Seamus Heaney, the beloved Irish poet, once claimed that “a person from Northern Ireland is naturally cautious.” As I walked through Belfast this past May and ventured on a black-cab tour of the city, talking to many of the locals, Heaney’s insight seemed eerily true.
Belfast is a fascinating place. The hills surrounding the city’s outer limits are astonishingly beautiful, and on a sunny day the sky is populated with warm tones of orange and yellow that shine brilliantly off the grandiose Victorian and Edwardian architecture. Like in the Republic, the people of Belfast are extraordinarily friendly and hospitable, regardless of the area you are in. I’ve told many people the latter fact and oftentimes receive a look of confusion in response.
This is primarily because of Belfast’s troubled history (pun intended). The Troubles were an extraordinarily traumatic period of time not only in Northern Ireland but for the Republic too, as well as Scotland and England. Someone with a basic understanding of the history of this triad will know the almost constant cycle of conflict that has plagued their societies for a significant chunk of the last millennia. The Troubles, though, are not too far from us to be remembered and were the latest instance of major conflict between the Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland. In fact, it was only in the 1998 Good Friday Agreement that any sort of relative peace was achieved for a population torn apart by three decades of extreme violence.
Patrick Radden Keefe chronicles the history of this conflict in an intriguing way. Starting with the abduction of Jean McConville–a widowed mother of 10–from her home in Divis Flats (a Belfast housing project for Irish Catholics) and the introduction of a spry woman with deep revolutionary ties and tendencies named Dolours Price, Keefe blends together an emphatic story laced with sorrow, depression, violence and a deep sectarian contempt.
Keefe, in exhaustive detail, talks about not only McConville and Price but important figures like Brendan Hughes and Gerry Adams, who were instrumental in the formation and operation of the Provisional IRA (the Provos), the violent outgrowth of the Official Irish Republican Army (IRA). We see the transformation of the characters as they bond over their intense nationalism, especially in the British prisons, where they subjected themselves to hunger strikes (you may have heard of the famous Bobby Sands) and bonded over their idealism of a united Ireland.
In pursuit of this ideal, Price, Adams and Hughes were more than comfortable with violence as the mechanism to achieve independence from Britain. There were routine bombings in Belfast and London and almost constant fighting in the Belfast neighborhoods–the Europa Hotel in central Belfast, for example, holds the shameful record of being “the most bombed hotel in the world.”
While Adams never toted the Armalite like Hughes often did, he was the assumed mastermind behind the Provos. But as violence continued to run its course and more people died, divisions occurred. Adams considered Hughes to be his attack dog of sorts and even described Hughes as having the ability to compensate “for any inability to articulate politically at a great length by doing things right instinctively.” In other words, Adams was the judge and Hughes the executioner. Dolours Price claimed, probably half-jokingly, “that she never saw Adams with a gun and she never saw Hughes without one.”
If you can’t spot the divide, it is essentially one of intellectual proclivity. Adams (who is still alive today) targeted politics as a more sure-fire method of securing his side’s interests and ended up even disavowing any previous membership with the IRA, instead choosing to operate as a full-time politician under the political arm of Sinn Féin.
This divide left a broken legacy of shattered souls. Hughes repudiated Adams and claimed that he “dropped all the important things that we fought and died for, mainly the enhancement and the betterment of the working class people in Ireland.”
While Hughes resided in the gloomy and oppressive Divis Flats, a location central to Irish-Catholic history in Belfast, Adams daytimed as a posh and sumptuous politician, making a name for himself in a radically different way than his past could honestly tell.
Price echoed Hughes’s sentiment. Both asked themselves as the distance between them and the events of the past widened: what was it all for? Why did they kill so many people? Why did they commit terrorism? If it wasn’t for the freedom of their people, then how could any of their actions be justified?
These questions still remain unanswered for a deeply divided population. According to my guide in Belfast (who appeared to have been associated with the IRA in some fashion), the iron palings that to this day divide the Catholic and Protestant populations shut for the night around 7 p.m. Lurking not far from these gates is the ominous Peace Wall, which I proudly wrote my name on.
I say this because it was deeply humbling to be in a place that experienced so much internal turmoil and violence. You can see it in people’s faces and hear the reverberations of trauma in their stories. This was especially true in the Irish-Catholic neighborhoods, where bullet holes plastered the brick of old buildings, and where memorials and murals lined the streets, all in remembrance of an era that has only been suppressed and never solved.
Take the case of McConville’s children. They saw their mother be kidnapped for allegedly aiding a wounded British soldier. This, for the IRA, was helping the enemy and therefore was an act of treason. But the IRA was also incredibly obscure about their motive for kidnapping McConville. According to Keefe himself:
“The IRA has maintained for decades that McConville was murdered because she had been supplying information to the British Army. The children of Jean McConville—who today are parents and grandparents themselves—have angrily challenged this assertion, pointing out that Jean was a widowed mother of ten who would have had no access to sensitive information, much less the time to pass it along. A report by the Police Ombudsman for Northern Ireland, from 2006, also found no evidence that McConville was an informer.”
What this case is meant to exemplify is how complicated and difficult it was to push through The Troubles period. McConville’s children never saw their mother again after she was abducted and eventually murdered by a secret clique known as the “Unknowns” (the contradiction there reveals the organization’s obscurity). The one who drove her to her execution just over the border in Dundalk, in Republican territory, happened to be Price.
Perhaps, without belaboring the point any further, you can see the connections and narrative-overlapping the book entails. Keefe is one of the few nonfiction writers who can write like a novelist. Not to mention the complex storyline that localizes the conflict (in the case of McConville) and explains its general events and historical context.
“Say Nothing” is essentially a story of tragedy, of failed idealism. No side bears innocence. The Protestant Unionists were incredibly awful to the Catholic populations in Derry and Belfast and engaged in counter-terrorism of their own to further enforce political and religious infringement on the Catholic populations, who were overwhelmingly Irish nationalists.
However, to romanticize the IRA–which is a common phenomenon–is to be morally inconsistent. McConville never saw her children again, and her children grew as orphans, some of them never recovering from her abrupt absence. The IRA has plenty of blood on its hands and as such, should not be revered.
In my view, Keefe offers a balanced analysis of this incredibly difficult subject without being a boring writer. He isn’t afraid to make judgments or offer sympathy but does so in a way that does not alienate the reader. He effectively communicates misery and triumph while accurately relaying the history. In sum, “Say Nothing” is an incredible read. Very much worth the time.
I should like to close with an excerpt from a poem written by Irish poet Derek Mahon:
Your people await you, their heavy washing
flaps for you in the housing estates –
a credulous people. God, you could do it, God
help you, stand on a corner stiff
with rhetoric, promising nothing under the sun.
Rating: 8/10
