Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland

A searing, meticulously developed, and essential historical work , a triumph of both rigorous reportage and literary artistry.

Say Nothing is at once a true crime/murder mystery; history of the Troubles mainly the IRA’s side. as seen through the eyes of Delours Price, Brendan Hughes, and Gerry Adams; character study, and political thriller all rolled into one. It reads like a novel because Radden Keefe does such a fantastic job allowing the reader to get to know the main characters; there is never a dull moment in the book. The book begins with the disappearance of Jean McConville, a 38-year-old widow and mother of ten, on December 7, 1972. From there, the history of the Troubles comes into focus, with the violence beginning in the mid-1960s, even though as Radden Keefe points out the strife in Northern Ireland didn’t begin at that time. The IRA’s violent wing, the Provisionals, as opposed to the Stickies, emerged during that time, as the IRA had been in existence long before, with some of the Provos coming from a long line of IRA family members. Say Nothing pierces into the nature of the human condition and political power. The Troubles serve as a sort of microcosm of the general nature of political violence in the name of a cause. Does anything justify innocent people been killed in the name of a cause?

The book’s content on its own would get 5 stars but I bought a used copy that smells faintly of tobacco and triggers my asthma when I read. Book shipped quickly and otherwise was in great shape. I don’t know how this hasn’t been optioned as a limited series or film. It’s an important history and the writing is so engrossing I’m almost done after starting just last night.

Say Nothing by Patrick Radden Keefe is subtitled A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland. It is very rare for me to ignore everything around me and become completely immersed in a book, no matter how great or suspenseful it is, but that is exactly what happened with this one. Being across the ocean, I really didn’t know that much about life in Northern Ireland during The Troubles, which stretched from 1968 to 1998, at the time events were happening. I first became aware of the deep divisions only after I began researching my ancestry, which led to Ballygawley, County Tyrone, Northern Ireland. During trips there, I visited Belfast and took the bus tours which included much about The Troubles and brought me past the Peace Walls and art commemorating both sides. In fact, one of the last British soldiers to be killed had the same last name as my ancestors (Neely), who was killed in an IRA bomb attack outside Ballygawley. So when I came across the story of Jean McConville, a 38-year-old mother of 10 children who was abducted and murdered by the IRA, I was intrigued. Who would burst into someone’s home, knowing the father had died of cancer, and remove the mother of children as young as six years of age right in front of them, take her to a remote location and murder her? They had to have known the children would be left on their own, perhaps even to die without adult care. And why would anyone be that inhumane? Patrick Radden Keefe’s book, Say Nothing, answers those questions in a very balanced way. Being a journalist by trade—a New Yorker Magazine award-winning journalist—I immediately knew from the level of detail that he had painstakingly researched not only Jean McConville and her family but also each of the individuals that had some level of participation in her abduction and murder. The result is an absolutely riveting story that delves deep into what causes people to become terrorists, the changes that occur in a person’s mind when they are raised among extreme levels of hatred and the extent to which they will go because they believe in a cause larger than themselves. What was particularly striking was the revelation that many of the people involved in acts of terror—the bombing of London and Northern Ireland and the killing of innocent civilians—suffered abnormally high rates of drug dependency, alcoholism and PTSD after The Troubles had officially ended with the Good Friday Peace Agreement of 1998. The agreement caused the IRA to stand down, the British to release political prisoners held without trial or conviction, but it fell short of turning Northern Ireland over to the Irish Republicans. Because that was the goal of the IRA, members were left wondering what the killing and maiming was all about if their leaders were willing to simply give up the goal and work with the British politically through Sinn Fein. In Jean McConville’s case—the central subject of this book—she was a Protestant that had taken work as a domestic in a Catholic household, subsequently falling in love with her boss’ Catholic son. In America, this would not have been perceived as a problem at all. In Northern Ireland, it led to the kiss of death and a generation of children traumatized by their father’s death, their mother’s murder and their subsequent separation and hellish time in abusive, Catholic-run children’s homes that seem right out of a Charles Dickens novel. The investigations into Jean McConville’s disappearance would lead to Dolours and Marian Price—it is Dolours’ picture that appears on the front cover, her face partially hidden consistent with IRA terrorists of the time. The damning evidence was in the form of Dolours’ own voice as she participated in a Boston College project in which she admitted on audiotape that she drove McConville across the border to Dundalk in the Republic of Ireland. Later, when the men instructed to kill her did not want to do that because McConville was a widowed mother of ten, Dolours drove back to Dundalk with two others, assumed to be her sister Marian and Ivor Bell, and murdered McConville, burying her in an unmarked grave. It would take decades and particularly strong storms to erode the ground in which she’d been hastily buried, for her body to be found. By that time, her children were grown and had families of their own. We do find out who fired the fatal shot that killed Jean McConville. But the story is far larger than that. It is the story of a country that had been invaded by foreign forces more than 700 years ago and divided in the early 20th century so that one part of the country became the free and independent Republic of Ireland while the other part remained a colony controlled by Great Britain. It is the story of those loyal to the United Kingdom as well as those carrying on a tradition of a free Ireland for which their ancestors fought for hundreds of years. It is also the story of supposed men of God—priests and ministers—who fueled the hatred within their communities, leading to spiraling violence and extremism on both sides. With Brexit, tensions have once again increased between the two factions and ultimately, it will be London who will decide its fate. I highly recommend this book. Be prepared for a riveting tale and a book you can’t put down.

