Say Nothing

by Patrick Radden Keefe

  Adams never responded to these provocations, and Price, spurned anew, could occasionally turn menacing. ‘I look forward to the freedom to lay bare my experiences,’ she wrote in 2005, adding, ‘This is the only freedom left to me.’

  Price had taken lately to telephoning journalists when she felt like talking. She would be sitting at home, sometimes with a glass of something in her hand, and slide into a doleful reverie about the past. It wasn’t just that she was lonely. It was that she was seized, in these moments, by a defiant impulse to set matters straight. To testify. ‘Dolours, what the fuck are you doing?’ Eamonn McCann would protest, pointing out just how hazardous it could be for her to ring up a journalist for a chat about her history. But to McCann, it seemed that Price was filled with ‘a great rage’ she could scarcely control. When she read the Adams interview about Lynskey in February 2010, she reached for the telephone.

  The next morning, a Belfast journalist named Allison Morris got to work at the Irish News and discovered a stack of messages waiting for her. Price, it seemed, had been ringing the night desk at the newspaper all night. As it happened, Morris had grown up in Andersonstown, like Price. She was an aggressive reporter, blonde and slightly brassy, with impeccable republican sources. She made the trip to Dublin, where Price was waiting to meet her. Morris had interviewed her fair share of ex-paramilitaries, and she was acquainted with the relevant hazards: warped by trauma, such men and women often navigated their days in a fog of alcohol and prescription drugs. She had interviewed Brendan Hughes on a number of occasions before he died, and she sometimes had to stop the interviews because he was drunk. But when Price came to the door and greeted Morris and her photographer, she seemed sober and coherent. Her hair was short and dyed a platinum blonde, and she wore a cardigan and a red scarf looped around her neck. Morris was struck by her poise and beauty. Price seemed to her, as she did to so many, like a theatre person, a bohemian.

  Price wanted to talk about the disappeared. What had set her off was the blitheness with which Adams discussed the disappearance of her old friend Joe Lynskey, as though it were some act of God rather than an atrocity that Adams himself had ordered. Lynskey was ‘a gentleman’, Price told Morris. She should not have allowed him to go to his death. She should have helped him flee the country. ‘It devastated me, it still does,’ she said. ‘I should have done more.’

  ‘You do realise you’re implicating yourself?’ Morris said.

  ‘I don’t care any more,’ Price said. ‘The man’s a liar.’

  The two women had been talking for some time when Morris looked up and was startled to see a boy hovering uncertainly in the doorway. He had pale skin and dark, shaggy hair. He was the spitting image, Morris thought, of Stephen Rea. It was Danny, Dolours’s son. He was holding a telephone. ‘My aunt Marian wants to speak with you,’ he said to Morris.

  When Morris got on the phone, Marian Price was furious that she might be conducting an interview. She explained that Dolours had been receiving treatment at St Patrick’s, a mental health facility in Dublin. ‘She is not well,’ Marian said. ‘She should not be talking to people.’

  ‘Your sister’s a grown woman,’ Morris protested. But Marian was insistent.

  After leaving the house, Morris consulted with her boss and tried to think of a way to salvage the interview. The solution she ended up devising was to write a slightly anodyne version of the story and say that Dolours Price intended to confess to the Independent Commission for the Location of Victims’ Remains – because anyone who approached the commission with information would, in theory, receive immunity from prosecution. The article was published a few days later, under the headline DOLOURS PRICE’S TRAUMA OVER IRA DISAPPEARED. It said that Price had ‘vital information’ to share about the disappearances of Joe Lynskey, Seamus Wright and Kevin McKee. But it did not spell out any of the details. Morris also noted that Price had information about ‘the final days of mother-of-10 Jean McConville’. Before the article ran, Morris telephoned Price and asked if she had contacted the commission. Price lied and said that she had.

