A middle-aged writer returns to his college townto record the final interview with his 90-year-old intellectual mentor. But he’s broken his phone, and doesn’t seem able to confess that it’s not recording … this anxiety dream of a beginning leads us into a series of sharp insights into family, memory, inheritance and storytelling – all that it means to be human, and how smartphones are changing our sense of the world at every level.
Patrick Radden Keefe … ‘I think there are some pretty malign forces, particularly affecting boys, in adolescence.’ Photograph: Maria Spann/The Guardian
The big interview
A gangster, a bogus inheritance and a dead 19-year-old: the mystery Patrick Radden Keefe couldn’t ignore
When Zac Brettler jumped to his death in London, the coroner recorded an open verdict, admitting: ‘I don’t know what happened.’ The acclaimed author of Say Nothing and, now, London Falling, talks about his search for answers Anna MooreTuesdahy 7 April 2026
In the summer of 2023, the American writer and journalist Patrick Radden Keefe was in London for the filming of Say Nothing, the television adaptation of his much-lauded, much-awarded account of a Troubles murder. It was there, on set, that Keefe got talking to a visitor, a friend of the director, who happened to tell Keefe about friends of his, the Brettlers, a London family who had experienced something tragic, strange and terrible.
A new book about the Troubles in Northern Ireland is a detective story about an unsolved murder. It’s also an examination of the cost of achieving peace.
David A. Graham
March 3, 2019
Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern IrelandBY PATRICK RADDEN KEEFE DOUBLEDAY
Nearly 4,000 people were killed in the Troubles in Northern Ireland between the late 1960s and the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, as violent tensions flared between mostly Catholic republicans, who sought unification of Northern Ireland with the Republic of Ireland, and a mix of Protestant paramilitaries, police, and British army forces arrayed against them. People died in shootings and riots and bombings. They were killed in internecine struggles, or while guarding military posts, or while simply going about their daily lives in Belfast.
But a small number, fewer than 20, were “disappeared,” a technique more associated with right-wing South American juntas than with Northern Irish guerrillas. One night in December 1972, masked militants entered a flat in Belfast and abducted Jean McConville, a recently widowed mother of 10. The kidnappers told the children she’d be back soon, but McConville was never seen again. Her body was not found until 2003, and her murder has never been officially solved.
Patrick Radden Keefe’s new book, Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland, presents itself as a detective story: a quest to figure out who killed McConville and why. Keefe is accomplished at unraveling old crimes—as he did with “A Loaded Gun,” his breathtaking 2013 New Yorker article about a mass shooter—and he had an unusual cache of evidence to work with. After the Good Friday Agreement, Boston College created an archive of oral histories of the conflict, which was intended to be sealed until the interviewees were dead. Two of the interviews, with the former Irish Republican Army members Brendan Hughes and Dolours Price, discussed the murder in detail. Keefe was able to work from transcripts of interviews with both Hughes and Price, who had died by the time he wrote the book.
Keefe creates a persuasive account, writing that Hughes ordered McConville’s arrest on the grounds that she was a tout, or informer, a crime the IRA punished by death. (The evidence that she was an informer is vague and dubious at best.) Price drove her over the border into the Republic of Ireland. Three IRA members, including Price, took turns firing a gun loaded with two blanks and one bullet, so that none of them would know until he or she pulled the trigger who would be the killer. Once McConville was dead, she was secretly buried. (Keefe comes to an intriguing conclusion about who fired the fatal shot, though his case is necessarily circumstantial.)
While the murder appalls, McConville herself seems to vanish before the reader’s eyes. She was just 38 when she was killed, and her life is nearly as opaque as her death. Only one photograph of her remains in her children’s possession, and some of them were too young when she died to have much memory of her. Though Keefe notes how her disappearance wreaked havoc on her children’s lives, that’s not his focus. Instead, Say Nothing is about how conflicts end, and who can end them. It is also an indictment of Gerry Adams, the republican politician who helped negotiate the Good Friday Agreement. Keefe alleges that he is the man who decided that McConville should be disappeared.
