Michael: Most history is written by the victors. But what happens when there are no victors? When a 30-year war ends not with a bang, but with a tense, whispered agreement to just… stop. And what happens to the secrets buried during that war? They don’t just disappear. Kevin: That's a chilling thought. The secrets are still out there, like landmines waiting for someone to step on them. Michael: That's the world Patrick Radden Keefe plunges us into with Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland. And Keefe is the perfect guide for this—he's a staff writer at The New Yorker and this book actually won the Orwell Prize, which is a huge deal for political writing. It’s been hailed as a modern masterpiece of narrative nonfiction. Kevin: Right, so he's not just a historian, he's an investigative journalist. He knows how to follow the threads. Michael: Exactly. And he starts with a thread that unravels everything: the 1972 disappearance of a 38-year-old widow and mother of ten, Jean McConville.

Kevin: A mother of ten? That’s just… immediately devastating. Michael: It’s the anchor of the whole book. Keefe drops us right into the scene. It's December 1972, in the Divis Flats of West Belfast—a grim, concrete housing project that was a hotbed of IRA activity. Jean McConville is giving her kids a bath. There's a knock on the door. Kevin: Oh no. Michael: A group of people, some masked, some not, including women, burst in. They're from the IRA. They tell Jean she needs to come with them, just for a little while. Her kids are screaming, clinging to her. Her oldest son, Archie, tries to go with her. Kevin: Please tell me they let him. Michael: They let him walk with her down the stairs, but outside, there's a bigger group waiting, and a blue Volkswagen van. One of the men presses a gun to Archie’s cheek and tells him to "Fuck off." The last thing Jean says to him is, "Watch the children until I come back." Kevin: And she never does. Michael: She never does. She becomes one of "the Disappeared." And this is where Keefe's reporting is just gut-wrenching. He focuses on what happens next. Kevin: Hold on, they just left ten kids alone in the flat? No one checked on them? Michael: For weeks, they were on their own. The oldest, Helen, was a teenager. They tried to carry on, drawing their mother's pension. But the community, steeped in fear, ostracized them. Rumors started to spread, likely planted by the IRA, that Jean wasn't murdered—that she was a "Brit lover" who abandoned her children to run off with a British soldier. Kevin: That’s unbelievably cruel. So the community turned on them? They believed the rumors? Michael: In that environment, you believe what you're told to believe, or at least you act like you do. It's safer. The children were completely isolated. Her son Michael, who was only eleven, started shoplifting food just to feed his younger siblings. Eventually, social services stepped in, but their solution was to split the children up and send them to various orphanages. Kevin: And I'm guessing these weren't exactly loving, supportive homes. Michael: They were horrific. Keefe details the abuse the children suffered—physical, emotional, sexual—at the hands of the nuns and Christian Brothers who ran these institutions. It’s a second layer of trauma piled on top of the first. The state that was supposed to protect them ended up brutalizing them. Their family was shattered, and their mother's name was tarnished. All because of a secret.

Kevin: Who does something like that? Who are these people who would drag a mother away from her children and then systematically destroy her reputation? Michael: That's the other side of the story Keefe tells so brilliantly. He introduces us to Dolours Price. And her story is just as compelling, in a completely different way. She wasn't born a monster; she was a bright, idealistic young woman. Kevin: So how does she get from idealistic to IRA soldier? Michael: It starts with her family. The Prices were republican royalty. Her father, Albert, was a legendary IRA man. Her aunt, Bridie, was permanently disabled—blinded, both hands blown off—while handling explosives for the IRA. In their house, the martyrs of the 1916 Easter Rising were saints. The idea of blood sacrifice for Ireland wasn't just history; it was a living, breathing family value. Kevin: So violence was normalized from birth. Michael: Exactly. But Dolours didn't initially embrace it. In the late 60s, she was inspired by the American civil rights movement. She believed in peaceful protest. She and her sister Marian joined the marches demanding equal rights for Catholics, who faced systemic discrimination in housing, jobs, everything. Kevin: What changed? Michael: The Burntollet Bridge ambush in 1969. It was a civil rights march from Belfast to Derry. As they crossed this bridge, a mob of loyalist extremists, allegedly with the police looking the other way, ambushed them with clubs, iron bars, and rocks. Dolours was beaten and thrown into a freezing river. Kevin: Wow. So it's like she tried to play by the rules, but the game was rigged, and the referees were helping the other team cheat. At some point, you just decide to flip the board. Michael: That's a perfect analogy. Keefe quotes her mother, Chrissie, who asked her daughters when they came home battered and bruised, "Why did you not fight back?" For Dolours, that was the moment her faith in non-violence died. She concluded that the state wouldn't protect her, so the only path left was armed struggle. She joined the Provisional IRA. Kevin: And she became a key figure, right? Michael: A very effective one. She was part of a secret unit called the "Unknowns." She was involved in the London car bombings, which led to her capture and a brutal hunger strike where she was force-fed over 200 times. But this is the core of the book's genius—it shows you the path. It doesn't excuse her actions, but it makes them understandable. You see how ideology and trauma can forge a person into a weapon. And you see the cost. The book details her later life, ravaged by PTSD, anorexia, and a profound sense of moral injury. She felt her sacrifices were betrayed by the peace process.

