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- [00:01]
Anita Arnan
If you want access to bonus episodes, reading lists for every series of Empire, a chat, community discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcast ad, free listening and a weekly newsletter, sign up to empire club@www.empirepoduk.com.
- [00:29]
William Durimpel
Hello and welcome to Empire with me, Anit and me, William Durimpel. It's just been such a rip roaring ride with Patrick Raden Keefe, the author of say Nothing. We've praised it to high heaven. I'll do it again. I think it's a masterful telling of the troubles.
- [00:46]
Anita Arnan
One of the great non fiction books of our time.
- [00:48]
William Durimpel
Yes, a Truman Capote of our time, I think you said last time and I think that's probably true. Patrick, thank you very much for being with us. We're going to pick up the baton from the last episode which we ended on Father Alec Reid who was administering last rites and trying to deliver CPR to one of the off duty soldiers who's dying in this funeral scene. And the carnage is sort of, it seems as if it's reached the absolute nadir of horror with, you know, pictures of him with blood across his mouth. But it does kick start a start of a peace process which will last for 10 years and take 10 years to germinate. The seeds were planted at the last episode. We should say we're going to talk a lot more about Gerry Adams, Gene McConville and the two Price sisters in this episode. We should start by saying that, you know, Gerry Adams denies still ever being part of the ira. Has that been tricky for you to navigate? But he hasn't sued you, has he? I mean we just get that very clear. Everything that you've written. He hasn't taken you to court for any of it, has he?
- [01:44]
Patrick Radden Keefe
I mean, in some ways, actually this question is a kind of a useful way back into what we were talking about because Gerry Adams was in the ira. I mean I document this in my book. There are many people who are in the IRA with him who have said as much. But he also was really instrumental in helping lead this political process that ends up giving rise to the peace process. And so it's in, right around the period where we left off really in, in the 1980s when Jerry Adams starts denying that he had ever been in the ira, he says not, not only am I not in the ira, I was never in the ira. I'm a political leader. I've been a political activist, a Republican activist. Now I would contend to you that that was a lie. I think it was a really Politically convenient lie. He has a kind of virgin birth, right? He sort of. He's able to become this figure who is a political interlocutor. Somebody who can run for office and win office, who represents people who, you know, notionally is somebody who can help be a peace negotiator. Somebody who eventually is given a visa during the Clinton administration to come to Washington D.C. so he's no longer the same kind of international pariah. It's like a lie he tells, but a really expedient one in terms of where things are going. And then the problem is it's one that he's stuck with. So it hasn't been that hard for me in my writing. I try and document everything that I can and sort of make the case. I always acknowledge that Adams denies the very premise that he was ever in the ira. But I think that at this point, you'd be hard pressed to find somebody who takes that denial, all that seriously.
- [03:25]
William Durimpel
Let's pick up on one of the stories that we started in the last episode, and that is the disappearance of Jean McConville. And so we talked about how she was taken from her family, her sort of children crying from Divis Flats in Belfast in December 1972. She's disappeared. She's one of those. You know, we talk about the disappeared mostly in relation to South America, but it was happening in Northern Ireland, too. And her family have no idea what has become of her. And we should go back to those children. Actually. I think we haven't really done them the service they deserve because they have already lost their father to cancer. They've lost their mother to God knows where, because they don't know. Except somebody does come to their flat with some of her belongings, don't they? So they have a good idea.
- [04:13]
Patrick Radden Keefe
Yeah. So she disappears that night. The children expect her to come back. She doesn't. Days go by. They're basically looking after themselves.
- [04:22]
Anita Arnan
Running feral.
- [04:23]
Patrick Radden Keefe
Yeah. Yeah, they really are. Food is running out. They have older siblings who, some of whom are working. And so there's a little bit of money here and there, but. But not much, not enough. And they turn to the church. And the church, interestingly, I got all this documentation, but the church kind of spurns them, essentially. There are the notes from a social worker who checked in on the children, who said that the church had been not particularly sympathetic.
