Second paragraph of third chapter:

She was born Jean Murray, in 1934, to Thomas and May Murray, a Protestant couple in East Belfast. Belfast was a sooty, grey city of chimneys and steeples, flanked by a flat green mountain on one side and the Belfast Lough, an inlet of the North Channel, on the other. It had linen mills and tobacco factories, a deepwater harbour where ships were built, and row upon row of identical brick workers’ houses. The Murrays lived on Avoniel Road, not far from the Harland & Wolff shipyard, where the Titanic had been built. Jean’s father worked at Harland & Wolff. Every morning when she was a child, he would join the thousands of men plodding past her house on their way to the shipyard, and every evening he would return as the procession of men plodded home in the opposite direction. When the Second World War broke out, Belfast’s linen factor produced millions of uniforms and the shipyards churned out navy vessels. Then, one night in 1941, not long before Jean’s seventh birthday, air raid sirens wailed as a formation of Luftwaffe bombers streaked across the waterfront, scattering parachute mines and incendiary bombs, and Harland & Wolff erupted into flame.

This is a tremendous book about one particular aspect of the Northern Ireland conflict, tracking two intertwined stories through the decades: first, the history of sisters and IRA members Dolours and Marian Price, and second the mystery of Jean McConville née Murray, who was abducted and murdered by the IRA in 1972. Keefe has interviewed, and read interviews with, many of the surviving protagonists, and of course the story was made into a major Disney+ TV drama. It’s a chilling narrative of violence and death, sometimes political and sometimes just thuggery.

It is a book that has evoked sharp reactions. One person on social media responded to my note that I had read the book by fuming that it was “IRA propaganda. Complete bullshit”, though he later admitted that he had not actually read it himself. On the other hand, mainstream Republicans find both book and series sensationalist and unduly hostile to Gerry Adams. (Links are to two separate reviews by Tim O’Grady on Danny Morrison’s blog.)

By telling one particular set of stories, others are not told. Of course, everyone must write the book that they want to write; but the fact is that Northern Ireland is a lot wider than the dynamics of Republican West Belfast, and the experiences of the Prices and McConvilles, awful as they were, are representative of a part of society but not the whole. Keefe does make the occasional effort to acknowledge this, but I think a reader who knew nothing about the Troubles might get the impression that there was nothing else happening. Lost Lives would be a very good corrective.

The question is, what does one want to make of the past? At the end of the peace process, both the Prices and McConvilles felt cheated for different reasons. The McConvilles eventually did get closure with the discovery of their mother’s body, but that came about by chance rather than by any help from political factors. The Prices on the other hand felt that if the British remained in Northern Ireland, the entire armed struggle looked pointless, and they were revolted by that thought.

But the armed struggle was pointless; and it was evil. This is my analysis, not Keefe’s. The 1998 Good Friday Agreement was much the same as the 1974 power-sharing structure. The most significant differences were the provisions for ex-paramilitary prisoners, and police reform. (Some would argue that the D’Hondt coalition government is also a major change, but I would say that the forced coalition was there in 1974 and the D’Hondt process is a detail of implementation.) Was that worth the lives lost and devastated over thirty years?

This of course does not excuse or minimise the role of the British and Unionists in the story. If Unionists had run Stormont better in the first place, especially if the British had leaned on them to do so, there would have been no conflict. Loyalist violence, directed by Unionist leaders, was the initiating factor in the Troubles (as shown in the early episodes of Say Nothing), and Loyalists killed more civilians than either Republicans or the British Army. Bloody Sunday was an atrocity, and the cover-up was a crime (though Bloody Friday was an atrocity too). The Price sisters were brutalised in jail, and they were not the only ones.

Books like Say Nothing are very valuable to help understand the past – especially so if the reader keeps in mind that they show only part of the whole story.

I had occasional shocks of personal connection. In 1996, I was an election candidate in North Belfast as was Gerry Kelly, one of the Price sisters’ colleagues in the 1973 London bombings. He won, I lost; I have particular memories of a hustings in the Ardoyne where the audience was basically deciding between voting for him or not voting at all, and I left in such a rush that I had to go back the next day to collect my coat. (He doesn’t get a named speaking part in the TV show.)

A couple of the minor characters in the story mentioned are on my Facebook friends list – I won’t embarrass them by naming them, but they are played in the TV series by Seamus O’Hara and Charlotte McCurry. The idea behind the Boston College archives, on which more in a moment, came from Paul Bew, who I have known since I was roughly thirteen. Northern Ireland is a small place.

The Boston College archives play a large part in how much of the story came to light. These were a set of taped interviews with paramilitaries which unexpectedly became a source of evidence for the police investigating the murder of Jean McConville. I had a lot of respect and affection for Ed Moloney, the director of the project who died last year, and I corresponded warmly and sympathetically with him in 2011 when it started seriously running into trouble. But I have to say that he does not appear to have done the necessary due diligence on the extent to which his carefully gathered records could be used in future criminal investigations, and relied unwisely on the doctrine of the protection of journalistic sources. Expert legal advice was simply never sought, and that is a big error – on Keefe’s telling, Ed Moloney’s error rather than anyone else’s.

Whatever you make of the political intentions of the author, it is a well told story. I groaned a bit when I looked at 404 pages of dense text, with 93 pages of footnotes, but it really slips by quickly – even when you know what happened in the end. And here Keefe’s choice to focus on the McConvilles and the Prices does make sense, because by focusing on the human cost of the conflict to two families, you turn historical facts and statistics into stories that can be related to by any reader.

Published in 2018, the book got a new lease of life with the 2024 drama, which I finally got around to watching at the end of last year. I think it’s very well done. In particular, Lola Petticrew and Maxine Peake excel as Dolours Price in her youth and in her middle age, and Rory Kinnear is very memorable as Frank Kitson. I was surprised to see Josh Finan, who plays the young Gerry Adams here, pop up again as Dan, the philosophy teacher whose students are convicts, in Waiting for the Out, which we have been watching more recently.

On the downside, the early episodes tastelessly play the Prices’ IRA activities for laughs, and the whole thing is more sympathetic to the Prices than perhaps they deserve. The darkness is acknowledged too, but I felt the balance could have been put in a better place.

Watching it with my son, who was born in 1999 and has never lived in Northern Ireland, was also instructive. The two standout episodes are the sixth, which centres on the brutal force-feeding of the Price sisters on hunger strike in Brixton, and the eighth (of the nine) which concludes with the McConville children, now thirty years after their mother was taken from them, clustering together in the hope that her body will be found. With the caveats above, it’s very watchable.

You can get Say Nothing (the book) here.

This was the top non-fiction book on my unread shelf. Next is Oscar Wilde: A Biography, by Richard Ellmann.