Say Nothing
Page 39
On race days, Michael released his birds, and they would disappear over the horizon. Then, eventually, they would come home. He always loved that about pigeons. They wander. But their natural instinct is to fly back to the place where they were born.
Acknowledgements
My first thanks go to Jean McConville’s children, several of whom spent time speaking with me. Those were difficult conversations. The McConvilles have experienced unimaginable suffering with great dignity. I hope that I have related the story of what happened to their family as truthfully and comprehensively as possible.
I owe thanks to the staffs of numerous libraries and archives, particularly the Linen Hall Library in Belfast, the National Library of Ireland in Dublin, the National Archives of the United Kingdom at Kew, the Churchill Archives Centre at the University of Cambridge, the New York Public Library, the Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Archives at New York University, and the John J. Burns and Thomas P. O’Neill, Jr. Libraries at Boston College. The Conflict Archive on the Internet (CAIN) at Ulster University was also an invaluable resource.
Ed Moloney was extremely patient in relating his own story and his broader insights about the Troubles. He also shared crucial material that he has assembled over decades of research, and I deeply appreciate the collegial spirit in which he was willing to do so. Anthony McIntyre, Carrie Twomey, Ricky O’Rawe and Hugh Feeney were particularly generous with their time and recollections. Sandra Peake of the Wave Trauma Centre, Dennis Godfrey of the Independent Commission for the Location of Victims’ Remains and Liz Young of the Police Service of Northern Ireland were all helpful. For hospitality, friendship and guidance in Belfast, I’m indebted to Gerry and Shelagh Moriarty, Alison Millar and Paul Howard (and their son Sam), Rachel Hooper, Darragh MacIntyre, and my old pal Steve Warby. Oorlagh George and I first met in Los Angeles, then reconnected in Belfast. Along the way, she shared a few observations about the Troubles that have been rattling around in my head ever since and have informed the book in subtle but important ways. In Dublin, dear friends John Lacy, Sean O’Neill and Clodagh Dunne took care of me. A particular thanks to Adam Goldman of the New York Times, who found Pat McClure. Tara Keenan-Thomson graciously shared the transcript of her 2003 interview with Dolours Price. James Kinchin-White, a tenacious archival researcher with a particular interest in the Troubles, uncovered several of the government documents cited here.
Book writing can be a lonely enterprise, but I’ve been fortunate enough to work with a series of talented research assistants. Some helped track down one-off items, others did work that spanned years, and they all made the book feel more like a collaboration. Deep thanks to Ruby Mellen, Linda Kinstler, Giulia Ricco, Katy Wynbrandt, Colson Lin, Jake McAuley, Rachel Luban, and particularly Victoria Beale. Emily Gogolak and Ruth Margalit fact-checked the original article. The precise, indefatigable Fergus McIntosh fact-checked the book. Needless to say, any errors that remain are entirely my own.
During 2016–17, I spent a year as an Eric and Wendy Schmidt Fellow at the New America Foundation. My thanks to the Schmidts for supporting this project, and to Anne-Marie Slaughter, Peter Bergen, Konstantin Kakaes and Awista Ayub for that opportunity. The book first started to feel like a book in April 2016, when I spent several precious weeks at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center, on Lake Como, where I had the time and space to start getting words on paper. Thanks to Claudia Juech, Elena Ongania and Pilar Palaciá for that extraordinary experience. I workshopped sections of the book at New America and Bellagio, and also at the New York Institute for the Humanities, and I remain deeply grateful to my fellow fellows at each of these institutions for their insightful critiques.
I’ve been reading the New Yorker since I was a kid, and I’m still a little gobsmacked that a publication I so cherish has become my professional home. Thanks to David Remnick, Pam McCarthy, Dorothy Wickenden and Henry Finder for all they do for the magazine, and for enabling me to do this work. A particular, profound thanks to Daniel Zalewski, ingenious editor and steadfast friend, who makes everything he touches so much better. I’m grateful to all my colleagues but particularly Fabio Bertoni, Andrew Marantz, Tyler Foggatt, Raffi Khatchadourian, Rachel Aviv, David Grann, Philip Gourevitch, George Packer, Sheelah Kolhatkar, Jonathan Blitzer and Siobhan Bohnacker. Without Bruce Diones, I might still be locked out of the building.
