves together the stories of the most influential actors in this most complex and layered of plays, among them Brendan Hughes and Gerry Adams, the tactician and politician who revived and controlled the IRA, Dolours Price and her sister Marian, who became IRA warriors and folk heroes, and many others who contributed their personalities, voices, and/or weapons to the struggle to either unify the two Irelands or protect the might of the British crown.
Keefe holds both sides in balance, showing the IRA and its political arm, Sinn Fein, in as glaring a light as the British army- both sides committed atrocities that they later excused as the price of war. Keefe follows former members of the IRA as they age into regret or defiance, compounding the tragedy of lives given for a cause that seems bewildering in retrospect.
Gerry Adams may have been an architect of the peace agreement, but his bizarre denials of involvement in the IRA, when all evidence shows him as its principal leader in the 70s and 80s, render him a sociopathic figure. His Judas betrayal of his IRA contemporaries adds to the emotional haunting of many of this story's central figures and makes mockery of what these young people thought they stood for- several of whom died during the course of this book's writing.
Say Nothing is a riveting, gut-wrenching work of investigative journalism that explores a complex and devastating episode of modern Irish history through intimate portraits of lives deeply affected by the conflict. It is outstanding. Easily one of the best books I will read all year.
January 7, 2020
"Say Nothing" is a fascinating look at the Troubles in Northern Ireland, and it's one of the best nonfiction books I read in 2019. The author starts by sharing the gripping story of a mother who disappeared after being abducted by IRA members, which was some excellent true-crime writing and is a mystery that is woven throughout the narrative. It was a relief, for both the reader and the orphaned children of the mother, that by the end there is some closure to this sad event.
One of the things I liked most about this book is that the author went to great lengths to interview and report on both sides of the conflict — so there are stories from both the Irish protesters and British soldiers. (It reminded me of the greatness of Ken Burns' and Lynn Novick's masterpiece documentary on the Vietnam War, how they made sure to interview soldiers from North Vietnam, in addition to the South Vietnamese and Americans.)
I listened to this on audio, and the narrator had a lovely Irish accent that really gave the book a sense of atmosphere. Highly recommended.
One of the things I liked most about this book is that the author went to great lengths to interview and report on both sides of the conflict — so there are stories from both the Irish protesters and British soldiers. (It reminded me of the greatness of Ken Burns' and Lynn Novick's masterpiece documentary on the Vietnam War, how they made sure to interview soldiers from North Vietnam, in addition to the South Vietnamese and Americans.)
I listened to this on audio, and the narrator had a lovely Irish accent that really gave the book a sense of atmosphere. Highly recommended.
March 12, 2020
“Who should be held accountable for a shared history of violence? It was a question that was dogging Northern Ireland as a whole.”
“If you could just get people to talk, he believed, the most bitter antagonists could discover common ground.”
“Say nothing!” Delours Price, to her collaborators, as they faced prison in London for participating in an IRA bombing of key London sites.
Here’s Seamus Heaney’s poem, "Whatever You Say, Say Nothing"(1975) as written:
https://www.blueridgejournal.com/poem...
Here’s Heaney reading some of the poem aloud:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OpDw5...
Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland is an impressive work of true crime/non-fiction set in Northern Ireland during the late twentieth century decades known there as The Troubles that makes clear that saying nothing, the code of silence, complicates history, memory and our ability to navigate the future in so many ways. We don’t trust the other side, the police, the gangs, the opposition powers, we don’t talk about family secrets and so on. But how do we create a reasonable facsimile of history with ethical responsibility if stories are silenced? Patrick Radden Keefe grew up in Irish-American Boston and knew little about those days. Books had been written, films were made, but he wanted to know what really happened there, and why.