This story has no heroes, just more and less complicated villains. That mirrors the Troubles, which avoid easy binaries. Whether one sympathizes with Protestant unionists or Catholic republicans, both sides committed horrific abuses, and while Keefe focuses on the IRA, he notes that it is not for lack of atrocities by unionist paramilitaries, the Royal Ulster Constabulary, or the British military. Even McConville’s life shows how stubbornly the conflict resisted simple categorization. She was born to a Protestant family but married a Catholic who was a soldier in the British army. When she was abducted, it was from her apartment in a Catholic neighborhood in Belfast.
Adams continues to deny that he was a member of the IRA, much less involved in McConville’s murder. But through exhaustive research, new interviews, and especially the Boston College transcripts, Keefe vividly reconstructs the foxhole bonds among IRA members and Adams’s role in the organization’s operations, showing why his former comrades were so stung by his abandonment of the armed struggle in favor of politics—and why his claims of innocence ring false.
Price, Hughes, and Adams worked closely together in the early 1970s as members of the Provisional IRA, a breakaway faction of the moribund old Irish Republican Army that embraced violence and disdained electoral politics. Price joined the Provos after being beaten by unionist thugs during a nonviolent 1969 march. Hughes, a daring tactician, was her commanding officer. But, Keefe writes, the wily Adams was the architect of the IRA’s bloody strategy. All three were imprisoned in 1973: Price for her role in a deadly bombing in London, and Hughes and Adams after being arrested together in Belfast and held without trial.
Adams was freed in 1977, Price (suffering from anorexia developed during a hunger strike) in 1981. When Hughes was released, in 1986, he lived at Adams’s house while he got back on his feet. By that time, Keefe notes, Adams had become convinced that independence couldn’t be won through armed struggle alone. Under his new strategy, the IRA would pursue power “with a ballot paper in one hand and an Armalite [rifle] in the other.” In 1983, Adams was elected president of Sinn Féin, the IRA’s political wing, and a member of the British Parliament.
His transformation would become key to peace in Northern Ireland. By deciding to enter politics, Adams created a future in which he could negotiate the 1998 peace agreement, but in the immediate term, it was a risky maneuver that placed him in a perilous position. He was still a target for the Royal Ulster Constabulary, and now also risked retaliation from angry Provos who had killed alleged traitors like McConville with little hesitation. Adams’s solution was to insist that he was never a member of the IRA. This was plainly ridiculous: The press had long called him a leader within the organization, he’d appeared at IRA funerals in the group’s signature black beret, and he had written a pseudonymous piece for the Sinn Féin newspaper, Republican News, that proclaimed, “Rightly or wrongly, I am an IRA volunteer,” and defended violence as a tactic. Adam’s denial of IRA membership was meant to be taken literally, but not seriously—a fiction to protect himself from prosecution while winking at his allies. At a 1995 event, a man shouted, “Bring back the IRA!” and Adams replied, grinning, “They haven't gone away, you know.”
Among the alienated former cohorts were Hughes and Price, whom Keefe brings back to life with the help of the Boston College interviews. Both were critical of Adams publicly, but they were especially harsh in the oral histories. Though neither of them was still involved in violence, they hadn’t denounced it as a tactic, and they resented the handover of weapons under the Good Friday Agreement as a surrender. Price and Hughes had paid dearly for the crimes they said they committed in the IRA’s name—in prison time and physical ailments, but also in haunted consciences. At the time, they had viewed the killings as regrettable parts of a struggle for freedom. Now Adams had nullified the cause while denying his own role. Hughes said that while he once would have taken a bullet for Adams, he now wanted to put one in him. Except that, “as everything turned out,” Hughes said, “not one death was worth it.”
That included McConville, in whose murder both Hughes and Price implicated Adams. Hughes said he’d supported killing McConville, but Adams had ordered, over Hughes’s objections, that she also be disappeared. Price told another interviewer, who provided the unpublished transcript to Keefe, that Adams had given the order to kill McConville, and that the squad that killed her reported back to him afterward. When the Boston College project became publicly known, Northern Irish prosecutors subpoenaed the archive and obtained them. Adams was arrested for McConville’s murder in 2014, but was later released and never charged.