With over 100 pages of notes backing up every scrap of narrative, Say Nothing is a remarkable account of “The Troubles” in Northern Ireland intertwined with the disappearance of Jean McConville, a 38-year-old—and widowed—mother of ten. Intertwined isn’t quite the right word—the book uses McConville’s broad-daylight abduction (in 1972) as a jumping-off point. The vast majority of Say Nothing concerns itself with The Troubles—though, again, McConville’s disappearance and death create a perfectly murky case study for the whole, protracted, decades-long mess. The Troubles took the lives of some 4,000 people. On one side, Catholic republicans seeking unification of Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. On the other, Protestant paramilitaries, police, and British army forces. Only 20 individuals were “disappeared.” McConville’s body wasn’t found until 2003, five years after the 1998 agreement that brought three decades of violence to a close. As Keefe’s acknowledgements and those lengthy notes make clear, Keefe drew heavily on an oral history archive at Boston College. Two interviews in that history were with Brendan Hughes and Dolours Prices—former members of the Irish Republican Army. They provided plenty of detail about McConville’s murder. The thick wedge of backstory that forms the heart of Say Nothing is critical to understanding what happened to McConville but the book is hardly a detailed prosecution of her murder, allegedly over her role as a tout (informer). As many others have pointed out, Say Nothing has no heroes. Both sides committed horrific acts of violence that ended the lives of many innocent civilians. Keefe’s narrative covers all the key figures on both sides along with the tricks, the lies, the ambushes, the terrorism, the traps, the the violence, Bloody Sunday, Bloody Friday, hunger strikes, the hazy legal fallout from the Jane McConville case itself, and the personal fallout on McConville’s offspring. You will come to understand the importance of, well, saying nothing. Keefe covers Gerry Adams’ conversion from leader of the armed struggle to his role as a political deal-maker—and Keefe credits Adams for an end to the outright violence (while acknowledging that ample tension remains). “Whatever callous motivations Adams might have possessed, and whatever deceptive machinations he might have employed, he steered the IRA out of a bloody and intractable conflict and into a brittle but enduring peace,” writes Keefe. Say Nothing—A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland is recounted in calm, clear-eyed fashion. Keefe’s dogged research is evident and his journalistic approach is solid (read those acknowledgements for a good explanation of how he went about corroborating interviews and checking facts). But McGonville’s disappearance drops far to the background as Keefe takes us deep into the “The Troubles” and all the protracted, violent quagmire.

“Whatever you say, say nothing!” was an admonition of the Irish Republican Army, immortalized by the venerable Irish poet Seamus Heaney. The author of this 348-page book (plus 77 pages of notes, bibliography and acknowledgments) emphasizes that it is not “a history book but a work of narrative nonfiction.” There is no attempt to re-create the centuries-old hostilities between Ireland and Britain. Rather, the author takes one small sliver of the “Troubles” in 1972 – the kidnapping and murder of a 38-year old Belfast housewife – and examines that crime under a microscope, much like a pathologist would do in a hospital laboratory. Through the personalities of the individuals associated with the crime, the reader gets a broad understanding of the hostilities over the second half of the 20th century. The organization of the facts and the writing of the story are outstanding. On the whole, the author balances his discussions of disputed facts in a fair manner. That said, when it comes to the law of evidence, he seems not to understand the difference between hearsay and admissions. (Admissions are almost always admissible in evidence.) The photographs are interesting, not the formal renderings usually found in such books. Also, the photos are scattered throughout the book and not restricted to several consecutive pages in the middle of the volume. When you come across a photo, you know who that person is and how he or she fits into the story. On the other hand, the images in the photos were not printed clearly. They were washed out. I would have liked to see a map or two of the parts of Belfast in which the main activities took place. The text says that the streets have changed over the years, so it would not suffice to buy a current street map or to visit Google maps on the Internet. This is an excellent book. And lest the reader think that the subject matter is ancient history, today’s news carries the sad story of a young journalist in Derry who was fatally shot yesterday by gunmen affiliated with a group called the “New IRA.”