Bill Thomas at Doubleday saw promise in this story from our initial conversation about it and edited the manuscript with his usual keen eye and steady hand. Enormous thanks to Bill and also to Margo Shickmanter, Michael Goldsmith, Todd Doughty, Daniel Novack, Leila Gordon, Will Palmer, Maria Massey, and everybody else at Doubleday. I’m also very grateful to Arabella Pike for her encouragement and guidance on the manuscript, and to Katherine Patrick, Iain Hunt, Mary Byrne and all their colleagues at William Collins in London and Dublin. Thanks, as ever, to my agent, the wonderful Tina Bennett, and to Anna DeRoy, Tracy Fisher and Svetlana Katz at WME. Thea Traff, with her impeccable eye, helped me track down the photos. My friend and colleague, the supremely gifted Philip Montgomery, took the author photo.
Thanks, for various reasons, to Michael Shtender-Auerbach, Sai Sriskandarajah, Michael Wahid Hanna, Sarah Margon, Dan Kurtz-Phelan, Ed Caesar, Linc Caplan, William Chan, Alex Gibney, Jason Burns, David Park, Andy Galker, Nate Lavey, Jean Strouse, Melanie Rehak, Eric Banks, Maya Jasanoff, Simon Carswell, Trevor Birney, Nuala Cunningham, Gideon Lewis-Kraus and Matthew Teague.
There is no summarising my gratitude to my parents, Frank Keefe and Jennifer Radden. They still read every word I write before almost anyone else does, and when I think about the kind of person (and the kind of parent) I want to be, they still provide the model. Special thanks to Beatrice Radden Keefe and Greg de Souza, and to Tristram Radden Keefe and Carlota Melo. A big hug, also, to baby E.
I am so fortunate in my in-laws, Tadeusz and Ewa, without whose last-minute childcare interventions this book could never have been written.
But my biggest thanks go to their beautiful, sharp-minded daughter, Justyna. It’s been twenty years since we first met, yet a day doesn’t go by when I’m not reminded of how lucky I am to share my life with her. (Indeed, she is often the one who reminds me.) As for our sons, Lucian and Felix, Lucian said to me just now, ‘Write that we basically did all the work.’ I can’t say that they accelerated the progress of this project, exactly, but they were a daily reminder of life’s antic consolations, and the book is dedicated to them.
A Note on Sources
Say Nothing is based on four years of research, seven trips to Northern Ireland and interviews with more than one hundred people. But in the spirit of the book’s title, there were many people who refused to speak with me, or who started to and then had a change of heart. It may seem strange that events from nearly half a century ago could still provoke such fear and anguish. But, as I hope this book makes clear, in Belfast, history is alive and dangerous.
Memory is a slippery thing, so I have sought wherever possible to establish corroboration for individual recollections. In instances where there are discrepancies among different accounts, I have used the most plausible version of events in the main text of the book and elaborated on alternative accounts, or other nuances, in the notes.
This is not a history book but a work of narrative non-fiction. No dialogue or details have been invented or imagined; in instances where I describe the inner thoughts of characters, it is because they have related those thoughts to me, or to others, as detailed in the notes. Because I have elected to tell this particular story, there are important aspects of the Troubles that are not addressed. The book hardly mentions loyalist terrorism, to take just one example. If you’re feeling whataboutish, I would direct you to one of the many excellent books cited in the notes that address the Troubles more broadly or your favoured subject in particular. Because the history of the Troubles is so vexed, and so often inflected by partisan predispositions, some of the episodes described in this book are the subject o
f controversy and divergent interpretation; rather than burden the central narrative with frequent digressions, I have tended to address such debates in the notes.
In addition to interviews, the book is based on extensive archival research, including many contemporary newspaper accounts, as well as unpublished letters and emails, recently declassified government papers, published and unpublished memoirs, contemporary propaganda, affidavits, depositions, inquest reports, coroners’ reports, witness testimony, diaries, archival footage and photographs, and the recordings of phone conversations. In recounting the history of the Price family, I relied heavily on two extensive unpublished interviews with Dolours Price, one conducted by Tara Keenan-Thomson in 2003, the other by Ed Moloney in 2010.