Adams refused to talk to Keefe and has disclaimed all responsibility for the killing, but Keefe compiles a compelling brief to show that he was closely involved in it and in many other episodes. While Adams’s turn to politics seems sincere, a central argument of Say Nothing is that his claims of ignorance and detached condemnations of Provos violence make him a hypocrite who’s been laundered into an elder statesman with a quirky, grandfatherly Twitter feed. Yet while Hughes and Price seemed to wrestle more honestly with their actions, their fidelity to indefinite armed struggle for unification is also indefensible. The IRA had waged a war for decades and came no closer to dislodging the British from Northern Ireland. How many years, and how many deaths, would it have taken to win?
In part because of his denials, Adams was uniquely positioned to make peace when the moment arrived. Widely known as a leader of the Provos, he had the credibility to make political compromises; because he repudiated that past, he had entree into politics. That combination allowed him to join the list of imperfect leaders who have brokered momentous peace agreements. Say Nothing succeeds because it presents an extensive ledger of evidence against Adams, without reducing him to flat caricature. Keefe shows how important Adams’s pragmatism was to creating the fragile, and now threatened, peace in North Ireland, but doesn’t downplay his moral bankruptcy. Keefe recalls that there was once speculation that Adams might win the Nobel Peace Prize. Though he didn’t, Adams would have been at home alongside winners such as Yasser Arafat, F. W. de Klerk, and Henry Kissinger, who were able to strike deals not in spite of but because of their deep flaws.
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Tale of a woman who died and a woman who killed in the Northern Ireland conflict
By Devlin Barrett
Reporter focusing on national security and law enforcement
Devlin Barrett writes about national security and law enforcement for The Washington Post. He has previously worked at the Wall Street Journal, the Associated Press and the New York Post, where he started as a copy boy.
March 8, 2019
Devlin Barrett covers national security and law enforcement for The Washington Post.
Helen McKendry holds a photo of her mother, Jean McConville, left, who was killed in 1972. (Helen McKendry holds a photo of her mother, Jean McConville, left, who was killed in 1972. Photo: Peter Muhly/AFP/Getty Images)
People trying to end a war — even a dirty guerrilla war like the one that gripped Northern Ireland for decades — often say that the terms for peace must honor those who died in the conflict.
“Say Nothing,” Patrick Radden Keefe’s examination of “the Troubles” in Northern Ireland from the late 1960s to the Good Friday Agreement in 1998, provides a fresh accounting of the moral balance sheet not just for those killed but for those who did the killing.
Patrick Radden Keefe
It is fitting that Keefe, an American writer with Irish ancestry but little connection to the place itself, took up the task. Irish Americans have always played an outsize role in that struggle; first, by supporting the Irish Republican Army financially and politically, when its other main source of funding was bank robberies, and second, through the Clinton administration’s push toward the 1998 peace deal.
The book does not attempt to recount the entirety of the Troubles. Instead, it uses one killing — of Jean McConville, a single mother in Belfast slain by the IRA as a suspected “tout,” or informant — to trace the conflict through the lives and deaths of two very different women.
The book begins with McConville’s killing in 1972, and its central character is one of her killers, Dolours Price. Price was about 20 years old when she joined the IRA, and she quickly proved her worth to the organization at a time when a propensity for violence was most valued.
She robbed banks dressed as a nun, she planted bombs, and she was sentenced to decades in prison for explosions in London. In an era of self-styled revolutionaries, the London bombings gave her a level of notoriety.
McConville, by comparison, lived and died in obscurity. A widow and a mother of 10, McConville struggled in 1972 simply to keep her children clothed and fed. One night, a group of armed men and women came to her apartment and took her away over the protests of her children. She was never seen alive again. Her disappearance was not investigated; the only government action taken at the time was to split up her children and ship them off to a variety of grim, punishing institutions.