  Three days after Morris’s article was published, a Belfast tabloid called Sunday Life put out an article of its own. Under the headline GERRY ADAMS AND THE DISAPPEARED, this article featured precisely the types of details that Morris had omitted from hers, and it attributed these details to the ‘Terrorist in a Mini-Skirt Who Married a Movie Star’, Dolours Price. According to Sunday Life, Price fingered Adams directly, saying he had ‘played a key role in disappearing victims’. When Price picked up Joe Lynskey before he was killed, she did so ‘on the orders of Gerry Adams’. Price said that she had also driven Jean McConville across the border to her death. Some members of the IRA had ‘wanted Jean’s body dumped in the middle of Albert Street’. But, Price maintained, Gerry Adams ‘argued against that’, saying that doing so would be bad for the image of the Provos.

  These charges were devastating in their specificity, and dovetailed quite precisely with the account by Brendan Hughes. But there was something peculiar about the article in Sunday Life. To begin with, the author, Ciarán Barnes, did not appear to have spoken to Dolours Price himself. Instead he cited a ‘tape recorded confession’ by Price, ‘which Sunday Life has heard’. But what was this confession? Elsewhere in the article, Barnes wrote that Price ‘has made taped confessions of her role in the abductions to academics at Boston University’. Apart from the erroneous name – Boston University and Boston College are separate institutions – the implication was unmistakable: it appeared that Ciarán Barnes, a Belfast tabloid journalist, had somehow listened to the Boston College tapes of Dolours Price.

  When Ed Moloney learned about the Sunday Life story, he reacted with alarm. The article clearly intimated that Barnes had accessed the archive at Boston College. But Moloney knew that this could not be true. The recordings had been held under lock and key, in the Treasure Room at the Burns Library. What’s more, Moloney could point to another reason why Barnes could not have had access to the tapes: in her recorded interviews with Mackers, Dolours Price had never mentioned Jean McConville – because Mackers had warned her against doing so. ‘Dolours Price did not once mention the name “Jean McConville”,’ Moloney wrote in a subsequent affidavit.

  If Barnes hadn’t heard the Boston tapes, then which confession was he referring to? As they tried to fathom what had happened, Moloney and Mackers arrived at a theory. Allison Morris and Ciarán Barnes were friends and former colleagues who had worked together in the past, at the Andersonstown News. Moloney and Mackers knew about the abortive Irish News interview that had been halted by Marian Price. They concluded that, after publishing her own defanged version of the Price story, Morris must have shared the tape of her interview with her friend Barnes. In the article, Barnes wrote about hearing a ‘taped confession’ and also said that Dolours Price had made a ‘taped confession’ for the Belfast Project. The article implied that there was only one taped confession. But in fact there were two.

  Allison Morris denied sharing her interview with Barnes; Barnes would say only that he ‘would be remiss’ to talk about his sources. Gerry Adams, meanwhile, angrily contested Price’s claims, noting that she was ‘a long-standing opponent of Sinn Féin and the peace process’. Price was suffering from ‘trauma’, Adams pointed out, adding, ‘There obviously are issues she has to find closure on for herself.’ It was the same criticism Adams had levelled at Hughes, who he characterised as having ‘his issues and his difficulties’.

  If Adams had indeed been the commanding officer of both Price and Hughes, this talking point could be interpreted as surpassingly callous: both were indignant because Adams had ordered them to take brutal actions, then disowned them, claiming that they alone bore moral responsibility, because he was never in the IRA. When each finally spoke up, Adams maintained that they were lying – and, in order to discredit them, pointed to the genuine trauma they were experiencing. Adams himself seemed conspicuously undaunted by the past. So many others were tor
tured by what they had experienced in the Troubles. But he never looked as though he had lost a night’s sleep. ‘Brendan said what Brendan said,’ he told one interviewer. ‘And Brendan’s dead. So let it go.’