This is an excellent, brutally honest book on the happenings in Ireland back then. Keefe does a really great job at capturing your attention in the beginning with McConville’s capture and subsequent disappearance. He then pivots to the I.R.A. and the unrest in Ireland, and seems to forget the buildup that he started with at the beginning after a while. Or maybe I got lost in all the details. It felt to me that I got lost in all the details towards the end, I was ‘historied out’, if you will, and wanted to get on with solving the murder. He eventually did and I was very satisfied. Overall, this was a thoroughly researched, well-written book, and I clearly did not know enough about Ireland’s violent history prior to reading this. I am blown away by how long the violence went on, by how many people suffered, and by the craziness of the I.R.A’s tactics to get what they wanted. They used hunger strikes to some success (but some also died). A hunger strike was successful in electing a member of the I.R.A. to Parliament (he was in jail, whaat?!), and last but certainly not least, we have Dolours and Marian Price. There is a lot to unpack with these two. They are sisters that caused so much havoc in Ireland, using their beauty to appear innocent, as in, “Who us? We couldn’t possibly be this dangerous, we are just two pretty sisters, move along…” And yet, they were quite possibly the masterminds behind much of the destruction during this time in Ireland. I will neither confirm nor deny whether this is a fact, you must read for yourself.

Great read. Written in a great manner that kept my reading and reading.if you are into the history of onNorthern Ireland and The Troubles, this is a must read

- Say Nothing is an incredible insight into the Troubles in Northern Ireland. It explores many of the unsettling truths behind the decades long conflict that occurred in Northern Ireland. It begins by focusing on the 1972 abduction and murder of Jean McConville, and through this prism explores the lives of key figures, including Brendan Hughes, sisters Dolores and Marian Price and Gerry Adams as well as the Jean McConnell's children. The book is also a profound understanding of the human experience in these troubled times of conflict. - The book’s title is taken from the famous Heini poem “whatever you say, say nothing”. - It tells us a story of the disappearance of McConville, a widowed mother of 10 children and using this as a framework, then tells us the story of the IRA troubles. The author doesn’t judge but tries to tell their stories with impartially, so that readers can form their own opinions. I had a much greater understanding of some of these people and their stories, and it’s a very gripping and thought provoking read. I have already read the authors book “house of pain“ (that explains the opioid crisis through the manufacture and distribution of the drug OxyContin and how it came about in America and killed thousands and that 4 in every 5 heroin and opioid users in America nowadays began with a prescription of a prescribed drug to manage pain given to them by a health care professional) and he writes wonderful books of which this is definitely one of them. - The book wonderfully captures the early idolisem of youth, but as their stories and events progress, each person changes to almost becoming someone else, characters are not fixed but caught in a moment of time and then changed by the events and years as they become more layered and nuanced and as they become older and more tragic. Sometimes, you feel that there are no heroes or villains, just people whose convictions curdle into confusion, and whose wounds never fully heal. - Among the books many intriguing takeaways is a clear, demonstrable belief: staying silent isn’t the answer. I will be thinking of this book for a long time. Highly recommended.

Very gripping book

Great book in perfect condition.

I left Belfast in 1973 to go to London as young woman barely 19 years old to train as a nurse like many before me. I kept abreast of the news from Northern Ireland and was always very doubtful of Gerry Adam’s and his motivations but the detail in this book is phenomenal. The death of Jean McConville and her story has fascinated me since her disappearance but I was unaware of the consequences for her children and my heart goes out to them. I am so glad to have come across this book and will recommend it to my family as an incredible historical account of the troubles and the people who were integral to the continuance of the deaths and destruction during those years.

A book to add to my top list of recommendations. The characters and facts are well explained with all the nuances required for an immersion in the human drama and thus the personal misery to which a process of violent radicalisation leads. Entertaining to read to boot