- [04:48]
William Durimpel
And is that because they think they're the children of a tout. The term, in case you missed, it was of an informant. That's the story that has swirled around.
- [04:56]
Patrick Radden Keefe
Jean McConville one little caveat I would add to that, and it's funny, this is a thing I've encountered in other historical contexts, as I'm sure you two have. Sometimes there's a tendency to look back on what you might regard as the kind of the callousness or the heartlessness of people during wartime towards others. And I do think it's important to remember that, you know, there's always a kind of triage in those situations and in an incredibly violent period with lots of upheaval and lots of injustice left and right. It may also be that they just kind of got lost in the. In the shuffle. But you're absolutely right that not long after Jean disappears, a young man shows up at the door and he hands them her rings that she had had when she was taken away. And for at least one of her children, that was kind of the moment when he realized, she's not coming back, she's probably dead.
- [05:48]
Anita Arnan
But on the other hand, a postcard turns up from Blackpool and they cling.
- [05:52]
Patrick Radden Keefe
On to that, and they do. And this is the cruelty of forced disappearance as a tactic is that some of the children, even after those rings come, they just didn't want to believe that their mother was dead. And so they would have these kind of ideas of, you know, what if she got amnesia, right? Or there's some issue that she' got some medical issue, she's going to pop up. They stayed in that flat and didn't want to leave. And in fact, eventually social services comes in and removes them all. They were clinging to the flat because they said, well, we have to be here when she gets back. And at some point there is a postcard that arrives from Blackpool made out to the McConville family with no further text on it. And they decided it must be that for some reason she's gone to Blackpool. And she sent us this postcard. And I should say this was a tactic that was used with other disappearances as well, that there were other people who were disappeared by the ira. And then what would happen is somebody would say, oh, I've just seen him in, in London, or I spoke to someone who said he went to Australia, the families would be sort of told these stories. And this was obviously at a very different time than today where if somebody vanished one day and then you heard they went off to Australia, there was no Internet, there was no kind of easy way to fact check that. And so the younger children end up getting split up and sent to. And the saddest thing about this story is that they had really wanted to be together. They sort of had the wherewithal, even at that age, to say, listen, if you're gonna put us in homes, at least put us together. And the state separated them.
- [07:23]
William Durimpel
They are the most hurt in this story of a whole sort of island of hurt. Their story kind of breaks my heart, to be honest. And also, I mean, Michael, one of the sons, just months after the disappearance, suffers again. Just tell us what happens to Michael, because he's still a child. I mean, he's still just a teenager. What happens to him?
- [07:42]
Patrick Radden Keefe
Well, so some of the kids had been asking around. Basically, they'd been sort of going out. This is before they ended up in the homes. They were going out, inquiring about what had happened to their mother. And this turns out to have been a dangerous thing to do. And so Michael, at a certain point, is basically abducted by a group of kids who are sort of the youth wing of the ira, who tie him up and tell him to stop asking questions about his mother. And they stab him with a pen knife. You know, not fatally or anything, but a very scary incident. And so the community is telling these poor children, I mean, Michael's 11 at the time.
- [08:17]
William Durimpel
Oh, he's 11. He's not even a teenager. God, he's just a kid. Yeah.
- [08:20]
Patrick Radden Keefe
Telling them, you know, don't ask questions about what happened to your mother.
- [08:24]
William Durimpel
So the McConville children sort of scattered to the wind. Some of them absolutely adamant that they are going to get to the bottom of this. Growing up in this haze of, you were our neighbors who did this to us. Some of you know what's happened to our mother. Our mother's never coming back. We want to know.
- [08:40]
Anita Arnan
They keep spotting people, don't they, who they recognize from the night that their mother was abducted. Someone in a choir and someone in a taxi.