Patrick Radden Keefe
Many years later, Price confided that she had driven McConville to her death, and she and two others were tasked with the killing. In Price’s telling, she deliberately missed when it was her turn to fire. McConville’s body was dumped in a sandy grave, unmarked and undiscovered for decades.
Keefe’s description of McConville’s killing is haunting, and it seems to have haunted her killers. Years later, Price and some of the others who took part are angry, depressed and drinking heavily, as portrayed by Keefe.
Despite their guilt, they seem certain of one thing: that McConville was an informant for the hated British. Keefe is much more skeptical on that point, and such skepticism seems warranted, at least on the available evidence. In 2006, a police ombudsman declared her innocent of any such activity, saying there were no files to suggest she had ever been an informer for the British government. Yet for all the self-loathing voiced by McConville’s killers, they remain determined not to concede that she might have been innocent. Perhaps they know something that remains buried; perhaps their capacity for guilt only goes so far.
The story of Price’s confession is a saga unto itself.
In 2001, a wealthy Irish American businessman paid $200,000 to fund an unusual project — collecting the oral histories of those who had been footsoldiers and terrorists in Northern Ireland’s sectarian violence. The goal was to gather the accounts of those like Price, who fought to unite the island, as well as the accounts of the loyalists who wanted to remain part of the United Kingdom.
The main impediment to the project, its backers realized quickly, was that all the ex-gunmen and women knew that talking could get them killed. So they offered a condition: Interviews would not become public until the deaths of those who participated.
Among the former IRA members, those who spoke for the project were largely those disenchanted with the direction of Sinn Fein, the IRA’s political arm. Price and others had come to feel that the terms of the Good Friday accord were insultingly meager.
“For what Sinn Fein has achieved today, I would not have missed a good breakfast,” she said in a radio interview. “Volunteers didn’t only die. Volunteers had to kill, as well, you know?”
In private conversations, she laid the blame on her former commanding officer in the IRA, Gerry Adams. A scruffy terrorism suspect in the 1970s, Adams had by the 1990s transformed himself into a prominent politician who denied ever being a member of the IRA. By the time of the Good Friday agreement, even Bill Clinton struggled to know just what to make of Adams and his past, saying, “I don’t know what the real deal is between him and the IRA.” To Keefe, the public uncertainty surrounding Adams’s past is what made the transition to peace possible; those who did not want to be seen as negotiating with a terrorist could say he wasn’t one.
To Price and some of her compatriots, Adams’s new respectability meant he had sold out, given what he had once ordered them to do. It seemed a sick joke that the man who allegedly gave the order to kill McConville would declare, decades later, that her disappearance should be fully investigated. In Keefe’s telling, Adams’s insistence of innocence had a debilitating effect on the executioners — they alone would bear the silent moral burden of her killing and the killings of others.
And so Price and others spoke in secret to the Boston College history project. Their cooperation began spilling out in 2010, with the publication of a book featuring the accounts of two of the participants, and a subsequent conversation Price had with an Irish reporter. With that, Northern Irish police detectives began to demand access to records that could crack old, unsolved killings like that of McConville. After a lengthy battle in the U.S. courts, the detectives were able to review the oral history project’s accounts of McConville’s death. Adams was brought in for questioning, but without a confession there was apparently insufficient evidence to take him to court.
When Price died in 2013 of a toxic combination of medications, Adams did not attend the funeral — he was no longer welcome in the circles of violent Irish republicanism. By then Adams was a member of Parliament in the Republic of Ireland and the leader of Sinn Fein, which he had steered away from its IRA affiliation into a more traditional political party. But another major figure from the Troubles, Bernadette Devlin, spoke at her graveside. Her oration captured the sense of exhaustion that helped end the war.
“We cannot keep pretending forty years of cruel war, of loss, of sacrifice, of prison, of inhumanity, has not affected each and every one of us in heart and soul and spirit,” Devlin said. “It broke our hearts, and it broke our bodies. It changed our perspectives, and it makes every day hard.”
As a cautionary tale, “Say Nothing” speaks volumes — about the zealotry of youth, the long-term consequences of violence and the politics of forgetting.
Say Nothing
A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland
