Say Nothing

by Patrick Radden Keefe

  One of the characters in the film, played by Miranda Richardson, is a redheaded IRA woman. ‘I spent a few days in Belfast soaking up the atmosphere,’ Richardson said, years later, when she was asked about the part. ‘Stephen introduced me to his wife, Dolours Price, who had been a member of the Provisional IRA and a hunger striker, and who was a real heroine there. We went out to a pub, which was an extraordinary experience. She was treated like a film star.’

  Rea insisted that the part of Fergus was not in any way based on his spouse. But he did allow that Price might have influenced his interpretation. ‘The only thing I can say is that I wouldn’t regard anyone involved in that conflict as essentially evil, which is what we’re told to believe,’ he said. ‘There may have been some empathy with Dolours’s situation, but … it never consciously crossed my mind.’ Discussing the themes of the film, Rea added, in a line that could be the Price family credo, ‘Redemption through suffering. That’s my fave.’

  On the subject of his own ideology, Rea was elusive. ‘You mustn’t assume that my politics are the same as my wife’s, and you mustn’t assume that her politics are the same as they were twenty years ago,’ he told The Times in 1993. This was a canned answer, rehearsed for the publicity tour, and for the most part Rea stuck to it. But occasionally he would slip. After repeating the same evasive sentiment in an interview with Entertainment Weekly, he added, ‘I don’t feel ashamed of my wife’s political background, and I don’t think she should either. I feel that the people who administered the North of Ireland for the last twenty years should be ashamed.’ Realising that he had strayed off script, he added, tartly, ‘There you are. That’s a political statement.’

  In December 1992, Rea and Price travelled with the children to New York, to stay for a couple of months while Rea performed in a play on Broadway. The city agreed with Price. In another life, she might have just been a theatre person. With her quick tongue, flaming red hair and peacock personality, she might have fitted in as another eccentric bohemian. ‘She would have been ideally suited to be someone’s crazy aunt who moved to New York and was in the theatre and flounced around with scarves,’ one of her friends remarked. ‘That’s who she would’ve been had it not been for the Troubles.’

  In The Crying Game, Fergus ends up walking away from the armed struggle. To Rea, it was a story about someone ‘remaking’ himself, ‘going through some appalling experience yet coming out better, enriched’. There were ordinary, decent people who became involved in the republican movement only to see the conflict spiral into something that they could no longer control. For some of these people, Rea pointed out, a moment arrived when they found themselves saying, ‘I’ve had enough.’

  In August 1994, the IRA declared a ceasefire. It appeared that the secret negotiations brokered by Father Alec Reid had borne fruit. Dolours Price and other republicans were summoned to a social club in West Belfast to be told about the decision. Three representatives sat behind a table and summarised the plan. The ceasefire was presented as a positive move – not a victory, certainly, but not a defeat, either. Some people struggled to understand why the IRA would lay down its weapons without any sort of promise from the British that they would withdraw from Ireland in exchange. There was talk about the enormous numbers of people who had died. Price raised her hand and asked, ‘Are we being told that with hindsight we should never have undertaken an armed struggle?’

  There had always been a certain absolutism about the hard edge of Irish republicanism. ‘Whatever soul searchings there may be among Irish political parties now or hereafter, we go in the calm certitude of having done the clear, clean, sheer thing,’ Patrick Pearse, the doomed hero of the Easter Rising, once declared. ‘We have the strength and the peace of mind of those who never compromise.’ But the nature of a ceasefire and a peace process is precisely negotiation, soul searching and compromise. Much blood had been spilled over a quarter of a century in the name of a stark and absolute ambition: Brits out. Yet that ambition had not been realised. This left some members of the movement feeling confused. The leadership assured past and current foot soldiers that they had not given up their weapons, that the ceasefire was a tactical move, that it could be undone at any time. But this felt like a sop, a line concocted to placate the troops, in order to avoid another split in the ranks like the one that had divided the Provisionals from the Officials back in 1969. The one major concession that the IRA received in the ceasefire negotiations was a greater acceptance, by the British, of Sinn Féin. As one former IRA volunteer remarked, ‘In return for ending the armed insurrection, Sinn Féin was given an opportunity to present itself as a conventional political party and, perhaps more important, as a party that could help deliver an end to the long years of conflict in Northern Ireland.’

