Say Nothing

Say Nothing starts out with the disappearance of Jean McConville, a 38 year old widow and mother of 10, who was dragged from her home in Belfast by a group of masked men and women in 1972 and never seen by her family again. But in order to tell the story of what happened to Jean McConville and her children, it's necessary to tell the story of the IRA, the Royal Ulster Constabulary, and the British Army in Belfast in the 20th century. So, after giving us the mystery of McConville's disappearance and the terrible plight of her children, Patrick Radden Keefe spends the bulk of the next 200 pages writing about the history of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, and the individuals who played important roles in the Provisional IRA through the 1970's and all the way up to the Good Friday Accord. This was not what I expected, but it was riveting, so I happily went along for the ride. Of course, the story does make its way back to Jean McConville, and other people who were “disappeared” during the Troubles.

As an American who knew about the Troubles growing up and romanticized the IRA, especially as a teenager, I appreciated how Keefe acknowledges that there was a sort of glamour associated with IRA fighters. His book shows clearly, though, how very brutal and unglamorous the conflict was, and many of the people in it as well. The present is equally complex. There is peace, but survivors are traumatized, the past has not been fully dealt with, and as more than one person in the book says, the IRA has not gone away.

Say Nothing has 65 pages of notes, a bibliography, and index. It is well researched and reads like a great piece of longform journalism, which it is.