Say Nothing

by Patrick Radden Keefe

  ‘We cannot keep pretending forty years of cruel war, of loss, of sacrifice, of prison, of inhumanity, has not affected each and every one of us in heart and soul and spirit,’ Price’s old friend Bernadette Devlin, who had led the student protests in the 1960s, said when the mourners reached the grave. ‘It broke our hearts and it broke our bodies. It changed our perspectives, and it makes every day hard.’

  The other graveside oration was delivered by Eamonn McCann. He spoke of Price’s contradictions and said that he had loved her for forty years. ‘If Dolours had a big fault, it was perhaps that she lived out too urgently the ideals to which so many others also purported to be dedicated,’ McCann said. ‘She was a liberator but never managed to liberate herself from those ideas.’ The mourners huddled under their umbrellas as the rain pounded the sodden ground. ‘Sometimes,’ McCann said, ‘we are imprisoned within ideals.’

  When the coroner asked Danny Rea if his mother had ever talked about killing herself, he replied that she had expressed no direct intention but had commented on ‘the self-destructive nature of her condition’. The coroner ruled out suicide. There was no letter or note. But Carrie Twomey, who was close to Price in her final years, believed that she had effectively taken her own life. ‘Brendan, too,’ Twomey said, speaking of Hughes. ‘They committed suicide for years.’

  ‘The body is a fantastic machine,’ Hughes told Mackers in one of his Boston College interviews, recounting the gruelling sequence of a hunger strike. ‘It’ll eat off all the fat tissue first, then it starts eating away at the muscle, to keep your brain alive.’ Long after Hughes and Price called an end to their strikes and attempted to reintegrate into society, they nursed old grudges and endlessly replayed their worst wartime abominations. In a sense, they never stopped devouring themselves. The official pronouncement in the coroner’s report for Dolours Price was ‘death by misadventure’.

  When the graveside orations were finished, the mourners fell silent and there was only the thrum of the driving rain and the distant buzz of a police helicopter hovering in the grey sky overhead. Before the coffin was lowered into the earth, someone retrieved the flag of Ireland, folded the bright rain-soaked fabric, and handed it to Price’s sons.

  29

  This Is the Past

  In the autumn of 2015, Theresa Villiers, the secretary of state for Northern Ireland, released a report about paramilitary activity, which had been produced by the PSNI and British intelligence. ‘All the main paramilitary groups operating during the period of the Troubles remain in existence,’ the report announced, specifying that this included the Provisional IRA. The Provos continued to function, albeit in ‘much reduced form’, and still had access to weapons. Big Bobby Storey was right: they hadn’t gone away.

  Gerry Adams dismissed the report as ‘nonsense’. But it caused a firestorm. One claim Villiers made was that, in the view of rank-and-file Provos, the IRA’s Army Council – the seven-member leadership body that for decades directed the armed struggle – continued to control not just the IRA, but also Sinn Féin, ‘with an overarching strategy’. Secretly, behind the scenes, the army was still calling the shots. The report was careful to indicate that the organisation was no longer engaged in violence, and now had a ‘wholly political focus’. Even so, as one columnist in the Irish Times suggested, it seemed to reinforce ‘the notion of men and women in balaclavas running the political show’.

  Nearly two decades had passed since the Good Friday Agreement, and Northern Ireland was now peaceful, apart from the occasional dissident attack. Yet the society seemed as divided as ever. The borders between Catholic and Protestant neighbourhoods were still inscribed in the concertina wire and steel of the so-called peace walls that vein the city, like fissures in a block of marble. In fact, there were more peace walls now than there had ever been at the height of the Troubles. These towering structures maintained some degree of calm by physically separating the city’s populations, as if they were animals in a zoo. But the walls were still tagged with runelike slurs – K.A.T., for ‘Kill all Taigs,’ a derogatory term for Catholics, on one side; K.A.H., for ‘Kill all Huns,’ a reference to Protestants, on the other.