Though the book is based chiefly on my own original reporting, it incorporates the groundbreaking work of a series of long-time chroniclers of the Troubles, chief among them Susan McKay, David McKittrick, Ed Moloney, Peter Taylor, Mark Urban, Martin Dillon, Richard English, Tim Pat Coogan, Malachi O’Doherty, Suzanne Breen, Allison Morris and Henry McDonald. In the early chapters, I also made use of the marvellous dispatches of Simon Winchester and Max Hastings. I have drawn heavily on many terrific documentaries, particularly Disappeared (1999), The Disappeared (2013) and Ed Moloney’s film I, Dolours (2018).
Gerry Adams frequently gives interviews, but when he learned the subject of my enquiry, he declined to speak to me. Through a representative, he sent a statement that said, in part, that the Boston College oral history project ‘is a deeply flawed, shoddy and self-serving effort’, and that Ed Moloney and Anthony McIntyre are ‘well known opponents of the Sinn Féin leadership and the party’s peace strategy’. Adams continues to deny that he ordered the murder of Jean McConville or that he was ever a member of the IRA. But the downside of contesting something everyone believes to be true is that the value of anything you say starts to depreciate. In creating the portrait of Adams, I relied on the recollections of numerous people who served alongside him in the IRA, on scores of other interviews that Adams has given, and on his own autobiographical writings.
When I started this project in 2014, Ed Moloney gave me the complete, unredacted transcript of Brendan Hughes’s Boston College interview, which became an indispensable source. But apart from that oral history, nobody involved in the Belfast Project would share any of the interviews with me. I never had access to the oral histories of Dolours Price, Ivor Bell, or any of the other participants referenced in the book, though I was able to reconstruct some of the conversations by interviewing Anthony McIntyre. The Boston tapes were supposed to lie untouched, like bottles in a wine cellar, until some future date when the participants were dead and scholars could study their testimony to make sense of the Troubles. Instead the tapes became criminal evidence – and a political weapon. They might be used to prosecute old crimes. But it seems likely, now, that they will never become available to researchers.
Several years ago, Boston College started informing people who had participated in the project that they could have their interviews back. The university, burnt by its own carelessness in handling such incendiary material, wanted to jettison its responsibility as custodian of the tapes. Many of the participants took the university up on this. One of them was Ricky O’Rawe. One day, he received a box from Boston College containing the recordings and transcripts of his conversations with Mackers from more than a decade earlier. At first, O’Rawe could not decide what to do with them. Then he had an idea. He took the CDs and transcripts into the study in his house and lit a fire in the fireplace. Then he opened a nice bottle of Bordeaux and poured himself a glass. The firelight reflected in framed photographs that lined the walls, pictures of old friends and comrades from the Troubles, many of them now dead. There was a copy of the 1916 Proclamation, in which Patrick Pearse declared an independent Ireland, and a photograph of Brendan Hughes. O’Rawe tossed his testimony into the flames. Then he drank the Bordeaux and watched it burn.
Notes
Abbreviated Sources
Interviews
H-BC – Brendan Hughes/Anthony McIntyre Boston College oral history transcript.
P-EM – Unpublished Dolours Price interview with Ed Moloney, 2010.
P-TKT – Unpublished Dolours Price interview with Tara Keenan-Thomson, 2003.
Legal Proceedings
Archie McConville deposition – Deposition of Arthur (Archie) McConville, Inquest on the Body of Jean McConville, Coroner’s District of County Louth, 5 April 2004.
BC Motion to Quash – Motion of Trustees of Boston College to Quash Subpoenas, 2 June 2011 (US District Court of Massachusetts, M.B.D. No. 11-MC-91078).
Government’s Opposition to Motion to Quash – Government’s Opposition to Motion to Quash and Motion for an Order to Compel, 1 July 2011 (US District Court of Massachusetts, M.B.D. No. 11-MC-91078).
Moloney Belfast affidavit – First Affidavit of Ed Moloney in the Matter of an Application by Anthony McIntyre for Judicial Review (High Court of Justice in Northern Ireland, 12 September 2012).
Moloney Massachusetts affidavit – Affidavit of Ed Moloney, 2 June 2011 (US District Court of Massachusetts, M.B.D. No. 11-MC-91078).