  26

  The Mystery Radio

  For the McConville family, the nearly simultaneous revelations of Ed Moloney’s book about Brendan Hughes and the newspaper stories about Dolours Price were painful. Both Hughes and Price had insisted that Jean was an informant, and Hughes had described in detail how she was discovered in possession of a radio. This new information appeared to reopen a matter that the McConvilles had felt was conclusively settled. In 2006, the police ombudsman for Northern Ireland, Nuala O’Loan, released a report on the death of Jean McConville. O’Loan found that the authorities had never conducted any sort of proper investigation into the abduction. But she located intelligence files from the time that recorded rumours suggesting that ‘McConville had been abducted by the Provos because she is an informer’. When she searched old military and police files, however, O’Loan was unable to locate any records that mentioned McConville prior to her disappearance – or any suggestion that she might have been working as an agent in Divis Flats. In her report, O’Loan pointed out that the United Kingdom has a policy to neither confirm nor deny whether any particular individual has served as a clandestine agent of the state. Nevertheless, she wrote, this situation was unique. ‘That family has suffered extensively because of the allegation that their mother was an informant,’ she noted, and because Jean was long since dead, no harm could come to her now. ‘She is not recorded as having been an agent at any time,’ O’Loan wrote, before concluding, more forcefully, ‘She was an innocent woman who was abducted and murdered.’

  This emphatic declaration felt like a vindication to Jean’s children, who for decades had asserted that their mother was unfairly maligned because she came to the assistance of a wounded British soldier. ‘I am glad my mother’s name was cleared,’ Michael McConville said after the report was released. ‘We knew throughout all the years, it was lies.’

  Not everyone was ready to accept O’Loan’s report as the final word, however. Even after her findings were announced, the Provos stuck to their original position, saying, in a new statement, that the IRA had conducted a ‘thorough investigation’ of its own into the circumstances surrounding McConville’s murder and had confirmed that she was ‘working as an informer for the British Army’. The statement singled out Michael McConville by name and acknowledged that he might dispute the Provos’ account, before adding, acerbically, ‘The IRA accepts he rejects this conclusion.’

  Ed Moloney and Anthony McIntyre also continued to believe that McConville had been an informant. Their confidence in the oral history of Brendan Hughes was unshakeable. To Moloney, it seemed that Nuala O’Loan, influenced by her obvious sympathy for the McConville children, simply chose to arrive at the categorical conclusion that would be most comforting for them. As a hard-nosed reporter, Moloney had an outlook that was more clinical and unsparing. In his view, the fact that O’Loan could not retrieve any records indicating that McConville was a spy hardly settled the matter. Which of the many secret archives of British military records had O’Loan consulted? She refused to specify. Perhaps there were records that she had not discovered. Had she really left no stone unturned? Mackers believed that the army or the police might have deliberately covered up Jean’s involvement. If she had been a tout, and she was warned by the IRA to stop, it would look pretty terrible for the authorities to give her another radio and send her back to work, when such a move was so likely to get her killed.

  There was also a mystery relating to the detail of the radio itself. Some former police officers, like Trevor Campbell, maintained that neither the army nor the police were using hand-held radios to communicate in those days, much less to communicate with informants. But Ed Moloney, working with a researcher who had served in the British Army, dug through old British files and found evidence of a small radio that was used by the army in Belfast in 1972. They even managed to track down a photograph of a British soldier, squatting against a wall in full battle flak, holding this type of radio – in Divis Flats.

  Soldier with a hand-held radio in Divis Flats (© Soldiers of Gloucestershire Museum)

  Even if such a radio did exist, however, it would be folly to give the device to a low-level informant who lived with a bunch of children in an intensely republican area. And what about those thin walls in Divis Flats? You couldn’t have a casual conversation over a cup of tea without the neighbours in the next flat overhearing. So making covert transmissions on a clandestine radio would pose serious risks. When Michael McConville studied the recollections of Brendan Hughes, he was struck by the fact that Hughes never said that he had personally seen the radio in question. Perhaps this was just a rumour that got passed around Belfast for long enough that over the years it became accepted as fact. Perhaps it was a story that the people who murdered Jean McConville told one another (or told themselves) in order to feel less awful about what they’d done. Michael also wrote off as ludicrous and insulting the suggestion, by Hughes, that the McConville siblings might somehow have assisted their mother in any conspiracy to spy on their neighbours.