  The centre of Belfast seemed bustling, almost cosmopolitan. It was dominated by the same chain stores – Waterstones, Caffè Nero, Kiehl’s – that you would find in any prosperous British city. The local film production facility, Titanic Studios, had become famous as the place where the television show Game of Thrones was filmed. There was even a popular tourist attraction, the Troubles Tour, in which ex-combatant taxi drivers guided visitors to flashpoints from the bad years, decoding the ubiquitous murals that conjured famous battles, martyrs and gunmen. The effect was to make the Troubles seem like distant history.

  But the truth was that most residents still lived in neighbourhoods circumscribed by religion, and more than 90 per cent of children in Northern Ireland continued to attend segregated primary schools. Bus stops in some parts of Belfast were informally designated Catholic or Protestant, and people would walk an extra block or two to wait at a stop where they wouldn’t fear being hassled. Hundreds of Union Jacks still fluttered in Protestant neighbourhoods, while Catholic areas were often decked out with the tricolour, or with Palestinian flags – a gesture of solidarity but also a signal that, even now, many republicans in the North regarded themselves as an occupied people. For a time, the American diplomat Richard Haass chaired a series of multiparty negotiations about unresolved issues in the peace process. But the talks foundered, in no small measure, over the issue of flags. Tribalism and its trappings remained so potent in Belfast that the various sides could not agree on how to govern the display of regalia. When the Belfast City Council voted, in 2012, to limit the number of days that the Union Jack could be raised above City Hall, protesters tried to storm the building, and riots erupted throughout the city, with unionist demonstrators throwing bricks and petrol bombs.

  In light of this ongoing discord, the Villiers report made one fascinating observation. ‘The existence and cohesion of these paramilitary groups since their ceasefires has played an important role in enabling the transition from extreme violence to political progress,’ it asserted. This was a counter-intuitive finding, and a subtle enough point that it was overlooked in the storm of press coverage that greeted the report. The continued existence of republican and loyalist outfits didn’t hurt the peace process – it helped it. It was because of the ‘authority’ conferred by these persisting hierarchies that such groups were able to ‘influence, restrain and manage’ their members, the report maintained, noting that there had been only ‘limited indications of dissent to date’, which were quickly dealt with ‘by the leadership’.

  To Brendan Hughes or Dolours Price or Marian Price or Anthony McIntyre, Sinn Féin’s tendency to brook no opposition seemed self-interested, illiberal and cruel. But perhaps, as the Villiers report appeared to suggest, it was only through such ruthless discipline – and the insistence that Irish republicanism must be a monolith, with zero tolerance for outliers – that Adams and the people around him had managed to keep the lid on a combustible situation, and prevent the war from reigniting.

  At around the time the Villiers report was released, prosecutors in Belfast announced that they intended to try Ivor Bell in connection with the murder of Jean McConville. ‘A decision has now been taken to prosecute this defendant,’ a government lawyer said. Bell was nearly eighty years old, a stooped figure, dressed in a cardigan, with a snow-white moustache and the wispy eyebrows of an ageing wizard. He had trouble climbing the courthouse stairs. But this development looked as though it could signal a dangerous turn for Gerry Adams, who had been arrested and released but not yet charged. If Bell was tried for ‘aiding and abetting’ the murder of Jean McConville, then presumably the testimony would touch on who it was that actually ordered the murder, and who carried it out. Some other loyal Sinn Féin functionary, like Bobby Storey, might be willing to go to jail to protect the boss, but Bell was anything
but loyal to Adams.

  In the early years of the Troubles, Bell and Adams were allies. They worked intimately together on the Belfast Brigade and did time together at Long Kesh. It was Bell who’d insisted that the 1972 peace talks could happen only if Adams was released from prison, and it was Bell who’d made the trip to London with him. Bell was a great proponent of physical force and had served as the IRA’s ‘ambassador’ to Muammar Qaddafi’s Libya, procuring huge shipments of heavy weaponry from the pariah state. By the mid-1980s, he had risen to become chief of staff of the IRA. But after Sinn Féin embraced an electoral approach during the hunger strike of Bobby Sands and started running other candidates for office, Bell grew concerned that resources and attention were being diverted from the armed struggle in order to campaign for seats. Too much ballot box, not enough Armalite. Eventually, Bell and some allies grew so dubious about this strategy that they plotted to overthrow Gerry Adams. But word of this defection reached Adams, and he moved swiftly, court-martialling Bell for treachery – a charge that could lead to a death sentence. Bell was found guilty, but when it came to the penalty, Adams stepped in – out of loyalty to his old friend, perhaps, or out of consideration for the politics of such a move – and spared his life. So Bell retreated from the movement, with a possible death sentence still hanging over his head, and lived a quiet life in West Belfast. He had refused, ever since, to speak to journalists about his experiences in the IRA. When Big Bobby Storey made the rounds during the 1990s, asking former Provos what they knew about the Jean McConville case, Bell was unhelpful. ‘Go and ask Gerry,’ he said, offering Storey the same line that Dolours Price had. ‘He’s the man.’