- [08:48]
Patrick Radden Keefe
This is the strangest thing about this story, is that Northern Ireland is so small. And listen, there are other. I mean, you could tell a similar story about Sarajevo or any number of other types of places where there's been a conflict. Rwanda, and then the conflict ends. And everybody still kind of lives in the same community. And you see these people. And so in the case of the McConvilles, the thing you mentioned about the choir was actually a scene that was fictionalized in the television series, I think, very effectively. I think what they were doing was. Was trying to take all of these different emotional dynamics and distill them into one, one scene. But, you know, there's an instance, even as adults, where Helen McConville was with her own family in McDonald's and sees one of the people who abducted her mother. There's a moment that I describe in the book where Michael McConville actually gets into the back of a black taxi in Belfast as an adult, and he sees in the mirror in the front of the taxi, he realizes that the man driving him is one of the people who decades earlier abducted his mother. And the strangest, most eerie aspect of this is he doesn't say anything, and he doesn't even know if that guy recognizes him. And they drive in silence, and then he just pays the guy his money and leaves.
- [10:07]
William Durimpel
It's such unthinkable pressure. But there is a glimmer of hope, not just for the McConville family, but for any who have lost loved ones or want answers as to what happened to loved ones. In 1994, there is a ceasefire, and that gives at least some space for people to start asking questions. I mean, what. What happens after the ceasefire is declared in 1994?
- [10:27]
Patrick Radden Keefe
So you have a ceasefire. And these families who had been dealing with this tragedy at this point for two decades, feeling pretty isolated, kind of thinking they were the only ones who had experienced this, start very, very tentatively to speak out and say, you know, now that the ceasefire's happened, I'd like to know what happened to my mother. What happened to Jean McConville, where did she go? And at the point where some of the McConville start speaking out, there are these other families that say, well, we lost somebody too during this period. We had our own disappearance. And there's a group that bands together and eventually is formed called the Families of the Disappeared. And they start having press conferences and they start asking questions. And I should say it's very dangerous for them to do this. I mean, it. It requires an enormous amount of courage to step out and speak up and say, I want answers. Because everybody knows who the perpetrator is. In this case, it's the ira. But the really fascinating thing to go to, what we were talking about with Gerry Adams, is that they have a leverage, these families as well, which is this is at a point where Sinn Fein is really trying to position itself as a credible interlocutor in an emerging peace process. And so when these families step out and they say, okay, well, look, if you're really committed to peace, we've got a few questions. Where are the bodies? What happened?
- [11:50]
William Durimpel
Yeah, so, I mean, that. That is going on. At the same time, we ought to cast an eye on the two sisters that we talked about so much in a couple of other episod the Price sisters. You know, all of this is going on, there are news reports, there are, you know, pictures on their screens. So they're sitting at home, they're looking at Jean McConville's face. This is all stirring up a period of time where they were hugely active and they too have suffered for their cause. I mean, just to remind people, they went on hunger strike, they almost died on hunger strike for, you know, what they believed in. But there is a buildup of something, particularly in Delors Price. I just talk us through what is the beginning of her awakening of conscience, if I may put it that way. It just feels like that.
- [12:32]
Patrick Radden Keefe
Well, just to take her back to where we left her, Britain blinked and she was sent with her sister to a women's prison in Northern Ireland to serve out their sentences. And they had had 20 year sentences. But what ends up happening is they find themselves in Armagh Prison, a women's prison. And particularly Dolores is sort of says that she's kind of turned over a new leaf. She's abandoned violence. She doesn't think that that's the way anymore. But the more relevant factor is that these sisters who had gone on hunger strike, you'll recall, almost died on hunger strike from starving themselves, then been force fed for over 200 days, and then almost died again from starving themselves before being sent to Armagh Prison. These sisters both developed terrible eating disorders. And the explanation that Dolores gave was your whole relationship with the process of nourishing your body when it kind of has this political valence to it and the sense that to eat is to blink, to eat is to compromise, you just kind of undo this very basic function, the conditioning. And so they both end up terribly anorexic and both sisters are released early. So it's. They end up doing about a decade in prison, close to, but nevertheless being released quite early. Controversially, I mean, Ian Paisley was not happy about this because there was a sense that if they stayed in prison, they might die at this point from their eating disorders. So Dolores comes out and very dramatically within a couple of years of getting out of prison, she gets married in a secret ceremony at Armagh Cathedral to the actor Stephen Ray, who she had encountered earlier on. Again, these are the kinds of details where if I'd written this book as a novel, you sort of wouldn't believe it. But Stephen Ray was a guy that she had encountered early on in the actually in the kind of peace protests in the late 60s, early 70s, but then he also was acting in the play in London that she went to see the night before she bombed London. And she ends up coming out of prison marrying Stephen Ray.
