In my career as a journalist, I had never written about the Troubles, or felt any particular urge to do so, until January 2013, when Dolours Price died and I read her obituary in the New York Times. The article related the dramatic contours of her biography but also mentioned the battle, which was then still brewing, over the secret archive at Boston College. One theme that I had become fascinated with as a journalist was collective denial: the stories that communities tell themselves in order to cope with tragic or transgressive events. I became intrigued by the idea that an archive of the personal reminiscences of ex-combatants might be so explosive: what was it about these accounts that was so threatening in the present day? In the intertwining lives of Jean McConville, Dolours Price, Brendan Hughes and Gerry Adams, I saw an opportunity to tell a story about how people become radicalised in their uncompromising devotion to a cause, and about how individuals – and a whole society – make sense of political violence once they have passed through the crucible and finally have time to reflect.
As I was finishing this book, after four years of research and writing, certain stubborn mysteries remained, and I had resigned myself to the conclusion that the whole truth of this dark saga might never be widely known, because the handful of individuals who still knew the truth would take it with them to their graves. Then, just as I was completing the manuscript, I made a startling discovery.
When Dolours Price unburdened herself to Ed Moloney about the final moments in Jean McConville’s life, she spoke about how she and two other members of the Unknowns had accompanied McConville to the lip of a freshly dug grave. One of the two associates with her was Wee Pat McClure, the head of the Unknowns.
For a long time, I could not figure out what had happened to McClure. I knew that he had disappeared in the 1980s. I interviewed a man who had seen McClure just after the notorious bombing of the La Mon restaurant, the horrific incident in Belfast in 1978 in which a device containing a napalm-like substance killed a dozen people and horribly burned thirty others. McClure had been arrested after the blast and held by the police for a week. He was badly shaken by the experience, and he worried about the information that Special Branch appeared to have on the Provos. ‘I’m out,’ McClure told the man. People who had known McClure in Belfast told me that he left the country and relocated to Canada, where he died at some point in the 1980s.
There are a lot of McClures in Canada, and when I tried to track down the family of Pat McClure, I couldn’t find them. Then, one day, I learned from a friend that the reason I couldn’t locate Wee Pat’s family in Canada was that they hadn’t ended up there at all. Instead, when McClure escaped Belfast with his wife and children not long after the La Mon bombing, they moved to the United States. In fact, his family had been living all along in Connecticut, not far from where I live, in New York.
McClure died in 1986. For five years before his death, he had worked as a guard at the Cheshire Correctional Institution, a high-security prison. When I saw Hugh Feeney, the fellow Unknown who had bombed London with the Price sisters and gone on hunger strike, he was quietly appalled to learn that McClure, a man he had revered, might have ended up becoming ‘a screw’. I approached McClure’s widow, Bridie, and their children, to see if they might speak with me. After all, Dolours Price had put Pat at the graveside of Jean McConville and described his involvement in other notorious incidents during the Troubles. But the family had no interest in talking, and it struck me that they probably had not realised that the husband and father they knew and loved had also been a war criminal. An obituary for McClure noted that he was a parishioner at his local Catholic church. I wondered whether, before his death, he had confessed.
For several years, I made periodic trips to the Bronx, to meet Ed Moloney. Eventually he shared with me an unpublished transcript of one of the two long interviews he conducted with Dolours Price. The document consisted of thirty dense, single-spaced pages. Before entrusting it to me, Moloney had made one key redaction – he removed the name of the third executioner who was at McConville’s grave. His rationale was simple: Price and McClure were both dead, but this third person was still alive. Moloney’s decades-long project of recording the facts of the Troubles had by this point created quite a bit of legal difficulty for any number of people, and he may have felt that he didn’t want to create any more.
