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

Keefe returns to the question of Jean McConville’s role in British intelligence. The police issued a report in 2006 that denied any record of McConville acting as an informant. Voices from the Grave and Dolours’s interviews, however, once again circulated the rumor. Contradictions abounded. Police officers, including Campbell, denied the use of handheld radios within the force at the time of McConville’s disappearance. A 1972 photograph, however, clearly depicted a British soldier using one within Divis Flats.

The subjectivity of memory becomes apparent as Keefe discusses uncertainty in the timeline of the disappearance. The IRA, Price, and Hughes maintained a story in which Jean McConville confessed and went home to repeat her crime. The children recalled their mother’s detainment while out at bingo being only one night before her abduction—this version left no opportunity for her to acquire a second radio and be rediscovered. Police records placed this first incident in late November, while the children remembered it being December. They continued to attribute her disappearance to the humanity Jean had shown an injured British soldier. Police records, however, bore no account of an injured soldier in Divis Flats.

Needing more information to establish the true sequence and nature of events, the PSNI, along with the U.S. Department of Justice, subpoenaed Boston College for the Price and Hughes tapes within their collection.

The state-sanctioned request for tapes induced panic among the Belfast Project’s interviewers, it’s director, Boston College administration, and library/archive staff. Moloney and Mackers argued that “nothing less than the principles of free speech and academic freedom” protected the secrecy of the tapes of living interviewees (299). Moloney and others suspected that authorities were insistent on receiving the tapes because they anticipated finding evidence against Adams as an IRA conspirator in a murder plot. The Belfast Project team had not taken the proper legal action to ensure protection for participants.

Boston College turned over the Hughes tapes first. A few months later, the college responded to a second subpoena and (after a court review), forfeited any and all tapes and transcripts that referenced Jean McConville. A judge reviewed the transcripts and ordered the release of five tapes. This batch included a recorded interview with Price, but it was not the one McIntyre had conducted; It was a separate (and secret) interview conducted by Moloney, merely housed with the Belfast Project tapes. It was this tape to which the Irish tabloid had alluded.

In conversations with Moloney, Dolours relayed her account of the McConville disappearance. Dolours confessed to delivering McConville to Dundalk, an IRA stronghold in the Republic, and leaving. Then, apparently, her superiors ordered her back, along with two other Unknowns, to carry out the execution instead of the originally tasked executioners. Dolours speculated that the squeamishness “was because McConville was a woman” (308). Someone gave orders for each of the Unknowns to shoot McConville. Dolours claimed that she missed on purpose, but watched the woman die at the hand of a companion. Insisting that she was disturbed even at the time, Dolours again blamed Adams for the decision and decried his public denial.  

After the release of all the tapes, the PSNI arrested Adams in 2014, “in relation to the abduction and murder, forty-one years earlier, of Jean McConville” (309). 

In 2009, a “dissident group” calling themselves the Real IRA claimed responsibility for the murder of two British soldiers at military barracks in Northern Ireland (310). An investigation linked Marian Price, nearly 60-years-old, to the mission. Authorities held her in prison for the next two years. Such aggressive rebukes to the Good Friday Agreement were rare in the generation of IRA that had sustained the warfare of the height of the Troubles, but younger splinter groups still issued violent orders.

Police investigators questioned McConville’s Divis Flats neighbors but released them. They charged Bell, who had, according to Hughes, expressed a desire not to disappear McConville but to publicize her corpse, with IRA membership and aiding and abetting murder.

In his own voluntary arrest and questioning, Adams maintained his innocence. He denounced Hughes and Price on the grounds that they were bitter and lying about the past. Keefe notes that, “Adams had excelled at the fraught art of willful denial” (315), strategically covering up and publicizing family secrets for convenience and well-timed sympathy. He maintained that he had never joined the IRA, and therefore could not have acted as the Belfast brigade commander, or approved McConville’s murder.

Adams’s supporters in Sinn Féin mobilized to safeguard his image as a peacemaker in light of his arrest. A close party member and known IRA man bellowed a thinly veiled threat to anyone that sought to tarnish Adams’s image. Republican rage targeted McIntyre and Belfast Project interviewees, invoking the loaded term “touts” to characterize them.

