SAY NOTHING
A TRUE STORY OF MURDER AND MEMORY IN NORTHERN IRELAND
PATRICK RADDEN KEEFE
Wm Collins, 520pp, £20
‘I can’t praise this book enough,’ Melanie Reid wrote in the Times; ‘it’s erudite, accessible, compelling, enlightening. I thought I was bored by Northern Ireland’s past until I read it.’
Reid believed the author’s ‘great achievement’ was to describe the conflict through personal stories. Jean Mcconville, a 38-year-old Catholic widow and mother of ten, was dragged from her home one night in December 1972. Shot in the head, she became one of the ‘disappeared’ – secretly murdered by the IRA but whose fates were never acknowledged. Until her bones were uncovered on a beach in the Irish Republic 32 years later. The children ended up in care, where they were abused, ‘their entire lives blighted by an act of extraordinary cruelty’.
‘Interwoven with the family tragedy are the stories of the killers, the unnervingly human agents behind the mayhem,’ Reid continued. Dolours Price eventually admitted her part in driving Mcconville to her death, and the author’s ‘extraordinary detective work also leads him to name Marian Price as the person who shot Mcconville.’ She denies it. Gerry Adams denies being involved, but Keefe says that he doesn’t ‘take Adams’s denials very seriously’.
‘What happened to Mcconville and the quest to find out who was responsible makes this remarkable book a gripping piece of non fiction,’ Tony Harnden wrote in the Sunday
Times. ‘This is an achievement in itself, but Say Nothing – breathtaking in its scope and ambition – is much more than that... [he] has produced a searing examination of the nature of truth in war and the toll taken by violence and deceit. The result is a lyrically written work that will take its place alongside the best of the books about the Troubles.’