O’Neill affidavit – Affidavit of Robert K. O’Neill, ‘In Re: Request from the United Kingdom Pursuant to the Treaty Between the Government of the United States of America and the Government of the United Kingdom on Mutual Assistance in Criminal Matters in the Matter of Dolours Price’, 2 June 2011 (US District Court of Massachusetts, M.B.D. No. 11-MC-91078).
Price affidavit – Affidavit of Dolours Price, Price & Price v. Home Office (High Court of Justice, Queen’s Bench Division), 23 April 1974.
Other Reports and Transcripts
De Silva Report – The Report of the Patrick Finucane Review, 12 December 2012.
HIA transcript – Historical Institutional Abuse Inquiry, hearing transcript, 2014.
16 May 2011, conference call – Recording of a conference call between Ed Moloney, Anthony McIntyre, Carrie Twomey, Wilson McArthur, Bob O’Neill and Tom Hachey, 16 May 2011.
Police Ombudsman’s Report – ‘Report into the Complaint by James and Michael McConville Regarding the Police Investigation into the Abduction and Murder of Their Mother Mrs Jean McConville’, Police Ombudsman for Northern Ireland, 18 July 2006.
Prologue: The Treasure Room
The Jesuits who founded: Charles Donovan, Paul FitzGerald and Paul Dunigan, History of Boston College: From the Beginnings to 1990 (Chestnut Hill, Mass.: University Press of Boston College, 1990), pp.2–3.
sell to Sotheby’s: ‘FBI Busts Librarian Accused of Stealing Books’, United Press International, 8 October 1986.
call the FBI himself: ‘Librarian Helps Foil the Theft of Irish Artifacts’, New York Times, 1 September 1991.
It is a secure space: O’Neill affidavit.
One summer day in 2013: ‘US Hands Over Bomber Dolours Price’s Secret Interview Tapes to PSNI’, Belfast Telegraph, 8 July 2013; interview with Ed Moloney.
There were MiniDiscs containing: Interviews with Ed Moloney and Anthony McIntyre.
Chapter 1: An Abduction
Jean McConville was thirty-eight: ‘Snatched Mother Missing a Month’, Belfast Telegraph, 16 January 1972. There have been conflicting accounts of Jean’s date of birth. Her daughter Helen has said that she was born in 1935, and the age of death cited on Jean’s headstone – thirty-seven – would also suggest that she was born in 1935. Most press accounts describe her as having been thirty-seven when she disappeared. But according to her birth certificate, which I obtained, her actual date of birth was 7 May 1934, which means that she was thirty-eight.
sweet-eyed twins: Unless otherwise noted, details in this section are drawn from several interviews with Michael McConville. Ann McConville was born on 28 November 1952, and died 29 September 1992; she suffered from tuberous sclerosis. The detail about the fourteen children being carried to term is from Susan McKay, ‘Diary’, London Review of Books, 19 December 2013.<
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The cooker in the new flat: Interview with Archie and Susie McConville.
when somebody knocked: Ibid.
must be Helen: ‘Snatched Mother Missing a Month’, Belfast Telegraph; Archie McConville deposition.
precisely how many there were: In most of the McConville children’s recollections, the number is eight. See, for example, Archie McConville deposition. But in some accounts, the children have suggested that there were more. In an interview with Susan McKay, Helen maintained that the gang consisted of ‘four women and eight men’, though Helen was not in fact at home at the time of the abduction and returned only later. See Susan McKay, ‘Diary’, London Review of Books. 19 December 2013. In an interview with me, Michael McConville put the number between ten and twelve.
carrying a gun: Interviews with Michael, Archie and Susie McConville.
‘What’s happening?’: ‘Sons Recall 30 Years of Painful Memories’, Irish News, 24 October 2003; Agnes McConville interview, Marian Finucane Show, RTÉ Radio, 23 November 2013.
children went berserk: Interview with Michael McConville.
only a few hours: Archie McConville deposition.
not strangers: Interview with Michael McConville.
There was nobody: Interview with Archie McConville; ‘Sons Recall 30 Years of Painful Memories’, Irish News, 24 October 2003.
He kept close: Ibid.
barrel into his cheek: Interview with Archie McConville; Archie McConville deposition.