I had been able to gather a few details about this mystery individual, however. Some time earlier, over dinner one night in Drogheda, Anthony McIntyre had told me that Dolours Price never spoke about the fate of Jean McConville in her recorded interviews for Boston College, but ‘off tape’, she had told him what happened. She related to Mackers the same story she did to Moloney, about the three-person death squad and the unmarked grave. Like Moloney, Mackers told me that Pat McClure had been there with Price. Also like Moloney, Mackers declined to tell me the identity of the third person. What he did say was that it was this third individual who fired the shot that killed Jean McConville. And he gave me one further clue: at some point, Mackers said, Gerry Adams had asked the shooter to become his personal driver.
This seemed like a promising revelation. It couldn’t be too difficult, I figured, to track down all the people who had been drivers for Adams over the years. But Mackers then told me that the killer had never actually taken the job, instead declining Adams’s offer. So after dangling this tantalising detail, he left me more or less where I had started. Eventually, I concluded that I would never learn the identity of the actual shooter. It would remain, quite literally, an Unknown.
When Moloney gave me the transcript of his interview with Price, I devoured the whole document quickly and then kept returning to it, poring over particular sections for days, extracting details that were relevant to the events I was covering in this book. Before finishing the manuscript, I decided to reread the whole interview from beginning to end, on the off chance that I had overlooked any important details. Twelve pages into the document, I encountered something that I had somehow missed before, and I sat bolt upright.
In the transcript, Moloney asks about the positions that Gerry Adams held in the various brigades and battalions of the IRA during the early 1970s. At a certain point, Price says, ‘Actually, he may have been moved to Brigade at that stage – because he wanted my sister to be his driver.’
She says it casually, in passing, and Moloney does not press her on it or interject.
‘You know, he always had to have a driver,’ Price goes on. ‘And she refused, because it was such a boring job.’
Marian Price would not speak to me for this book. Her lawyer in Belfast stonewalled my various overtures. When I tracked down one of her daughters, she requested, politely, that I never contact her again. Dolours Price had become so associated with the disappearance of Jean McConville in the public imagination that it had never occurred to me that her sister might also have played a part in the killing.
Of course, there may have been some slim chance that this was all just an extraordinary coincidence, and that the mosaic of details I had assembled did not actually incriminate Marian Price. There must have been other people, over the years, who declined an offer to become Gerry Adams’s chauffeur. A representative for Adams, for what it is worth, told me that any suggestion that Adams might have made such an offer to the killer of Jean McConville was, ‘like so many other claims made in relation to this case, entirely bogus’.
It’s also important to note that, while Moloney might have redacted the name of the shooter from the interview transcript he supplied to me, the Police Service of Northern Ireland are also in possession of the original transcript, which they obtained from Boston College – and that version is not redacted. If Dolours Price implicated her own sister in the murder of Jean McConville, and the police in Belfast knew about it, wouldn’t they have charged Marian Price with the crime?
Not necessarily. Price also implicated Gerry Adams, and the Brendan Hughes oral history corroborated her account – yet Adams was never charged. The legal acti
ons against Ivor Bell and Anthony McIntyre appear to suggest that if a person implicates himself in a Belfast Project oral history, those utterances can be used against him in court, but if he implicates somebody else, that is simply hearsay, rather than admissible evidence.
The more I mulled over the suggestion that Marian Price was the third Unknown at the graveside and may have fired the shot that ended Jean McConville’s life, the more it made sense. After all, the sisters were both members of the Unknowns. They both reported to Pat McClure. As Dolours liked to say, they did everything together. If Dolours had condemned Jean McConville in the fiercest terms to Ed Moloney and insisted, at times, that the killing was justified, it may have been an expression of the strain she felt in struggling to reconcile not just her own conduct with some plausible moral code, but the even graver conduct of her sister.
In the spring of 2018, I flew to Belfast one final time and took the train down to Drogheda. I had told Mackers and Carrie that I needed to speak with them about something important, and we met one evening at a restaurant on the banks of the River Boyne. As the sun set outside the window, I laid out for them the reasons that I believed it was Marian Price who had murdered Jean McConville. Mackers had ordered a whiskey, and he stared into it as I spoke. He acknowledged that he had told me the story about the offer from Gerry Adams, but he said that he would never confirm, one way or the other, whether Marian was the shooter. Carrie reminded me that when she and Mackers got married, Marian had been their maid of honour. Marian was in poor health, they pointed out, and the publication of such an allegation might have unfortunate repercussions for her adult children. But when we finished our meal and parted ways that night, neither of them had told me that I was wrong.
