Say Nothing

The historian Alvin Jackson has written that, for Adams, democratic action ‘was a way of liquidating the otherwise unrecoverable political capital amassed by the gunmen’.

In one of his conversations with Anthony McIntyre, Brendan Hughes said something similar, in the form of a metaphor. Think of the armed struggle as the launch of a boat, Hughes said, ‘getting a hundred people to push this boat out. This boat is stuck in the sand, right, and get them to push the boat out and then the boat sailing off and leaving the hundred people behind, right. That’s the way I feel. The boat is away, sailing on the high seas, with all the luxuries that it brings, and the poor people that launched the boat are left sitting in the muck and the dirt and the shit and the sand, behind.’

One theme that I had become fascinated with as a journalist was collective denial: the stories that communities tell themselves in order to cope with tragic or transgressive events. I became intrigued by the idea that an archive of the personal reminiscences of ex-combatants might be so explosive: what was it about these accounts that was so threatening in the present day? In the intertwining lives of Jean McConville, Dolours Price, Brendan Hughes and Gerry Adams, I saw an opportunity to tell a story about how people become radicalised in their uncompromising devotion to a cause, and about how individuals – and a whole society – make sense of political violence once they have passed through the crucible and finally have time to reflect.

Anthony McIntyre was also harshly critical of the effort to prosecute Rea. How will the truth of what really happened during the Troubles ever come out, he asked, if the authorities file murder charges against anyone who has the nerve to talk about it? ‘I would describe the PSNI stance as one of prosecuting truth, rather than procuring truth,’ he said in an interview.

The anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss once observed that, ‘for the majority of the human species, and for tens of thousands of years, the idea that humanity includes every human being on the face of the earth does not exist at all. The designation stops at the border of each tribe, or linguistic group, sometimes even at the edge of a village.’

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.

‘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.

‘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.’

They had only one gun, and they worried about their consciences and decided that they would each take a shot, so that they could never say for certain who it was that dealt the killing blow. This is an old trick used by firing squads – one of the gunmen’s rifles will be loaded with a blank so that afterwards, each of the shooters can tell himself that he might not have been the one to take a life

The Irish landscape is dominated by peat bogs, and the anaerobic and acidic conditions in the densely packed earth mean that the past in Ireland is occasionally subject to macabre resurrection. Peat cutters sometimes churn up ancient mandibles, clavicles, or entire cadavers that have been preserved for millennia. The bodies, which in some cases date back to before the Bronze Age, often show signs of ritual sacrifice and violent death.

When an American graduate student named Tara Keenan visited her in 2003, Price said, ‘I would like to think that what I did was to illustrate to the world the ability of any regular human being to push themselves to the limits and beyond, physically and mentally, because of some deeply felt belief.’ She spoke as if she had been some kind of endurance athlete rather than a paramilitary. ‘An ordinary person was able to react in a kind of extraordinary way,’ she continued. ‘It’s like a woman who can lift cars off her children. None of us know the limits of our ability.’