  In fact, there was only one context in which Bell had been willing to go on the record and recount the story of his IRA career: an oral history for the Belfast Project, with Anthony McIntyre. In court, a prosecutor suggested that an individual who had participated in the project, who was referred to only as ‘Z’, had acknowledged, in the Boston tapes, playing a role in the McConville murder. (The charges against Bell were eventually changed from ‘aiding and abetting’ to ‘soliciting’ the murder.)

  But Bell’s legal representative, a prominent Belfast lawyer named Peter Corrigan, argued that the Boston tapes were ‘totally inadmissible’. The oral history archive was ‘an intellectual, academic project, but was riddled with inaccuracies’, Corrigan contended, and because it was so ‘unreliable and subjective’, it did not match the rigorous standards required for evidence in a criminal case. In any event, Corrigan said, his client hadn’t even been in Belfast during the period in 1972 when McConville was abducted, and he could present an alibi to prove it.

  Such arguments were secondary, however, to the more audacious central thrust of Bell’s defence: he wasn’t Z. When Mackers was doing his interviews for the Belfast Project, he would never append the actual name of the interview subject to the recordings and transcripts, just the alphabet code name. The real identity of each individual was contained in a separate form. These forms were the only documents that translated the code names to real names. Because they were so sensitive, they had not been sent electronically, but rather were hand-delivered to Bob O’Neill, the director of the Burns Library. It now emerged, however, that in the intervening years, Boston College had lost some of the forms – including the form for Z. The prosecutors could produce no piece of paper that proved that the interviewee named Z was really Ivor Bell. Of course, Ed Moloney and Anthony McIntyre knew exactly who Z was. But they let it be known that they had zero intention of cooperating with the court. This is ‘a one issue case’, Peter Corrigan said. ‘Is the person on the tape Ivor Bell? And that cannot be proven.’

  Taken aback, perhaps, by this bold gambit, the prosecutors announced that they intended to summon a voice analyst. Experts in ‘forensic phonetics’ occasionally testify in court, and they compare not just the tone and frequency of voices, but the lexicon, the syntax and the use of characteristic filler words like ‘um’ and ‘ah’. There was a sense, though, in which Bell saying that he wasn’t Z was a bit like Gerry Adams saying he wasn’t in the IRA: it was a pretence that turned into a farce. Most of the Belfast Project participants spoke to Mackers for hours on end, and in his solicitous, collegial manner, Mackers often slipped, and addressed them by their first names. So the Z recording more than likely included instances in which Mackers referred to Z as Ivor. Besides, the context of the rest of Bell’s interview would make it impossible to deny that he was Z: how many IRA men accompanied Adams to the peace talks in 1972, served as ambassador to Libya, then became chief of staff, before being court-martialled for treachery?

  The voice analyst ended up testifying that Z was ‘likely’ Ivor Bell. But Corrigan said that, even if the government could prove that his client was Z, Bell was still innocent of the charges. If you listen to the recording itself, Corrigan suggested, ‘Z explicitly states that he was not involved with the murder of Jean McConville.’ A PSNI detective who had also heard the interview disagreed, saying that Z did acknowledge playing ‘a critical role in the aiding, abetting, counsel and procurement of the murder’.