  But there was another mystery that was compounded by the publication of the Brendan Hughes account. It involved the timeline of Jean McConville’s disappearance. In her investigation, Nuala O’Loan was not able to recover any official documents giving a precise date for the night Jean McConville disappeared. The children had always maintained that one evening in early December, Jean had gone to play bingo and had then been seized, questioned and beaten before she was discovered wandering in a daze by the army and brought home to Divis Flats. It was the following evening that she was taken away, according to the children’s memory: she was still nursing the bruises from her beating. While the children could not be absolutely certain about the date, they believed that Jean was abducted on 7 December 1972.

  This timeline would seem to contradict the story told by Brendan Hughes, who recalled McConville being questioned and having the radio seized, then returning to work as an informant and, some time later, being caught with a second radio. The story that Hughes told, which Dolours Price endorsed and the IRA officially maintained in its statements, was that Jean McConville was not just an informant but a recidivist: that she was warned to stop helping the British, and then murdered only after she defied the warning. But if McConville was questioned and warned on the night of 6 December and then abducted from her flat the following night, the timeline Hughes asserted would make no sense. Even in a scenario in which McConville’s ostensible British handlers were callous enough to put her back to work after the warning, it seems unlikely that they would do so – and even supply her with a new radio – within twenty-four hours.

  The McConville children embraced O’Loan’s report as a complete exoneration of their mother, a decades-overdue affirmation of everything they had been saying for years. But in a few significant particulars, the report was actually at odds with the family’s version of events. In her review of historical documentation, Nuala O’Loan discovered an official record that seemed to describe the night Jean was taken from the bingo hall by the IRA for questioning. According to an old police log, a woman was found wandering the streets in West Belfast one night at 11 p.m. She had been beaten. The log noted that her name was Mary McConville, but clearly this was Jean – her address was listed as St Jude’s Walk, in Divis Flats. The log stated that the woman had been ‘accosted by a number of men and warned to stop giving information to the military’.

  Setting aside the question of whether the IRA was correct or mistaken in believing Jean to be a tout, this document appeared to corroborate the claim that a warning had been issued to her. But the police log was a significant clue for another reason as well: according to the log, McConville was found wandering the streets after the beating and the warning not on the night of 6 December, as the children’s account s
uggested, but seven nights earlier, on 29 November.

  Michael McConville and his siblings were just kids in 1972. They lived in a war zone, their mother had been taken, and they were forced to steal and scavenge for food. In the midst of tumult and tragedy, nobody is consulting the calendar. And memory is a strange thing. Helen remembers that on the day after Jean was taken from the bingo hall, the younger children went to school; Michael remembers that they stayed home. It could be that the McConville siblings simply got the dates mixed up in retrospect and that Jean was actually questioned on 29 November and taken away on 30 November. But from the very first press interviews and accounts to social services that they gave beginning in January 1973, the children were emphatic that their mother was taken in early December, not late November. If the date of the abduction is accurate, and the police log that O’Loan discovered is reliable, then it would seem that more than a single night may have elapsed between the initial interrogation and warning and the moment Jean McConville was taken away. If that were the true chronology, then it would look a lot more like the timeline proposed by Brendan Hughes.

  There was one final confounding detail in O’Loan’s report. For decades, the McConville kids had talked about the night their mother came to the aid of the wounded British soldier in Divis Flats. More than one of the children could recall vivid details from that evening: the family huddled in the darkness of the flat; the staccato pop of gunfire in the concrete corridors; the soldier’s anguished moan outside the door. But when O’Loan consulted army records from the period, she could find no evidence of a British soldier being wounded in the vicinity of Divis Flats. Perhaps the records were incomplete? Or perhaps there was some mistake regarding the nature of the soldier’s injuries, or the period in the lives of the McConvilles when the episode took place. But it was tempting to wonder whether the children of Jean McConville, like the people who abducted her, had not constructed a legend around the vanished woman that they could live with.