Say Nothing by Patrick Radden Keefe

This meticulously reported book begins with a longstanding mystery: Who abducted Jean McConville, and why? In December 1972, a group of masked men and women dragged McConville, a 38-year-old mother of 10 who had recently been widowed, from her Belfast home. “Say Nothing” investigates what happened to McConville, while also telling the broader story of the Troubles.

“This sensitive and judicious book raises some troubling, and perhaps unanswerable, questions” about how to move forward from an anguished past, our critic Jennifer Szalai writes. “Keefe’s narrative is an architectural feat, expertly constructed out of complex and contentious material, arranged and balanced just so.”

Jean McConville was a protestant woman who married a catholic British soldier and lived in the heartland of separatist Belfast.  A mother of ten children, she was widowed in early 1972 - by the end of the year she would be dead.

The Troubles in Ireland were primarily political and nationalistic, fueled by historical events, with an ethnic or sectarian dimension, although it was not a religious conflict. Following the "Bloody Sunday" shootings in Derry in January 1972, the Provisional IRA ramped up their own armed campaign in reaction to the ongoing violence. This culminated in a ferocious bombing campaign in July 1972. The IRA (as well as other Irish republican and loyalist paramilitary groups) had a policy of killing informers within its own ranks; however, from the start of the conflict the term informer was also used for civilians who were suspected of providing information on paramilitary organisations to the security forces. 

Jean McConville

One night, in December 1972, Jean was kidnapped and murdered by the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) and illicitly buried in County Louth in the Republic of Ireland in 1972 after being accused by the IRA of passing information to British forces (of which there was no actual proof). The Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) did not begin to investigate the disappearance properly until 1995, and her body was only discovered by chance in 2003. A formal investigation was launched in 2006 with arrests following in 2014, though suspects would be released due to insufficient evidence.

This crime is notorious due to the fact the Jean was a widowed mother of ten, her body was hidden when the bodies of informers were usually left in public as a warning, and due to the lack of any immediate follow up with regards to finding her.

Keefe said he began researching and writing the book after reading the obituary for Dolours Price in 2013. Dolours was an active member of the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA), and in a series of interviews conducted by Boston College (and for a forthcoming film "I, Dolours), she confessed to her participation in the murder and disappearance of Jean McConville.

read more:
Irish Times - Filming Dolours Price

Irish Times - New Book Reveals Killers

Irish Times - Boston Tapes, Gerry Adams and Ivor Bell
BBC News - Jean McConville, The Disappeared Mother of Ten
The Guardian - Former IRA Chief Cleared Over Killing
The Journal - Son Class For Public Inquiry
Irish Central - Judge Throws Out Case Against Adams

Irish Examiner - Jean McConville