  If the case was going to focus on the abetting, the question remained: abetting whom? Brendan Hughes and Dolours Price were both steadfast in their assertion that it was Adams who ordered the murder. But Adams, now, seemed safe from prosecution. After he was questioned by the PSNI, his file had been forwarded to the prosecution service. But the director of public prosecutions, a man named Barra McGrory, had to recuse himself from the case, because his father, who was also a lawyer, had previously represented Adams. This sort of potential conflict of interest was everywhere in Northern Ireland. The PSNI official who signed off on the decision to arrest Adams was a man named Drew Harris. His father had been murdered by the IRA. After prosecutors listened to the Boston tapes, however, they concluded that the evidence against Adams amounted to uncorroborated allegations, which would not be a successful basis for prosecution. If indeed Adams had ordered the execution of Jean McConville, then, with this ruling, he had officially got away with murder. It appeared that an oral history in which one implicated oneself could be used to prosecute, whereas an oral history in which one implicated others could not. Ivor Bell would have done better to heed the credo that Adams had so resolutely clung to since his youth: Never say anything. It might have saved him.

  Who should be held accountable for a shared history of violence? It was a question that was dogging Northern Ireland as a whole. ‘My client is entitled to be treated equally before the law,’ Peter Corrigan said of Ivor Bell. Would the British soldiers who shot unarmed civilians on Bloody Sunday be subjected to the same justice? he asked. ‘Why is everybody not being treated equally for conflict-related offences?’ Because there was never any mechanism established for dealing with the past, the official approach to decades-old atrocities was entirely ad hoc, which left everyone unhappy. There were inquests and investigations by the police ombudsman and special government inquiries. The past was big business for criminal justice. Every day, the Belfast papers carried reports of some new cold case that would now be re-examined. The PSNI had a ‘legacy’ unit devoted exclusively to investigating Troubles-related crimes. It had a backlog of nearly a thousand cases.

  Even if one took for granted the good faith and intentions of the police – which many didn’t – there was no way to undertake such a project without being accused of bias. The authorities had limited resources. Budgets were being slashed. And the police had to continue actually policing Northern Ireland in the present day. For the detectives in the legacy unit, it could seem, at times, as though they were living out a scenario from The Twilight Zone: in your life outside work, the year is 2018, but on the job it is always 1973, or 1989, or some other bloody moment from the distant past. The head of the team was a Catholic named Mark Hamilton, the son of one of the few Catholic officers in the old RUC. By the time Hamilton joined the department in 1994, the peace process was already under way. He was a ‘ceasefire c
op’, he liked to say. He just wanted to be a regular police officer; he didn’t want to spend his career relitigating the Troubles.

  Sometimes Hamilton would go to public hearings about one long-ago bloodbath or another and, as the representative of the police, he would dutifully play the role of whipping boy. Grieving families would express their frustration, having suffered for decades without answers. They did not trust the authorities, and felt they had good reason not to. Sometimes they would shout abuse at him. Usually Hamilton just took it. This was part of the job, and he felt tremendous empathy for victims whose lives had been upended by violence. But occasionally, he would protest. ‘When this crime happened, I was a baby. I was in nappies,’ he would say. ‘I am not the enemy here.’

  Sometimes, historical investigations were so big or so sensitive that they were taken out of the department altogether. In 2016, a new investigation into Stakeknife was launched. Led by Jon Boutcher, the chief constable of Bedfordshire, it would involve fifty detectives working for up to five years, with a budget that might exceed thirty million pounds. ‘With both the passage of time and the very nature of these crimes, the truth will be a difficult and elusive prey,’ Boutcher acknowledged.

  There was reason to believe that neither Freddie Scappaticci nor his British handlers would ever be tried for the dozens of murders on which they have been alleged to have colluded. Scappaticci was still in hiding, reportedly living under an assumed name, in a witness protection programme administered by the very government that now claimed to be investigating him. But in January 2018, he was picked up by the British police. ‘A seventy-two-year-old man has been arrested,’ Boutcher said in a carefully worded statement. ‘He is currently in custody at an undisclosed location.’ Scappaticci was released without charges after several days of questioning. It seemed unlikely that British authorities would ever really get to the bottom of the Stakeknife conspiracy, because to do so would thoroughly implicate the British state.