In 1998, thirty years of conflict in Northern Ireland was brought to an end. With the Good Friday Agreement, paramilitary organisations on both sides, Republican pro-Irish Catholic and Unionist pro-British Protestant, ceased operations. Northern Ireland remained part of the UK, while its frontier with the Republic of Ireland, a 310-mile border marked by barbed wire, watchtowers and armed soldiers, was dismantled to the point that until today it is almost impossible to tell where one country ends and another begins.
THE EU BORDER
However, over two decades on and there’s still a huge amount of tension in Northern Ireland. Giant fences known as ‘peace walls’ divide communities, and 92 per cent of children go to schools segregated by religion. The UK’s exit from the EU threatens to upset a delicate balance. The invisible Irish border has become the physical frontier between the EU and a non-member country, but if any infrastructure were reinstalled here it might lead to political instability.
OUT AT SEA
Former US President Joe Biden, who has Irish ancestry, is among those who stress that any Brexit trade deal must not compromise peace. In a protocol that came into force in 2021, the UK agreed that Northern Ireland should continue to apply the EU’s single market rules, even though it has left with the rest of the UK. In order to comply with EU requirements, however, checks will be required on certain products entering Northern Ireland from Britain, creating a customs border in the Irish Sea.
BREXIT
The protocol is not designed to be a permanent solution, leaving Northern Ireland in charge of its fate by vote every four years. Opinions are, of course, deeply divided: Pro-British Unionist politicians in the country are angered by the arrangements, saying it damages Northern Ireland’s bond with the UK. On the other hand, Irish Republican politicians say that given the 56 per cent of Northern Irish residents who voted against Brexit and the countless requests for Irish passports, a united Ireland is inevitable.
say nothing
There are seven times more Irish-Americans in the US than there are people living in Ireland. The ancestors of Patrick Radden Keefe, New Yorker staff journalist and author of the award-winning book Say Nothing, emigrated in the 19th century. Keefe didn’t feel a great personal connection to Ireland when he was growing up in Boston in the 1980s, he says. It wasn’t until 2013, while looking for ideas for stories in the New York Times obituaries —a section that his father calls the “Irish sports pages”— that Keefe was arrested by the image of a Northern Irishwoman. Born in 1950, in her youth, Dolours Price looked every bit the glamorous feminist freedom fighter. She was, in fact, a notorious operative in the Provisional IRA. Keefe describes how she got there:
Patrick Radden Keefe (American accent): She’d grown up in an Irish Republican family going back on both sides for generations. In the 1960s, there was an effort by young people to go out on the streets and protest for greater civil rights for Catholics in Northern Ireland, who had faced great discrimination for years. She and her younger sister Marion went on a protest march from Belfast to Derry. For the first three days they sang songs and they had these banners that said ‘We Shall Overcome’. And on the fourth day the march was ambushed and they were attacked by a Loyalist mob, and Dolours and her sister were beaten. And they got back to Belfast, and their mother, she says: “Why did you not fight back?”
PEACE AND BETRAYAL
The Price sisters abandoned pacifism and joined the IRA. In 1973 they travelled to London to set off car bombs, and while imprisoned there, went on hunger strike and almost died. Having been prepared to make the ultimate sacrifice for the cause, Dolours Price was not impressed by the 1998 peace agreement, as Keefe explains:
Patrick Radden Keefe: When you get the Good Friday Agreement, I saw this as an event to celebrate. Dolours Price did not. To her there was this feeling that for years and years she had done terrible things but with an expectation that one day she would achieve what generations of her family had sacrificed for: was that they would get the Brits out of Northern Ireland. And to her she had been robbed retroactively of the justification that she’d been counting on.
JUSTIFICATION
Price felt most betrayed by her commander, a slippery figure called Gerry Adams who reinvented himself as a politician and champion of peace, and denied ever being in the IRA. It was Adams, claimed Price, who had ordered the operation that she took part in to ‘disappear’ an iconic female victim of the Troubles.
Patrick Radden Keefe: Jean McConville, a very famous name in Northern Ireland, was taken away by the IRA and shot and disappeared. Forced disappearance, which is more familiar in the context in Chile, Argentina or other dirty wars. It did happen during the Troubles, but Northern Ireland is so small. There you’re talking about just over a dozen people. She was a Belfast woman, a mother of ten, a widow... and one night in December 1972 a gang of masked intruders barged into her home and pulled her out of the apartment. She never came back.
THE SAFETY PIN
McConville’s children never stopped looking for their mother. She was not found, however, until 2003 when human bones were seen sticking up out of the sand on an Irish beach.
Patrick Radden Keefe: The bones were wrapped in some clothing, so they asked some of the kids to come in and see if maybe they could identify the clothing. So Archie McConville was sixteen when his mother was taken away. And he is going to look at the clothes, but he finds that he can’t bring himself to. But there is one thing about Jean McConville that her children remember, which is that she always had a safety pin pinned to her clothing. As a mother of ten you can imagine, somebody was always missing a button. So, Archie says: is there a safety pin? And the cop turns over the fabric, and there it is.
NETWORK OF SPIES
Price always insisted that McConville had been an informer or ‘tout’ for the British Army. McConville’s kids deny it to this day. While Keefe has no proof either way, he did discover that the British Army used threats and bribery to establish an extensive network of informers.
Patrick Radden Keefe: There was a big strategy of the British, born in an approach to earlier colonial insurgencies, to try and turn people, to try and create informants; to infiltrate not just the paramilitary groups but the local people and get them to give you information. Nothing is more reviled in Ireland than a tout, but slowly and very methodically the British government created more and more touts. To a point where by the end of the Troubles one in four people who worked for the IRA also worked in some fashion for the British government.