Michael: And this is where both stories—the victim's and the perpetrator's—collide in this world of secrets. The official reason for Jean McConville's murder was that she was a "tout"—an informer. Kevin: A spy for the British. Was she? Michael: That's the million-dollar question. The IRA insisted she was. They claimed they found a radio transmitter in her flat. Her family has always vehemently denied it, saying her only "crime" was giving a cup of water to a wounded British soldier moaning outside her door. An act of basic human compassion. Kevin: And in that world, compassion could get you killed. Michael: It could. And this opens up the third major theme of the book: the secret war of intelligence and betrayal. The Troubles weren't just fought with bombs and bullets; they were fought with information. The British intelligence services, like the clandestine MRF, were experts at recruiting informers. They would find a person's vulnerability—money, blackmail, a criminal charge—and exploit it. Kevin: And the IRA had its own internal police to hunt for these informers? Michael: They had the "Nutting Squad," an internal security unit responsible for interrogating and executing suspected touts. It was led by a man who, it was later revealed, was himself one of Britain's most valuable long-term agents, code-named "Stakeknife." Kevin: You're kidding. The head of internal security was the top spy? Michael: The layers of betrayal are dizzying. And this leads us to the final act of the book: the Boston College Tapes. After the peace process, a project was started at Boston College to create an oral history of the Troubles. They interviewed former paramilitaries from both sides, promising them that their tapes would be sealed until after their deaths. Kevin: A chance to finally tell the truth without fear of reprisal. Michael: That was the idea. People like Brendan Hughes and Dolours Price, who felt betrayed by the peace process and by their former commander, Gerry Adams, gave explosive, incredibly candid interviews. Hughes, on tape, directly implicated Adams in ordering the abduction and murder of Jean McConville. Kevin: So a project designed to let people finally speak, but only after they're dead, ends up forcing them to speak while they're alive? That's an incredible, almost tragic, twist. Michael: It's the ultimate irony. After Hughes died, a book was published based on his testimony. The police in Northern Ireland heard about it and issued a subpoena to Boston College for the tapes, not just Hughes's but everyone's. A US court, citing a treaty with the UK, ordered the college to hand them over. The promise of secrecy was broken. Kevin: And the title of the book is Say Nothing. Breaking that code of silence, even for history, had devastating real-world consequences. Michael: It blew the fragile peace wide open. It led to arrests, political firestorms, and forced a reckoning that no one was ready for. The past came roaring back.

Kevin: So after all this, what's the big takeaway? Is it that peace is impossible without truth, or that some truths are too dangerous to uncover? Michael: I think Keefe's book suggests the past is never truly past. The Troubles didn't just end; they went dormant, and the unresolved traumas and secrets continue to poison the present. The central tension of the book is that reconciliation requires truth, but in a place like Northern Ireland, the truth is a weapon that can still get people killed. Kevin: It's like that quote you mentioned from the book's epigraph. Michael: Exactly. "All wars are fought twice, the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory." Say Nothing is the story of that second war, the war for memory. It shows how official histories are constructed, and how easily the stories of the powerless, like Jean McConville, can be erased. But it also shows that those stories have a power of their own, and they refuse to stay buried forever. Kevin: It's a deeply unsettling book, but it feels essential. It makes you wonder, what secrets are we agreeing to keep silent about in our own communities, and what's the long-term cost? Michael: A question that resonates far beyond Northern Ireland. Kevin: A powerful and profound read. Thanks for bringing it to us, Michael. Michael: This is Aibrary, signing off.