Keefe’s story centers on the abduction of a woman called Jean McConville, a young and recent widow and mother of ten children, in 1972. She was taken out of her house with her children clinging to her arms and legs, and they never saw her again. She was "disappeared," she was murdered, and decades later Keefe set out to figure out who did it, because he knew people knew, and he felt if he worked hard enough on it, he could find out. And he thinks he does! The book opens with a nappy (diaper) pin attached to McConville’s skirt and it ends with that same nappy pin, still attached to her skirt, found many years later with her bones in a shoreline grave.
George Bernard Shaw called Ireland “an autonomous political lunatic asylum,” which from the outside seems to have some darkly amusing truth to it, but the murders of those times can’t be reduced to glib/grim metaphors. You can’t understand what happened to McConville or why unless you have a basic understanding of the events of those years, so for more than 2/3 of the book we revisit Gerry Adams, Bobby Sands, the Price sisters, Burntollet Bridge, Bloody Sunday, Enniskillen, Margaret Thatcher and Ian Paisley, among so many others.
Right, so the single murder mystery can’t be extricated from layers of Irish history, secrecy, martyrdom, amid hundreds of other murders perpetrated by both (or several complicated layers) "sides” of the conflict. So we need to revisit the days of car bombs and paramilitaries and the fraught relationship between England and Ireland, between Protestants and Catholics, hunger strikes and forced feedings, Bloody Sunday, the disappeared, all of that. No one during The Troubles seemed to have had any idea of Martin Luther King or Gandhi, let’s just say that. I live in Chicago; we continue to have some experience with these things here, too.
“The violence intensified, grandiose funerals became routine, with rousing graveside orations and caskets draped in tricolor flags. People took to joking that there was no social life in Belfast anymore, apart from wakes.”
Keefe ushers us finally, too, into the secret and much contested—biased!?—"Treasure Room” of the Boston College Library, where oral history recordings that hold clues to McConville's fate turn out to be archived. Hundreds of people, including Gerry Adams himself, refused to talk to him, saying nothing, congratulations! But what is the responsibility of a people to collective memory? When political murder is committed over decades, who is to be taken to task for these crimes? Do they establish a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, as in South Africa and Canada? Doesn’t look like it, I, an outsider, observe, but who am I to get on my high horse about what is obviously none of my business and whaddoIknowabouddit, anyway!!?? What does this have to do with other human beings on the planet? Why don't I just shut up about it?! But Keefe disagrees, and he says something, piecing together a story from the shreds of talk several people are willing to have with him.
I just reread (the fictional) Milkman by Anna Burns about The Troubles, and so it was great to revisit the time through a non-fictional lens. I also re-read Joyce's Dubliners, where we can see that violent political conflicts were of course already present in Ireland more than a century ago.
Who’s the villain in this one? Lots of fingerpointing goes on here, and no faction comes off clean, but Gerry Addams seems to be one of Keefe’s central bad guys--Addams, the leader of the IRA, who at one point denied he was ever in the IRA!! But if no one admits guilt or identifies the murderers, as I see it, all we are left with is, as the Prince says in Romeo and Juliet: “All are punished.”
“If you could just get people to talk, he believed, the most bitter antagonists could discover common ground.”
“Say nothing!” Delours Price, to her collaborators, as they faced prison in London for participating in an IRA bombing of key London sites.
Here’s Seamus Heaney’s poem, "Whatever You Say, Say Nothing"(1975) as written:
https://www.blueridgejournal.com/poem...
Here’s Heaney reading some of the poem aloud:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OpDw5...
Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland is an impressive work of true crime/non-fiction set in Northern Ireland during the late twentieth century decades known there as The Troubles that makes clear that saying nothing, the code of silence, complicates history, memory and our ability to navigate the future in so many ways. We don’t trust the other side, the police, the gangs, the opposition powers, we don’t talk about family secrets and so on. But how do we create a reasonable facsimile of history with ethical responsibility if stories are silenced? Patrick Radden Keefe grew up in Irish-American Boston and knew little about those days. Books had been written, films were made, but he wanted to know what really happened there, and why.