Keefe announces abruptly that Dolours Price was unaffected by the threats because she “was already dead” (321). Her substance abuse ultimately claimed her life in January 2013. The chapter ends with a scene from her funeral in which old friends eulogize her and reflect on the trauma wrought by the Troubles.

The chapter opens in the Belfast of 2015: a city fissured by cage-like “peace walls” separating religious working-class communities from one another, but with a “cosmopolitan” and “prosperous” downtown (325). An official state report published that year concluded that not only were the active paramilitary groups of the Troubles still functional, but they also had access to weapons. The report also linked the enduring leadership of the Provos to the leadership of Sinn Féin. It concluded, however, that “the continued existence of republican and loyalist outfits didn’t hurt the peace process—but helped it” (325-326). The paramilitary infrastructure controlled a politically volatile situation by organizing and restraining members.

The chapter then returns to the case of McConville’s murder. The Bell trial lasted long enough that the court eventually excused him from participation on the grounds that his mind was failing in old age. Billy McConville died in 2017. He died before the state or anyone else could definitively hold someone accountable for his mother’s fate.

Keefe raises one of the most essential questions in the book: “Who should be held accountable for a shared history of violence?” (329). The government had not established a routine way to address and reconcile old atrocities. Part of the problem was unavoidable bias. State entities carried out investigations and trials, and yet people distrusted state authorities that favored certain groups and targeted others for the past half-century. Some people turned to civil suits with private lawyers. Helen McConville met with a law firm to discuss the possibility of filing a civil suit against Adams (though as of the book’s publication, she had not decided to follow through on the idea).

The Belfast Project fiasco disrupted the ongoing search for bodies by dissuading people who might have information from sharing it. Everyone could see that the consequences for recounting the past might land a person in court. Despite this challenge, the Independent Commission for the Location of Victims’ Remains continued to uncover bodies, including those of the triple agents, Wright and McKee.

Keefe gives the final word to Michael McConville, who proclaimed that his family would continue their fight for justice just as they had for the previous 40 years.

For the first time, Keefe employs a first-person narrative in the chapter and becomes an actor in the story he’s telling. He concluded during his painstaking book research that the person who actually pulled the trigger and killed Jean McConville was Marian Price. This argument is based on circumstantial evidence, and no one who knew the truth would confirm Keefe’s theory. Dolours Price and Moloney had, in their interview, concealed the identity of one of the Unknowns who Dolours accompanied to McConville’s execution on the grounds that the person was still alive. Keefe holds that the unnamed person was likely Marian Price, but the state (in possession of potentially condemning interview tapes) has never charged Marian because the testimony would likely be dismissed. All throughout the trials following the troubles, it seemed that a person could only implicate themselves, and not another person, in their oral interviews. An anonymous figure (Keefe knows this person’s identity but does not share it) even confirmed his theory, but Marian Price and her family would not talk to Keefe when he reached out.

Keefe ties up loose ends as much as is possible for an ongoing story. Adams retired from politics in 2017 after yet again recreating his image, this time as a “twinkle-eyed celebrity grandfather—an iconic but approachable grandee” (345). Keefe references Adams’s whimsical Twitter presence but suspects that the account reflects a deeper giddiness of unlikely survival and success.

Keefe then discusses the 2016 “Brexit” referendum, wherein British citizens voted to leave the European Union. Keefe explains that this restructuring of British affiliations and loyalties has the potential to “force Northern Ireland to make a choice” about new borders (347). He even concludes that a united Ireland might be inevitable in light of these political developments and changing demography in Northern Ireland.

Michael McConville again occupies the last scene in the chapter (in this case, the book). He continued to live in Belfast and raise pigeons, just as he had in his youth. He took solace in their both their simplicity and their sophistication: they can endure great physical trials in long-distance flight, but they return home and recover. Keefe does not digest the pigeon metaphor for the reader, but we have, by book’s end, witnessed the complicated concept of home in a place like wartime Belfast. The McConvilles continue to regroup and assemble when there is a significant family update, but, by the end of the book’s timeline, they were still waiting to learn what really set in motion the invasion of their home and its lifelong implications.