Interview
Patrick Radden Keefe, Author of "Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland"
- Patrick Radenkeef, a New Yorker contributor of Irish-American descent with no prior deep personal connection to the Troubles, was prompted to write his book after reading a 2013 New York Times obituary of Dolours Price.
- Price was the first woman to serve as a frontline soldier in the IRA; her death revealed a trajectory marked by "trauma over some of the things she'd done in her youth," including her involvement in the disappearance of Jean McConville.
- The book centers on the 1972 abduction of Jean McConville, a widowed mother of ten in Belfast, who was taken by an armed gang of intruders who promised to return her, but whose children never saw her again.
- Over the three decades of the Troubles, approximately 3,600 people were killed, with McConville's case becoming an iconic mystery due to the lack of immediate information regarding her fate.
- The investigation into McConville's disappearance connected her to Dolours Price and her sister Marion, who were members of the IRA's "Unknowns," a secretive paramilitary unit comparable to a "SEAL team."
- The Price sisters' father, Albert, instilled a family tradition of violence by teaching his daughters how to mix improvised explosives rather than telling them bedtime stories.
- In the spring of 1973, Dolours Price led a ten-person crew, including her sister, to escalate the conflict by conducting bombing missions on the British mainland, targeting the Old Bailey and other sites in London.
- The strategic rationale for moving attacks to London was the perception that the conflict could cause economic damage to unionist-owned businesses and avoid killing innocent bystanders in their own communities.
- Gerry Adams, a central figure in the narrative, is described as a "chilly, very analytical, pretty emotionally remote guy" who consistently denied IRA membership despite his own accounts of having been arrested and interrogated in the early 1970s.
- Adams employed a strategy of denial and "rope-a-doping" during interrogations, a tactic the author suggests served as practice for his decades-long public assertion that he was "never in the IRA."
- Adams faced significant internal and external friction: hardline Republicans resented his pivot to a political solution that did not achieve full reunification, while unionists viewed him as a criminal liar.
- The Good Friday Agreement, facilitated by President Bill Clinton and George Mitchell, introduced a "principle of consent," establishing that Northern Ireland would remain part of the UK unless a majority voted to reunify with the Republic.
- The peace agreement required compromise that alienated former foot soldiers like Dolours Price, who felt the terms had fundamentally changed the objective from "driving the Brits out" to establishing power-sharing governments.
- Adams' public denial of IRA membership created necessary political "deniability" for the international community, allowing figures like Bill Clinton to host him at the White House without appearing to negotiate directly with terrorists.
- Boston College launched an oral history project to record the stories of paramilitaries under the promise that the archives would remain sealed until the interviewees' deaths.
- Northern Irish prosecutors subpoenaed the Boston College archives, arguing that the Good Friday Agreement contained no statute of limitations on past crimes, and the university ultimately complied with the demand despite potential risks to the "brittle" peace.
- The leaked oral histories contain material implicating Gerry Adams in the McConville murder, specifically allegations that he ordered the killing based on suspicions that she was a British informant.
- Despite these allegations, no charges were filed against Adams because there were no living witnesses prepared to testify and no physical evidence from the 1972 crime.
- Brexit has re-inscribed the physical border between Northern Ireland and the Republic, a line the Troubles were fought to erase and which the Good Friday Agreement resolved through "creative ambiguity" allowing dual EU/UK status.
- The author predicts that the necessity of hardening the Irish border due to Brexit could lead to a "resurgence of some violence," though not a return to the full scale of the Troubles.
- Brexit may inadvertently catalyze Irish reunification, evidenced by polling showing a majority in the North potentially favoring it, though there is significant ambivalence in the Republic regarding the economic and social costs of absorbing the North.
- The narrative concludes that while the Good Friday Agreement successfully ended a thirty-year conflict, the unresolved nature of past crimes and the re-emergence of border issues suggest the peace remains fragile.