There was one more person I wanted to speak to, someone whom Dolours had known and confided in before she died. I explained what I had deduced and asked whether Dolours had ever mentioned Marian playing a role in the McConville killing. This person confirmed that she had – that Dolours had said the execution of Jean McConville was ‘something that the sisters had done together’.
Finally, I wrote to Marian’s lawyer in Belfast, spelling out what I had learned and intended to publish, and asking whether Marian would deny it. He never wrote back.
At the end of 2017, Gerry Adams announced that he would retire from his position as president of Sinn Féin and hand over authority to the party’s longtime deputy, Mary Lou McDonald. At forty-eight years old, McDonald had come of age, professionally, in the period after the Good Friday Agreement, so she was untinged by paramilitary history. Some observers wondered if Adams might continue to exercise power behind the scenes, but he promised that he had no interest in playing ‘puppet master’, and that he intended, genuinely, to retire.
Adams would soon turn seventy. He was still vigorous, but his movements had slowed ever so slightly, and his voice, which had always been one of his greatest assets, was no longer quite so formidable. The famous beard had gone a snowy white. The previous spring, Martin McGuinness, Adams’s longtime comrade in both war and peace, had died of a rare genetic disease. ‘Martin McGuinness was not a terrorist,’ Adams intoned, to applause, in a speech at McGuinness’s grave. ‘Martin McGuinness was a freedom fighter.’
Of course, to his supporters and his detractors alike, Adams himself retained a hint of danger. According to polls, even Sinn Féin voters did not believe his claims about never being in the IRA, and it is often said in Northern Ireland that he still has ‘the whiff of cordite’ about him. But Adams is nothing if not enigmatic, and as he prepared to retire from politics, he had succeeded in modulating his public persona once again. He often played the role, now, of twinkle-eyed celebrity grandfather – an iconic but approachable grandee. This development found its surreal culmination on Twitter, where Adams tended his popular account, interspersing studiously boring tweets about small-bore political issues with a barrage of cat pictures and encomiums to sudsy baths, rubber duckies and teddy bears. (‘I do love teddy bears,’ he told the BBC. ‘I have a large collection of teddy bears.’) One Irish writer likened such flourishes to ‘Charles Manson showing you his collection of tea cosies’, and it could seem, at times, that this assertive expression of whimsy was a form of cynical calculation. The West Belfast journalist Malachi O’Doherty suggested, in a biography of Adams, that the Sinn Féin leader is prone to ‘propagandising for his own humanity’.
But, cumulatively, Adams’s tweets suggest the giddiness of a man who has defied some very long odds. He was shot and nearly killed by loyalist gunmen and imprisoned and tortured by the British state. Improbably, he survived the conflict, helped bring the fighting to an end, and built a hugely successful political party that was a force not just in Northern Ireland but in the Republic as well. The historian Alvin Jackson has written that, for Adams, democratic action ‘was a way of liquidating the otherwise unrecoverable political capital amassed by the gunmen’.
In one of his conversations with Anthony McIntyre, Brendan Hughes said something similar, in the form of a metaphor. Think of the armed struggle as the launch of a boat, Hughes said, ‘getting a hundred people to push this boat out. This boat is stuck in the sand, right, and get them to push the boat out and then the boat sailing off and leaving the hundred people behind, right. That’s the way I feel. The boat is away, sailing on the high seas, with all the luxuries that it brings, and the poor people that launched the boat are left sitting in the muck and the dirt and the shit and the sand, behind.’
