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65 pages 2 hours read

Patrick Radden Keefe

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

Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2018

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Prologue-Part 1, Chapter 5Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Prologue-Part 1: “The Clear, Clean, Sheer Thing”

Prologue Summary: “The Treasure Room”

A short prologue reveals the opening of a murder investigation. In July 2013, Irish detectives flew to Boston, Massachusetts, to collect highly confidential and guarded files in Boston College’s John Burns Library. Though unstated in the prologue, the author quickly reveals the context: These files, stored in the titular “Treasure Room” within the library, pertained to the 1972 abduction and murder of Jean McConville, a Belfast mother and widow, during “The Troubles” in Northern Ireland.

Part 1, Chapter 1 Summary: “An Abduction”

One December night in 1972, at least eight armed and masked intruders stormed the Belfast residence of Jean McConville and her 10 children. The intrusion seemingly came out of nowhere; Jean had just gotten out of the bath, and her eldest daughter was picking up take-away food in town.

The scene was chaotic. Jean pulled on clothes as the intruders ushered her out of the apartment, “offering blunt assurances” that she would be back to the young children clinging to her limbs and crying (8).

Jean’s oldest son, Archie, negotiated to accompany his mother. The masked gang marched the pair through the dark and silent Divis Flats complex where the family lived and up to a van. Archie realized that it was neighbors, not strangers, who constituted this gang. One pulled a gun on him and directed him to turn back. Archie retreated and watched the van pull away with his mother inside. 

Part 1, Chapter 2 Summary: “Albert’s Daughters”

Chapter 2 leaves the Jean McConville anecdote to provide historical background and introduce other key figures and stories. Keefe introduces Dolours Price, a soon-to-be famous republican paramilitary soldier. The Price family had a long history of radical republican politics and violent protest. In her youth, Dolours’s father, Albert Price, told his daughter stories of his bombing missions with the Irish Republican Army (IRA) in the 1930s. The tales of subversive violence did not only come from her father; as Keefe recounts, “Everyone in the family, more or less, had been to prison” (11). Dolours’s family history familiarized and naturalized self-sacrifice for Ireland, especially by violent means.

In January 1969, student protestors carried out a march from Belfast to Derry, a distance of about 70 miles. Dolours Price and her sister, Marian, were among the protestors, participating in their family’s sacred practice of activism but opting for peaceful protest and diplomatic solutions to socio-political problems.

Tense confrontations began immediately. “Major” Ronald Bunting, the leader of Belfast’s self-identifying British Protestants, demonized the protestors and organized a counter-protest. Their tactics escalated to violent ambush as the march entered Derry via Burntollet Bridge. An organized group of men descended on the marchers and hurled “stones, bricks, milk bottles” (21). The ambush forced Dolours to reconsider her pacifist politics.

Keefe provides a longer history of colonial struggle between Ireland and Britain for context. For centuries, inhabitants of the small island resisted outsiders. Nationalist families in the twentieth century honored historic martyrs who died for independence. Revolutionary uprisings led to the 1921 partition of Ireland, denoting the island’s 26 southern counties as the Irish Free State or “Republic” and leaving six counties in the northeast, “Northern Ireland,” under British rule. A global wave of civil rights struggles ushered in new republican activism the 1960s and 70s.

Part 1, Chapter 3 Summary: “Evacuation”

Further detail about the McConville family illustrates the chaos residents felt in Northern Ireland in the 1960s. Jean was born and raised Protestant but worked as a domestic servant for a Catholic woman in Belfast and fell in love with her son, Arthur. Arthur McConville had served in the British Army, and despite his mother’s resentment, married Jean and started a family with her in the 1950s. Settling in Belfast, the family household came to include Jean’s mother, the married couple, and 10 kids: Anne, Robert, Archie, Helen, Agnes, Michael, Thomas, Susan, Billy, and Jim.

Throughout the 1960s, danger for the mixed-religion family approached as “mutual suspicion between Catholics and Protestants gradually intensified” (26). It was 1969 when “hell broke loose” in Derry at a riot known as the Battle of the Bogside (27). The riot reverberated in Belfast as groups of young Protestants pillaged Catholic neighborhoods. Catholics resisted with force, including the use of Molotov cocktails and crude homemade grenades. Soon, homemade barricades lined and divided neighborhoods, and thousands of residents became refugees driven from their homes.

The McConvilles moved from dwelling to dwelling but eventually landed in a unit on Divis Street in a complex that was plain, sterile, and altogether “dystopian” (31). The British Army entered to city to quash violent outbreaks and Catholics increasingly armed themselves in what felt like an occupied city.  

The chapter ends with the recollections of Michael “Mickey” McConville, who was only a young boy during the Troubles. He played with friends, searched for pigeons among the rubble to bring home and raise, and watched his father die of lung cancer in 1972. His memories echo elements of both normal childhood and circumstantial tragedy.

Part 1, Chapter 4 Summary: “An Underground Army”

Chapter Four returns to Dolours Price and describes her entrance into the IRA. At the onset of violence in the 1960s, the IRA exercised very little influence compared to its earlier iterations. It could offer no real protection for Catholic families and was poorly armed. As tensions mounted, revolutionaries imagined a rejuvenated organization, but fractured over visions. An old wing of the organization became the “Official IRA,” steadfast in its commitment to Marxism, while a new Provisional IRA (the “Provos”) mobilized for armed resistance in the streets. 

To Dolours, the whole Catholic sector of Belfast seemed to be mobilizing in “invigorating solidarity” (39). Dolours joined the Provos in 1971 even as she attended school at St. Mary’s Teacher Training College. Her sister also adopted the dual life of daytime studies and nighttime IRA missions.