  One day the following summer, a press conference was held in central Belfast at the Linen Hall Library, which occupies a handsome old building on Donegall Square. A new organisation had been formed to address the fate of the ‘disappeared’ – people who had been abducted and murdered during the Troubles and whose bodies had never been found. Participants mingled, wearing sky-blue ribbons on their lapels. Jean McConville’s daughter Helen was one of the speakers. ‘Four women and eight men came into our home in 1972 and took my mother away,’ she said. ‘We never saw her again, and I now say, to those women in particular, how can they look at their own children and not feel guilt about what they did to my mother?’

  Helen was thirty-seven – nearly the same age Jean had been when she disappeared. She had a stable marriage to Seamus McKendry, and children of her own. But the McConvilles had never managed to function as a normal family after their mother’s abduction. At one point, an opportunity had emerged for Helen to relocate with Seamus and the children to Australia. But she felt that she could not go, because, as Seamus explained, ‘she always had this wee thing that her mother might come back’.

  If childhood had been difficult for the McConville children, adulthood had not been much easier. Some had struggled to find work. Several grappled with drug and alcohol addiction. Jim McConville, who, along with his twin brother, Billy, was the youngest of the siblings, had been detained in a young offenders’ centre in the 1980s and had served a prison sentence in England for armed robbery. Michael was, in many respects, one of the most stable of the children. After leaving Lisnevin, the high-security group home, at sixteen, he had lived with Archie for a while, and then with Helen. But Michael and Helen had clashed, and for a time Michael ended up living on the street. He would stay with friends – a night here, a night there. But eventually he found work. At a dance one evening when he was seventeen, he met a girl named Angela. They became a couple, and eventually married. Michael held various jobs. For a time, he worked at the DeLorean plant in Belfast, where an assembly line produced futuristic cars with gull-wing doors.

  In 1992, Jean McConville’s oldest child, Anne, who had been ill all her life, died at the age of thirty-nine. Helen peered into the coffin at her older sister and was struck by how much she resembled Jean. She pledged to do what she could to find out what had happened to her mother. Seamus started to ask around Belfast. Once he ventured into a bar on the Falls Road that was known as an IRA hangout. But when he mentioned the name of his mother-in-law, the place went quiet. An old fellow slipped McKendry a bookie’s docket and asked him to go next door to make a bet. On the docket, the man had written: Get away.

  There were other families in the area with loved ones who had disappeared. One was a formidable woman named Margaret McKinney, whose son Brian had been abducted in 1978. ‘I’m away Mammy,’ he had told her, before climbing into his sister’s car and driving off. He was twenty-two. She never saw him again. Over the years, there were rumours that Brian had emigrated to England or to Mexico. McKinney was left with a nagging uncertainty, a dull, ever-present pain that she likened to a toothache. Eventually she rallied a group of families who were haunted by their own disappearances. After years of frightened silence, there was relief
, if not catharsis, in being able to speak openly with others about the enduring trauma of this kind of loss. The families had mostly given up any hope of their relatives returning alive, but they still wanted to recover their bodies. ‘I could accept now that Brian was dead,’ McKinney said. ‘I could not accept not having a grave to go to.’ For years, she had refused to change the linen on her son’s childhood bed. ‘I used to just get into his bed and wrap his clothes around me to see if I could just dream. Sleep and dream that I could see him,’ she recalled. But she would wake each time to find that he was still gone.

