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Patrick Radden Keefe’s
Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder & Memory in Northern Ireland [2019]
Journalist Keefe is on a roll. Following Say Nothing, he wrote in 2022 Empire of Pain, an exemplar of excellent muckraking, wherein he investigated Big Pharma, the marketing of Oxycontin and the Sackler Family. In the same year he published Rogues: True Stories of Grifters, Killers, and Crooks; and, in the same spirit, he just published a long account of Larry Gagosian and his domination of the world art market [“Money on the Wall,” New Yorker, July 31, 2023]. I was so impressed by Empire of Pain I wanted to read his account of the murder of Jean McConville by the Provisional Irish Republican Army [IRA] in 1972. Disclosure: I had a dog in the fight, my maternal line was Irish American and over many generations hated British rule. And, for better or worse, I inherited that legacy.
Say Nothing, contains a complex interweaving of different lives, generations and communities in the north of Ireland in the time of The Troubles. We meet politicians, nationalists, loyalists, neighbors, informants and gunmen; victims, journalists, historians and archivists. Keefe has a keen ear and muscular prose, as he guides us from the ‘disappearance’ of McConville to the generations-deep anti-colonial indignation of the IRA soldiers Dolours and Marian Price, to the valor of Brendan Hughes, a street-fighter in Belfast and, beyond that, to the craftiness of Gerry Adams as he navigates from the IRA to Sinn Féin, from warrior to politician. We learn of British counter-insurgent General Frank Kitson as he implements terrorist “anti-terror” tactics in the north of Ireland, and we meet Kitson’s troops, informants, and agent provocateurs. In this morass of agendas, of cycles of repression and resistance, and continued imperial tenacity, Keefe’s equanimity and compassion is remarkable.
But only to a degree. The central villains of the piece are the Price women, Gerry Adams, a few Provisional IRA bombers, and gunmen, on one hand, and Brigadier Kitson and his murderous provocateurs on the other. In the middle are the victims, Jean McConnville and her 10 orphaned children. Add a lonely priest, well intended journalists straddling the borderlands, and trepid and timid Boston College academics who leak their oral history archive of The Troubles to British intelligence. Add these up and you’ve got a tremendous story. But there is a problem to Keefe’s equivalency: Insufficient weight is given to the weight of British occupation of Ireland from the late twelfth century, to the Cromwellian slaughters of the Irish, to Britain’s cruel rule during the Great Famine, to the murderous policies in the wake of the Easter Rebellion and, after the birth of the Irish Republic, to the continued brutal rule by British and Northern Irish Protestants and their coercive use of police, military, and civilian terror to keep possession of the Six Counties. Alas, Keefe’s recent books seem more and more interested in villainy, rogues, and less and less about the solidarity of their victims. His book on Ireland is good but I think, in this regard, stands unbalanced.
https://www.c-span.org/video/?458428-1/say-nothing
By Louis Segal. Louis was born in Oakland, raised his family in Oakland, dropped out of school in 1968, worked many jobs over the decades, dropped back into school in the 80s, got a Ph.D. in history, taught as an adjunct professor from 1993 to 2015. Retired but not withdrawn.
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