Parents and children kept their involvement secret from each other even under the same roof. Enlistees attended secret training camps south of the border in the Republic, transported supplies, and built explosives.

Keefe offers insight into the gendered dynamics of the IRA as well. No longer required to merely join a female auxiliary wing, women volunteered for the IRA as full members in the 1970s. Occasionally, IRA women exploited their sexuality to lure British soldiers in what were called “honey traps” (45). Dolours and Marian avoided these missions, opting for the glamor and adventure of a liberated and empowered female youth culture at the center of the conflict.

This chapter, like the last, ends in 1972. In what would become one of the most incendiary events of the Troubles, British paratroopers killed over a dozen protestors and wounded another 15 at a peaceful protest on “Bloody Sunday” in January. The next month, protestors burned the British embassy building in Dublin. Britain responded by asserting direct rule in Northern Ireland. 

Part 1, Chapter 5 Summary: “St. Jude’s Walk”

This chapter provides background on the McConvilles and the events that led up to Jean’s capture, which has so far loomed in the book as a random and only loosely contextualized act of terror. Jean suffered greatly after the death of her husband, surrounded by the chaos and turbulence of warfare. She was not alone in suffering; Keefe notes that “tranquilizer use was higher in Northern Ireland than anywhere else in the United Kingdom” (52), prescribed by doctors to reduce catatonic numbness and hysteria.

Police arrested Robert, the oldest McConville son, on suspicion of being a member of the Official IRA. Jean descended into worse and worse depression, even spending time in the hospital away from her family. The rest of the family was scared, too. One night in particular, they huddled together on the floor of their flat as a gun battle exploded outside of their door. When the firing ceased, a man called for help. Jean McConville went outside to comfort the man, a wounded and dying British soldier. Someone saw, and the family found the words “BRIT LOVER” painted on their door the following morning (52).

Jean was captured, questioned, beaten, and then released one night while she was out to play bingo at a social club in town. It was, in the memories of her children, the night before her abduction.

Prologue-Part 1, Chapter 5 Analysis

The book’s early chapters introduce many of the key figures, places, and concepts at stake in the history of the Troubles in Northern Ireland during the 1960s and 1970s. Keefe details the ideological landscape of yet another generation of Irish republicanism. There was certainly a religious context for the violence, though to write off the conflict as an entirely religious struggle oversimplifies much of the ideological complexity. When we first meet Dolours, she was a participant in student circles that understood discrimination and exclusion in Northern Ireland to be a systemic byproduct of empire and industrial capitalism rather than the popularly expressed Catholic vs. Protestant divide. Amidst a global wave of civil rights and independence movements, such as the activism of Martin Luther King, Jr. in the United States and Che Guevara in Central and South America, young Irish republicans envisioned an entirely new Ireland freed from all forms of British oppression. At several moments, we see hopes for peaceful resolution die. For Dolours, the attack at Burntollet Bridge made her realize that she could not reason with blind, historically rooted hatred. Bloody Sunday was another reminder that peaceful protest would be met with organized, lethal State violence. 

As the situation became violent, commentators certainly did employ religious stereotypes and anxieties to articulate and escalate the social unrest. In bigoted speeches, Protestant leaders who organized the attack on the student demonstrators in 1969 spread fears of Catholic savagery and uprising. Catholics sensed double standards and bias in their treatment at the hands of police forces in Northern Ireland (called the Royal Ulster Constabulary, or “RUC”) and from visiting British soldiers who favored the Protestant majority and, at best, largely ignored attacks on Catholics.

Accounts of police brutality highlight the contentious role of the state in the social upheaval. To combat the perceived favoritism of British and Northern Irish armed forces, largely Catholic paramilitary resistance reemerged from the ashes of the old IRA and galvanized neighborhoods most effected by the “civil disturbance” that “felt like a war” (34). The Provos retained ties to their counterparts in the Republic, and we get a sense that activism and protest south of the border influenced politics in the North (such as the burning of the British Embassy).  

We see the violence play out in gray, rubble-strewn cities that sheltered secrets and guerilla violence. Keefe brings individual neighborhoods into sharp relief, like the Divis Flats from which Jean McConville disappeared, a place that housed thousands of displaced city residents but lacked grass and playgrounds. Keefe gives us some numbers to help illustrate the scale of the conflict. Out of about 350,000 Belfast residents, 10% would ultimately be displaced by violence (28). While the first two years of violence logged 19 and 29 casualties, respectively, the number skyrocketed to almost 200 in 1971 and almost 500 in 1972 (32). Keefe stresses that Ireland is a small island; these numbers are alarming.

In this early section, Keefe alternates chapters between the McConville family story and the Dolours Price/IRA story. This approach allows the author to transmit the personal pain of the tragedy for civilians alongside the structural conflict orchestrated by political and social institutions. We also see the way in which the civilian and paramilitary spheres are connected. Michael McConville was imprisoned on suspicion of IRA involvement. Archie was beaten to the point of broken bones for not joining the Provos (54). In following the McConville experience, Keefe introduces the importance of memory, which as the title suggests, will be a key part of the book’s historical analysis. In recounting memories from Archie and Michael McConville, we glimpse the catastrophe through the eyes of children who reckon with death and destruction but do not altogether cease being kids. They are observers of, and victims to, the strife. We also hear opinions and reflections from Dolours Price, who, as a politically minded and well-connected young adult, made decisions and acted in ways that could actually shape the conflict. 

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