Say Nothing is a remarkable book, fully deserving of its slot on the NY Times 100 best books of the century. It is both a general narrative of the Irish Troubles and a tale of one particular murder, the disappearance of Jean McConville in 1972. The story is mainly told from the IRA point of view with a focus on four people: Gerry Adams, Brendan Hughes, and sisters Marian and Dolours Price.
Many Irish people had never accepted the partition of the island, and there had been sporadic political violence in the north since 1916. But things were mostly pretty quiet in the 1950s and 1960s. What ignited the Troubles was an attempt by some young Catholics to organize a civil rights movement modeled on the one in the US. On October 5, 1968 a group of Catholic civil rights protesters tried to march through a Protestant neighborhood in Derry, and they were savagely attacked by loyalist paramilitaries while the police watched. This and other incidents led some members of the Irish Republican Army to call for a resumption of the "armed struggle" to drive out the British. Older IRA men were not eager for war, so a group of young radicals split away from the main faction and formed the Provisional IRA. It was the "Provos," as people called them, who carried out most of the bombings, shootings and so on over the next twenty years. Well, from the Catholic side, anyway; Protestant paramilitaries carried out plenty, and there were also atrocities committed by the police and the British army.
Two of the leaders of the Provos were Gerry Adams, who was more of a strategist, and Brendan Hughes, who was the operational leader of the Belfast Brigade. Marion and Dolours Price were two of their top soldiers. There is now a lot of oral history of these people, and they described these early days as dangerous and violent but also thrilling. Then they all went to prison. Marion and Dolours staged a famous hunger strike; one of the things I had forgotten about, until this book reminded me, was what a big deal IRA hunger strikes were. Gerry Adams seems to have done a lot of thinking during his prison stint, and to have decided – when is completely unclear – that violence would never drive out the British. So he shifted over from the IRA to become the head of its associated political party, Sinn Fein. His first major move was to have an imprisoned hunger striker, Bobby Sands, run for Parliament as a Sinn Fein candidate. (That was in 1981.) As Adams got more and more into politics and spent more time negotiating with various British, Irish, and American politicians, he began to say that he had never carried out violent acts and had in fact never been a member of the IRA.
One of the best parts of Say Nothing relates what happened to the aging soldiers of the IRA as the violence wound down and the peace process gathered momentum. They were a depressed, alcoholic, drug addicted bunch, and many of the former hunger strikers ended up anorexic. They were also furious with Gerry Adams, who had once ordered them to commit violent acts but now pretended he had never been involved. The old provos complained that they had carried out killings and bombings with one goal in mind: to drive the British out of Ireland. The mishmash compromise of the Good Friday Accords was not what they had in mind. Dolours Price said that this outcome could not justify any of what she had done, that the violence would only have been worth it if it had led to victory.
But there were plenty of other moral quandaries to go around. After peace was more or less established people began to talk and records began to slip out, and it turned out that some of the worst murderers in both the IRA and the loyalists were on the payroll of British intelligence. (One British agent said that two out of every five high-ranking IRA men were informers.) Some British newspapers were outraged; if the government knew about killings, shouldn't they be arresting the killers rather than paying them? In the US we had the same sort of confusion after 9-11; was the counter-terrorism operation more about military intelligence, or policing? Was it more important to prevent future attacks or to put people behind bars?
A book like this raises other questions. Keefe has done a lot of work to understand his IRA subjects, while limiting outrage over what they did. What should our attitude be? I find myself divided. The system in Northern Ireland was blatantly discriminatory, and the police worked in tandem with loyalist paramilitaries to keep Catholics down. The regime that resulted from the Good Friday Accords was much better for Catholics than what had come before. If the violence contributed to that end, it was in a sense beneficial.
But I don't think the violence did contribute very much. I think the main driver of peace in Ireland has been very broad social and economic changes. In 1968 Protestants in the north saw Catholic Ireland as a bunch of superstititious peasants barely out of the Middle Ages, and they wanted nothing to do with that priest-ridden state. To me, the biggest driver of peace has been the enormous economic and social change in Ireland, which has removed most of the issues that drove the conflict. Joining Ireland doesn't seem nearly as drastic or scary as it did in 1968. Meanwhile the economic situation in the north has deteriorated, and they are no longer significantly richer or better-educated than people in the rest of Ireland. As Keefe says, recent attempts by dissident IRA factions to restart the violence have been ignored by young people, who want nothing to do with violence that seems pointless to them.
That kind of progress warms my heart.
1 comment:
While I personally think the violence on the part of the Irish didn't accomplish much of value at all, I think there wasn't really any other option given to them. They tried to conduct peaceful protests, tried to work within the system, tried to achieve change through democracy and law, and all they got for their effort was murdered in the street with the direct approval of the British government.
The Irish gave peace a chance, and the British gave them sneering imperialist cruelty on a shocking scale, and so what recourse was there but to fight back? The extremes the British were willing to go to in pursuit of crushing the Irish into submission, rather than attempting to reach any sort of peaceable accord, are staggering. People seem to forget that the British were violently rounding up the Irish without any evidence of wrongdoing, putting them in literal concentration camps, holding them in squalid conditions indefinitely without their ever even being charged (much less tried), literally torturing them in captivity, and all the while Ulster loyalists were given carte blanche to wage campaigns of terror on their families and friends back home. It's the sort of policy the Nazis would have openly applauded - and then the British had the gall to be shocked that the Irish started shooting and bombing the army and security members who carried out such atrocities.
And what I find fascinating is the degree to which it WAS the men actually responsible for crimes against the Irish who died to Irish retaliation. For as much as the Irish contribution to the fighting gets framed as a terrorism campaign (and there are definitely times when it absolutely devolved into one), there's a shocking degree of truth to the Irish claim that they weren't acting as criminals, but as soldiers fighting a war that the other side didn't want to formally recognize.
Where the Irish lost a lot of moral high ground was in the unintended killings of others - so called "collateral damage", usually caused by bombs that didn't go off at the right time, or which were discovered and tampered with - and later on, starting to resort to intentionally killing innocents in a willing embrace of full blown terrorist tactics.
In fact, more than just moral high ground, the intentional targeting of "civilian" targets lost the IRA a lot of support among the Irish themselves, particularly at the end of the 1980s and going into the 1990s. People could support shooting or blowing up British soldiers who were complicit in the organized oppression of the Irish people, and even accept innocent deaths "caught in the crossfire" to some extent - but most were wholly unwilling to accept indiscriminate killings, blowing up public places like shopping centers or churches, and in particular killing children.
...which, in a way, I feel was a crucial development for peace to finally come. Many in the IRA very much did want to fight until total victory. But decades of slow attrition had taken their toll - the violence had become less precise over the years; less morally defensible; less an act of self defense, more an act of unbridled vengeance. Many young people in the 70s had flocked to the IRA because they saw it as fighting for what was right - but decades later, the young people of the 1990s turned away from the IRA because they saw it as fighting for the sake of cruelty. To many young Irish people, the IRA had become the very thing they had sought to destroy - a bunch of angry, bigoted thugs who felt compelled to hurt innocent people to convince themselves of their own supposed superiority.
Post a Comment