It is hard not to sympathise with Hughes emotionally. But politically, it would be folly not to sympathise with Adams. He may have possessed a sociopathic instinct for self-preservation, and there is something chilling about how Adams, secure in his place on the boat, does not cast so much as a backward glance at those comrades, like Hughes, who are left behind. But, really, it was history that was leaving Hughes behind. Northern Ireland had suffered enough. Whatever callous motivations Adams might have possessed, and whatever deceptive machinations he might have employed, he steered the IRA out of a bloody and intractable conflict and into a brittle but enduring peace.
Even after the Good Friday Agreement, Adams always insisted that he had never given up the cornerstone republican aspiration for a united Ireland; it was just that the means for getting there had changed. In the long run, the war may be won by demography. By some estimates, Catholics may outnumber Protestants in Northern Ireland as soon as the year 2021. This doesn’t necessarily mean that the British will soon be voted off the island. After the 2008 fiscal crisis and the subsequent recession in Dublin, some polls found that most Catholics in the North preferred to remain part of the United Kingdom. ‘Outbreeding Unionists may be an enjoyable pastime for those who have the energy,’ Adams once remarked. ‘But it hardly amounts to a political strategy.’
In the summer of 2016, the British people voted by a thin margin to leave the European Union. Only after the referendum did the public in Britain fully consider the implications of such a move. Since the Good Friday Agreement, the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic has seemed, at times, to have virtually disappeared. The soldiers and sandbagged checkpoints are long gone, and every day, tens of thousands of people and countless lorries full of goods crisscross the national boundary in one direction or the other. Northern Ireland is able to enjoy the benefits of being part of the United Kingdom and part of Europe at the same time. But Brexit, inevitably, complicates that split identity, and, depending on how the measure is implemented, it might ultimately force Northern Ireland to make a choice.
Adams is attuned to such possibilities. ‘Those of us who want a United Ireland need to be very careful that we are not accused of trying to exploit Brexit,’ he said. ‘But I just think the notion of Irish unity, in terms of public debate, is now much more prevalent.’ He announced that within five years, he would like to see a new referendum on whether Northern Ireland should remain part of the United Kingdom.
It would be ironic, to say the least, if one i
nadvertent long-term consequence of the Brexit referendum was a united Ireland – an outcome that three decades of appalling bloodshed and some thirty-five hundred lost lives had failed to achieve. But this is, in a way, the defining question hanging over the legacy of Gerry Adams. As a young man, he justified the use of political violence with one important caveat, writing that ‘only if I achieve the situation where my people can genuinely prosper can my course of action be seen, by me, to have been justified’.
Adams will probably not live to see a united Ireland, but it seems that such a day will inevitably come. The real question is whether it would have happened eventually anyway, without the violent interventions of the IRA? This is the sort of conundrum that bedevilled Dolours Price and Brendan Hughes, but in his final years, Adams seemed free of any such tortured introspection. When an interviewer asked him, in 2010, if he had blood on his hands, he responded, ‘I don’t. I am perfectly at peace. Absolutely.’
Behind the airy, modern house that Michael McConville built for his family in a rural area outside Belfast lies a bright-green expanse of lawn, lined by a series of wooden enclosures. These little houses hold hundreds of small cubbyholes, in which dozens of pigeons warble and bob and shift their feet. Having picked through the ruins of wartime Belfast as a child in search of pigeons in the wild, Michael grew up to keep hundreds of the birds, and to race them competitively. ‘Through the whole Troubles, there was never any hassle between Protestants and Catholics raising pigeons,’ he said, delicately cupping one of the creatures in his hand. It eyed him nervously, rolling its neck, so that its slate-grey feathers flashed magenta and teal, suddenly iridescent, like a peacock’s.
Pigeons were one of the first animals to be domesticated by humans, more than five thousand years ago. They’re monogamous and fiercely protective of their offspring. A pigeon builds endurance in the same way that a human athlete does, flying progressively longer distances. Irish pigeon racers can travel as far as England or France and release their birds and they will fly home across the water, through foul weather, covering hundreds of miles to return to their roost. Sometimes, when they get home after a long race, they will have burned off half their body weight from the exertion. But nurture and husband them with seeds and comfort and they will build up their strength to race again.
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