Tale of a woman who died and a woman who killed in the Northern Ireland conflict

Patrick Radden Keefe's book Say Nothing was reviewed in the Washington Post.

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.

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.