Keefe’s story centers on the abduction of a woman called Jean McConville, a young and recent widow and mother of ten children, in 1972. She was taken out of her house with her children clinging to her arms and legs, and they never saw her again. She was "disappeared," she was murdered, and decades later Keefe set out to figure out who did it, because he knew people knew, and he felt if he worked hard enough on it, he could find out. And he thinks he does! The book opens with a nappy (diaper) pin attached to McConville’s skirt and it ends with that same nappy pin, still attached to her skirt, found many years later with her bones in a shoreline grave.
George Bernard Shaw called Ireland “an autonomous political lunatic asylum,” which from the outside seems to have some darkly amusing truth to it, but the murders of those times can’t be reduced to glib/grim metaphors. You can’t understand what happened to McConville or why unless you have a basic understanding of the events of those years, so for more than 2/3 of the book we revisit Gerry Adams, Bobby Sands, the Price sisters, Burntollet Bridge, Bloody Sunday, Enniskillen, Margaret Thatcher and Ian Paisley, among so many others.
Right, so the single murder mystery can’t be extricated from layers of Irish history, secrecy, martyrdom, amid hundreds of other murders perpetrated by both (or several complicated layers) "sides” of the conflict. So we need to revisit the days of car bombs and paramilitaries and the fraught relationship between England and Ireland, between Protestants and Catholics, hunger strikes and forced feedings, Bloody Sunday, the disappeared, all of that. No one during The Troubles seemed to have had any idea of Martin Luther King or Gandhi, let’s just say that. I live in Chicago; we continue to have some experience with these things here, too.
“The violence intensified, grandiose funerals became routine, with rousing graveside orations and caskets draped in tricolor flags. People took to joking that there was no social life in Belfast anymore, apart from wakes.”
Keefe ushers us finally, too, into the secret and much contested—biased!?—"Treasure Room” of the Boston College Library, where oral history recordings that hold clues to McConville's fate turn out to be archived. Hundreds of people, including Gerry Adams himself, refused to talk to him, saying nothing, congratulations! But what is the responsibility of a people to collective memory? When political murder is committed over decades, who is to be taken to task for these crimes? Do they establish a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, as in South Africa and Canada? Doesn’t look like it, I, an outsider, observe, but who am I to get on my high horse about what is obviously none of my business and whaddoIknowabouddit, anyway!!?? What does this have to do with other human beings on the planet? Why don't I just shut up about it?! But Keefe disagrees, and he says something, piecing together a story from the shreds of talk several people are willing to have with him.
I just reread (the fictional) Milkman by Anna Burns about The Troubles, and so it was great to revisit the time through a non-fictional lens. I also re-read Joyce's Dubliners, where we can see that violent political conflicts were of course already present in Ireland more than a century ago.
Who’s the villain in this one? Lots of fingerpointing goes on here, and no faction comes off clean, but Gerry Addams seems to be one of Keefe’s central bad guys--Addams, the leader of the IRA, who at one point denied he was ever in the IRA!! But if no one admits guilt or identifies the murderers, as I see it, all we are left with is, as the Prince says in Romeo and Juliet: “All are punished.”
September 6, 2021
Όσοι είμαστε κάπως μεγάλοι... (-δλδ πόσο μεγάλοι κύριε; - έχουμε ακούσει νέοι Θεοδωράκη! - ok boomer... 🙄) θυμόμαστε τα δελτία ειδήσεων της δεκαετίας του '80 να έχουν σταθερή αναφορά τις Ταραχές στο Μπέλφαστ και την Βόρεια Ιρλανδία. Όταν υπογράφηκε η Συμφωνία της Μεγάλης Παρασκευής το 1998 είχα εντυπωσιαστεί από την προοπτική της ειρήνευσης σε έναν τόπο που έδειχνε ότι κάτι τέτοιο ήταν αδύνατο έως ακατόρθωτο με βάση όσα διαβάζαμε και ακούγαμε.
Το βιβλίο αυτό είναι ένα γνήσιο έργο καλού πολιτικού ρεπορτάζ με υπέροχη αφηγηματική δομή που συνδέει πολιτικά γεγονότα και προσωπικές ιστορίες των πρωταγωνιστων των Ταραχών κατά τρόπο που δεν κουράζει όποιον έχει μια εικόνα της ιστορίας αυτής της γωνιας της Ευρώπης. Αν και η αφορμή του είναι η εξαφάνιση μιας γυναίκας από τον IRA εν μέσω των Trubles του 1970, ο συγγραφέας καταγραφεί όλο το πολιτικό και πολεμικό σκηνικό της εποχής μέχρι και σήμερα, κάνοντας την μεγάλο - ιστορία των συγκρούσεων φόντο στην μικρο-ιστορία της εξαφάνισης ενός ανθρώπου.
Στον ακηρυχτο πόλεμο της Β. Ιρλανδίας χάθηκαν χιλιάδες ζωές, καταστραφηκαν κοινωνίες και οικογένειες, τα ψυχικά τραύματα δεν έκλεισαν ποτέ. Οι μαχητές του IRA που ποτέ δεν δέχτηκαν την εκεχειρία που επέβαλε το πολιτικό κομμάτι του, το Sin Fein και αφέθηκαν μόνοι με τα φαντάσματα των θυμάτων τους και το ξόδεμα της ζωής τους. Τελικά αν και επήλθε ειρήνευση, πότε η κοινωνία της Β Ιρλανδίας δεν συζήτησε για όλα αυτά που έγιναν και διέλυσαν τις ζωές τους επί δεκαετίες. Η λήθη θεωρήθηκε η καλύτερη λύση, η μνήμη ήταν πολύ οδυνηρή και η Σιωπή, απαίτηση από όλες τις πλευρές!
Όμως όπως σε κάθε "επανάσταση" ανάμεσα σε αυτούς που χάθηκαν κάτω από μια ιδέα ή για ένα ιδανικό, υπάρχουν πάντα εκείνοι οι άγνωστοι άνθρωποι που από λάθος ή κακιά στιγμή εξαφανίστηκαν. Πίσω έμειναν αυτοί που ήθελαν να μάθουν· όμως σε έναν τόπο που κανείς δεν θέλει να μιλά, ακόμα και σήμερα αυτά τα ερωτήματα, ακόμα κι αν είναι εκκωφαντικά, δεν απαντούντε ποτέ !
Η Β Ιρλανδία είναι αρκετά μικρός τόπος για να μπορέσει κανείς να αντέξει να αναμετρηθεί με το παρελθόν του. Και θα συνεχίσει για αρκετό καιρό ακόμα. Ίσως να μην το κάνει και πότε. Άλλωστε, κανείς δεν το θέλει αυτό, πραγματικά...
Το βιβλίο αυτό είναι ένα γνήσιο έργο καλού πολιτικού ρεπορτάζ με υπέροχη αφηγηματική δομή που συνδέει πολιτικά γεγονότα και προσωπικές ιστορίες των πρωταγωνιστων των Ταραχών κατά τρόπο που δεν κουράζει όποιον έχει μια εικόνα της ιστορίας αυτής της γωνιας της Ευρώπης. Αν και η αφορμή του είναι η εξαφάνιση μιας γυναίκας από τον IRA εν μέσω των Trubles του 1970, ο συγγραφέας καταγραφεί όλο το πολιτικό και πολεμικό σκηνικό της εποχής μέχρι και σήμερα, κάνοντας την μεγάλο - ιστορία των συγκρούσεων φόντο στην μικρο-ιστορία της εξαφάνισης ενός ανθρώπου.
Στον ακηρυχτο πόλεμο της Β. Ιρλανδίας χάθηκαν χιλιάδες ζωές, καταστραφηκαν κοινωνίες και οικογένειες, τα ψυχικά τραύματα δεν έκλεισαν ποτέ. Οι μαχητές του IRA που ποτέ δεν δέχτηκαν την εκεχειρία που επέβαλε το πολιτικό κομμάτι του, το Sin Fein και αφέθηκαν μόνοι με τα φαντάσματα των θυμάτων τους και το ξόδεμα της ζωής τους. Τελικά αν και επήλθε ειρήνευση, πότε η κοινωνία της Β Ιρλανδίας δεν συζήτησε για όλα αυτά που έγιναν και διέλυσαν τις ζωές τους επί δεκαετίες. Η λήθη θεωρήθηκε η καλύτερη λύση, η μνήμη ήταν πολύ οδυνηρή και η Σιωπή, απαίτηση από όλες τις πλευρές!
Όμως όπως σε κάθε "επανάσταση" ανάμεσα σε αυτούς που χάθηκαν κάτω από μια ιδέα ή για ένα ιδανικό, υπάρχουν πάντα εκείνοι οι άγνωστοι άνθρωποι που από λάθος ή κακιά στιγμή εξαφανίστηκαν. Πίσω έμειναν αυτοί που ήθελαν να μάθουν· όμως σε έναν τόπο που κανείς δεν θέλει να μιλά, ακόμα και σήμερα αυτά τα ερωτήματα, ακόμα κι αν είναι εκκωφαντικά, δεν απαντούντε ποτέ !
Η Β Ιρλανδία είναι αρκετά μικρός τόπος για να μπορέσει κανείς να αντέξει να αναμετρηθεί με το παρελθόν του. Και θα συνεχίσει για αρκετό καιρό ακόμα. Ίσως να μην το κάνει και πότε. Άλλωστε, κανείς δεν το θέλει αυτό, πραγματικά...
August 17, 2023
Patrick Radden Keefe is a masterful narrative nonfiction author. Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland is a thoroughly researched, fascinating story about the conflict between Northern Ireland and Britain. Jean McConville, a widow raising her ten children, was dragged from her home in Northern Ireland and never seen again.
Keefe exposes us to the main characters in the IRA and their thought processes, strategies, and deadly actions. When Margaret Thatcher was named Prime Minister of Britain, she took a very hard line on crimes committed by the IRA and would not budge on releasing prisoners who refused to eat.
Very interesting and informative.
Keefe exposes us to the main characters in the IRA and their thought processes, strategies, and deadly actions. When Margaret Thatcher was named Prime Minister of Britain, she took a very hard line on crimes committed by the IRA and would not budge on releasing prisoners who refused to eat.
Very interesting and informative.
August 23, 2023
I grew up living fairly close to London’s centre. I went to school smack-bang in the middle of it, walking the short distance from the tube station with all the bankers and city employees to be educated amongst the gleaming glass towers of the major banks. During this period the tube station was frequently evacuated or you had to take the bus home because the tube station had been sealed off; these events were so commonplace that they were never reported on the news and you never felt fear just irritation that your journey had been made markedly more problematic over a bomb threat that you knew was always just an empty threat intended to disrupt rather than kill. And then late one Friday night a bomb did go off not far from my school and was such a big explosion that our windows rattled at home.
I tell this because as a Londoner at this time the IRA were a strange mix of ever present threat and ignorable presence. There was even a kids drama set in Belfast where the story was (as far as I can remember) just typical kids’ issues but the kids walked past soldiers in full uniform holding guns squatting on street corners. Again the ignorable threat. Strange times. Made even stranger by the almost nightly presence of Gerry Adams on the news, his face shown but his voice being banned so his appearance was always prefaced with, “His words are voiced by an actor”. Now I often think of asking a lip-reader to determine how accurate this voiceover was to what was said.
Despite all this exposure to the conflict and having Irish family who had their own take on what was going on, it was only on reading this well crafted, clear, objective view of ‘The Troubles’ that I gleaned an understanding of life in Northern Ireland at the time and what was at the heart of the conflict beyond it being Catholic V Protestant, Loyalist V Republican.
The book is structured around the disappearance of a widowed housewife, Jean McConville who was taken from her home by a group of young men and women while her 10 children looked on. She was never seen again and her body never found until after the Good Friday Agreement when the burial sites of the disappeared could be revealed without fear of prosecution or reprisal. Jean herself is barely there in the book, more the Jean shaped hole she left behind is the gravitational pull that the various IRA members whose stories are told orbit.
The tragedy is the youth of these IRA members, young men and women whose political ideals married with their youthful vigour and wrecklessness helped rejuvenate a dormant IRA and led to three decades of fear and violence. It is a period where everyone involved was either a hero or villain. Jeremy Corbyn has not been forgiven by some for saying early on in the conflict that talks were needed, Tony Blair a hero for having the talks after God knows how many lives lost. More interestingly is Gerry Adams who went from hero to villain by his IRA supporters and villain to hero by those who silenced him for years.
This book brought home how normal these people doing atrocious things were. There are the Price sisters, attractive, intelligent attending teacher training college who drove people to executions, who set four car bombs around London, who were responsible for the death of Jean. There’s Brendan Hughes an extremely likeable figure who was the first to go on hunger strike, escaped prison in a mattress and planted bombs in shopping areas. I found out more about Bobby Sands and that 9 other men died alongside him on that particular hunger strike. Above all this book brought home just how claustrophobic and terrifying it must have been living in Belfast or Derry at that time. Terrifying not necessarily from the bombs, but the fear of being thought an informant, being seen somewhere you shouldn’t, saying the wrong thing in front of the wrong person, not doing what was expected of you. A place where you can’t trust anyone, not even the laundry delivery van and where a policeman might meet the IRA member he’s spent 3 days interrogating in a local restaurant while out for a meal with his wife.
So after lifetimes of living like this, of families being fractured, of lives lost it would seem the Good Friday Agreement would bring peace and life could be lived again. To some extent that may be the case, the bombings, shootings, disappearances have ore or less become a thing of the past but there is no satisfaction. Those involved in the IRA found it hard to come to terms with their actions, many dying young from alcohol and drug abuse and a life of chain smoking feeling that they had done the dirty work for a leader who had distanced himself from them and left them to an ignominious old age. Their dream of a united Ireland seems no closer, Hughes renames the GFA, the Got Fuck All, but most of them are old or dead and the next generation are unwilling to risk the fragile peace that exists. It would seem the legacy of the pain and suffering is little more than murals of those names made famous during the worst years which is a heartbreaking example of the futility of the violence.
This book is adept at separating the person from the action, the ideology from the politics and explains the motivations of those for whom terrorist and political prisoner were 2 sides of the same coin. Essential reading.
I tell this because as a Londoner at this time the IRA were a strange mix of ever present threat and ignorable presence. There was even a kids drama set in Belfast where the story was (as far as I can remember) just typical kids’ issues but the kids walked past soldiers in full uniform holding guns squatting on street corners. Again the ignorable threat. Strange times. Made even stranger by the almost nightly presence of Gerry Adams on the news, his face shown but his voice being banned so his appearance was always prefaced with, “His words are voiced by an actor”. Now I often think of asking a lip-reader to determine how accurate this voiceover was to what was said.
Despite all this exposure to the conflict and having Irish family who had their own take on what was going on, it was only on reading this well crafted, clear, objective view of ‘The Troubles’ that I gleaned an understanding of life in Northern Ireland at the time and what was at the heart of the conflict beyond it being Catholic V Protestant, Loyalist V Republican.
The book is structured around the disappearance of a widowed housewife, Jean McConville who was taken from her home by a group of young men and women while her 10 children looked on. She was never seen again and her body never found until after the Good Friday Agreement when the burial sites of the disappeared could be revealed without fear of prosecution or reprisal. Jean herself is barely there in the book, more the Jean shaped hole she left behind is the gravitational pull that the various IRA members whose stories are told orbit.