  When the families of the disappeared found one another, they discovered that they had been plagued by the same set of persistent, chilling questions: When had their loved one been killed? Had he suffered before he died? Was she tortured? Was he dead before they put him in the hole? Occasionally, people came forward with information. Father Alec Reid would hear things sometimes and pass along the odd tip. At one point, a rumour went around that some of the bodies had been buried on the Black Mountain, overlooking the city. But a search turned up nothing. After the ceasefire, the families felt secure enough, finally, to go public. In the hope of raising awareness, they wore the blue ribbons, as a symbol of remembrance for the disappeared, and sent ribbons to prominent figures like Bill Clinton and Nelson Mandela.

  When the McConvilles and other families finally aired these revelations, the press responded with shock that a tactic more familiar from grisly civil conflicts in places like Chile or Argentina might have been employed against British citizens. This was a parallel that the families were only too happy to highlight: the group that they established was inspired by the mothers of the disappeared, who gathered at the Plaza de Mayo, in Buenos Aires. Fewer than twenty people disappeared during the Troubles. Because the country is so small, however, the impact of each disappearance reverberated throughout the society. There was Columba McVeigh, a teenager who was abducted by the IRA in 1975 and never seen again. There was Robert Nairac, a dashing British Army officer who was working undercover when he disappeared in South Armagh in 1977. There was Seamus Ruddy, a thirty-two-year-old Newry man who was working as a teacher in Paris when he vanished in 1985.

  That this push by the families for answers would coincide with the peace process and the IRA ceasefire could only have been embarrassing for Gerry Adams. Just as he was positioning himself as a visionary who could see beyond the horizon of the conflict, the families of the disappeared were directing a series of loud and increasingly indignant queries at him by name. ‘We have a simple message for Gerry Adams and the IRA: our families have suffered far too much. Please bring this nightmare to an end,’ Seamus McKendry said in 1995. He continued, pointedly, ‘We feel it is hypocritical for Sinn Féin to expect the status of a full democratic party while this issue remains unresolved.’

  McKendry had visited the Sinn Féin leadership and asked them to conduct some kind of internal investigation to determine what had happened to Jean. One day, he bumped into Adams at the supermarket and confronted him, blurting, ‘Gerry, are you trying to make an idiot of my wife?’ At the end of the summer in 1995, Adams issued a carefully worded statement, pledging to help locate the bodies. ‘I call upon anyone who has any information about the whereabouts of these missing people to contact the families,’ he said.

  BOOK | THREE

  A RECKONING

  An excavation in the search for the disappeared (Sean and Yvette)

  20

  A Secret Archive

  One cold November day in 1995, US President Bill Clinton went to Derry to deliver a speech. Since assuming office three years earlier, he had taken an interest in the peace process in Northern Ireland. He had granted a visa to Gerry Adams to visit the United States, a crucial step in ending the isolation of Sinn Féin and legitimating Adams as an acceptable interlocutor. He had also met John Hume in Washington on several occasions. In Derry, it was Hume who introduced Clinton, describing how the American president had a dream, ‘that we will have a land in the next century where for the first time in our history there will be no killing in our streets, and no emigration of our young people to other lands’.

  Clinton took to the podium outside the Guildhall, beneath a display of winking Christmas lights. Bundled in a dark overcoat, he looked young, robust and optimistic. People were everywhere, clotting the narrow streets of Derry, teeming beneath the arches of the ancient city walls. ‘This city is a very different place from what a visitor like me would have seen just a year and a half ago, before the ceasefire,’ Clinton said. ‘The soldiers are off the streets. The city walls are open to civilians.’ He spoke of ‘the handshake of reconciliation’ and quoted a passage from a poem by Heaney:

  History says, Don’t hope

  On this side of the grave

  But then, once in a lifetime

  The longed-for tidal wave

  Of justice can rise up

  And hope and history rhyme.