The tragedy is the youth of these IRA members, young men and women whose political ideals married with their youthful vigour and wrecklessness helped rejuvenate a dormant IRA and led to three decades of fear and violence. It is a period where everyone involved was either a hero or villain. Jeremy Corbyn has not been forgiven by some for saying early on in the conflict that talks were needed, Tony Blair a hero for having the talks after God knows how many lives lost. More interestingly is Gerry Adams who went from hero to villain by his IRA supporters and villain to hero by those who silenced him for years.
This book brought home how normal these people doing atrocious things were. There are the Price sisters, attractive, intelligent attending teacher training college who drove people to executions, who set four car bombs around London, who were responsible for the death of Jean. There’s Brendan Hughes an extremely likeable figure who was the first to go on hunger strike, escaped prison in a mattress and planted bombs in shopping areas. I found out more about Bobby Sands and that 9 other men died alongside him on that particular hunger strike. Above all this book brought home just how claustrophobic and terrifying it must have been living in Belfast or Derry at that time. Terrifying not necessarily from the bombs, but the fear of being thought an informant, being seen somewhere you shouldn’t, saying the wrong thing in front of the wrong person, not doing what was expected of you. A place where you can’t trust anyone, not even the laundry delivery van and where a policeman might meet the IRA member he’s spent 3 days interrogating in a local restaurant while out for a meal with his wife.
So after lifetimes of living like this, of families being fractured, of lives lost it would seem the Good Friday Agreement would bring peace and life could be lived again. To some extent that may be the case, the bombings, shootings, disappearances have ore or less become a thing of the past but there is no satisfaction. Those involved in the IRA found it hard to come to terms with their actions, many dying young from alcohol and drug abuse and a life of chain smoking feeling that they had done the dirty work for a leader who had distanced himself from them and left them to an ignominious old age. Their dream of a united Ireland seems no closer, Hughes renames the GFA, the Got Fuck All, but most of them are old or dead and the next generation are unwilling to risk the fragile peace that exists. It would seem the legacy of the pain and suffering is little more than murals of those names made famous during the worst years which is a heartbreaking example of the futility of the violence.
This book is adept at separating the person from the action, the ideology from the politics and explains the motivations of those for whom terrorist and political prisoner were 2 sides of the same coin. Essential reading.
January 10, 2019
I’ve always been under-informed about the situation in Ireland and reading Say Nothing was a great way to cure that problem. It gives great history on the long-standing feud between the Protestants and Catholics in Ireland, and the problem with England getting involved in Ireland’s affairs for hundreds of years. It shares the story of the widowed 38-year-old mum of 10, Jean McConville, who is taken from her apartment one December night in 1972 by a threatening masked group, (IRA, but unsaid) and doesn’t come home. The kids try to carry on in her absence, with the oldest daughter in charge and the oldest boy working, but they are failing, hungry. The authorities eventually have to step in and put the younger ones into care, splitting some of them up.
The book also delves into the lives of several volunteer members of the IRA who have followed orders and done their jobs to an extreme. Some from a very young age, and almost to their deaths of starvation in prison on hunger strikes. There are the Price sisters, Dolours and Marian, and the man they call The Dark, Brendan Hughes. Bobby Sands, Gerry Adams, The IRA had split into 2 divisions, the Originals…more political, and the Provisionals who typically didn’t vote. My thanks for the advance electronic copy that was provided by NetGalley, author Patrick Radden Keefe, and the publisher for my fair review.
Also on my BookZone blog:
https://wordpress.com/post/bookblog20...
The book also delves into the lives of several volunteer members of the IRA who have followed orders and done their jobs to an extreme. Some from a very young age, and almost to their deaths of starvation in prison on hunger strikes. There are the Price sisters, Dolours and Marian, and the man they call The Dark, Brendan Hughes. Bobby Sands, Gerry Adams, The IRA had split into 2 divisions, the Originals…more political, and the Provisionals who typically didn’t vote. My thanks for the advance electronic copy that was provided by NetGalley, author Patrick Radden Keefe, and the publisher for my fair review.
Also on my BookZone blog:
https://wordpress.com/post/bookblog20...
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