  The chilly air was charged with a buoyant sense of possibility. The ceasefire would eventually end, in 1996, when the IRA detonated a bomb in London’s Docklands, injuring more than one hundred people. The group issued a statement blaming the British government’s refusal to negotiate with Sinn Féin until the IRA had decommissioned its weapons. There was some speculation in the press that Gerry Adams might not have known about the bombing in advance – that in his dedication to the peace process, he may have grown alienated from the IRA’s armed wing. But a second ceasefire was initiated in 1997, and this one held. For a week in April 1998, negotiators holed up at Hillsborough Castle, a Georgian mansion outside Belfast, and thrashed out the details of a peace agreement. The new British prime minister, Tony Blair, personally attended the negotiations, subsisting on sandwiches and Mars bars and leaving the building only once in three days. The chief negotiator was an American, former Maine senator George Mitchell. He was a quiet man, with great patience. But he likened his own commitment to forging a peace agreement to the uncompromising orthodoxy of a terrorist; he had what one observer described as ‘the tenacity of a fanatic’.

  The various representatives bluffed and quarrelled over dry bureaucratic questions regarding the structure of a new national assembly in Northern Ireland, the decommissioning of paramilitary weapons, the status of prisoners, and future relations between the six counties in the North and the governments of Ireland and Britain. Outside, as flurries of sleet battered the castle, Protestant and Catholic schoolchildren gathered at the gates, singing songs and asking for peace. Gerry Adams came outside and brought them a tray of drinks.

  Eventually, on Good Friday, the parties emerged and announced that they had arrived at a pact to which all sides could agree – a mechanism to end the three-decade conflict. Northern Ireland would remain part of the United Kingdom, but with its own devolved assembly and close links to the Republic of Ireland. The agreement acknowledged that the majority of people on the island wanted a united Ireland – but also that a majority of people in the six counties favoured remaining part of the United Kingdom. The key principle was ‘consent’: if, at some juncture, a majority of people in the North wanted to unite with Ireland, then the governments of the UK and Ireland would have a ‘binding obligation’ to honour that choice. But until that time, Northern Ireland would remain part of the UK, and Sinn Féin agreed to set aside its principle of abstention and allow its representatives to serve in the newly created assembly.

  ‘We’ll deliver the end of British rule in our country, and until we do, the struggle will continue,’ Adams said in a speech at the grave of Wolfe Tone, a few months after the agreement. Adams had played an instrumental role in securing the deal, and the very ambiguity that he had cultivated around his own persona may have been what made it possible for the various negotiators to deal with him. Even after the agreement, Bill Clinton would wonder about Adams. ‘I don’t know what the real deal is between him and the IRA,’ Clinton mused to Tony Blair on a telephone call in 1999. But the fiction that Adams had never
been a paramilitary created a political space in which interlocutors who might not want to be seen negotiating with terrorists could bring themselves to negotiate with him.

  In his speech, Adams couldn’t exactly declare victory. But he was upbeat, saying, ‘The Good Friday Agreement marks the conclusion of one phase and the beginning of a new phase of struggle.’ He wanted to see ‘a new Ireland’, he said. ‘An Ireland in which the guns are silent. Permanently. An Ireland in which all of the people of this island are at peace with each other and with our neighbours in Britain. An Ireland united by a process of healing and national reconciliation.’

  Two years later, across an ocean, Paul Bew was enjoying a stint as a visiting scholar at Boston College. Bew, who was normally based at Queen’s University, was a professor of Irish history. He had also served as an adviser to David Trimble, the leader of the Ulster Unionist Party, who had played a major role in the Good Friday negotiations and was now serving as first minister for Northern Ireland. Boston College had a dignified legacy as a bastion of scholarship on Irish history and literature. In the spring of 2000, the college administration was looking for a way to mark the end of the three-decade conflict in Northern Ireland, and Bew mentioned to Bob O’Neill, the head of the John J. Burns Library, that the college might consider some way of documenting the Troubles. Perhaps, Bew suggested, the college could gather some sort of testimony from people who had participated in the Troubles, in order to create a historical record of the conflict. ‘This will be for graduate students a generation from now,’ Bew said. O’Neill liked the idea. But the new project would need a director. Bew proposed a longtime Belfast journalist named Ed Moloney, who had been a respected reporter and editor at the Irish Times and the Sunday Tribune.