- [14:50]
Anita Arnan
And if anyone is listening to this and doesn't recognize that name, Google Stephen R E A because he is a very familiar face from every good Irish movie you've ever seen. From Michael Collins through to the Crying Game and all those wonderful Neil Jordan movies.
- [15:06]
Patrick Radden Keefe
Yeah. A tremendous stage and. And screen actor and a guy who I think it would be fair to say certainly when they met, was quite sympathetic to Dolos politics. And so she then has this period of time when she's kind of, you know, she's like an actor's wife. She's like the wife of a celebrated actor. And so crazily she ends up going back to London and living in Maida Vale and going to sort of fancy parties and openings. And so she's sort of living this interesting life, you know, a bit overshadowed by her husband who, you know, she had at one time been the more famous of the two and now it's the opposite.
- [15:44]
William Durimpel
But they have kids and she has, you know, there's a life that's. That's growing out of all of this.
- [15:49]
Patrick Radden Keefe
There's a life and they are building, you know, what I think could have been a happy life. But she also clearly has terrible ptsd. And she develops a drinking problem and she's really abusing prescription pills. She would later tell stories about, you know, having these kind of terrifying moments where one of the disappeared, who we haven't mentioned is a guy named Joe Lynskey. Who was a friend of hers who she had to drive to his death. He was in the ira. And at a certain point she's driving around and she's got her kids in the backseat of the car. And she looks in the rearview mirror back at her children. But she sees Jo. She sees the face of this friend who she had driven to his death. And so she gets these kind of flashes. And as all of this is happening, she's kind of got these kind of misgivings of what happened during this period of her life. Which was on the one hand the most dramatic and exciting. Her life now kind of pales with her life. Then on the other hand, it was a period in which she was doing these awful things. And as all this is happening, her one time friend Jerry Adams is sort of assuming a bigger and bigger role on the international stage.
- [16:57]
William Durimpel
This great statesman kind of level.
- [16:59]
Patrick Radden Keefe
He's the statesman. He's going to help achieve this peace. And so she already feels a sort of a sense of resentment in that respect. But even more so, when asked about the ira, Gerry Adams says, oh, well, I was never in the ira. And so there's this sense that she's suffering this trauma for these things that she did. And what she said was, there were things that I did that he ordered me to do. I did them on his orders. And he is kind of free of all that. He sort of achieved escape philosophy.
- [17:25]
William Durimpel
She's not the only one feeling it. And Brendan Hughes as well, who sort of famously, if you Google him, and also they do this in the screen adaptation of your book. He has a photo on his wall of him and Gerry Adams. You know, they were great mates. They formed a great friendship when they were in what will become known as the Mays Prison. You know, they spend time together, they have this sort of brotherhood. And he too, feels, hang on a minute. What was all that about? What was it for? What did I do all these things for? So there's a haunting that goes on for a lot of these people.
- [17:54]
Anita Arnan
They think of themselves, both of them, as being Gerry Adams squad members.
- [17:59]
Patrick Radden Keefe
Yeah. And I think there was a feeling that when they were young, that there was no daylight between any of them. And then there are a couple of things that happened. I mean, one of them is that the peace process ends up being quite a surprise to them in the sense that they expected that if there was going to be some kind of negotiated settlement, it would be one that that fundamentally entailed a united Ireland, because that was kind of the point of all of the violence. And my take on these two people in particular, I think there were others like them. But the two that I focus on, Dolores Price and Brendan Hughes, is that I don't think they were psychopaths. It would feel sort of morally comforting to think that they were just awful people who did these things because they were evil. The more unsettling thought is that they made a rational political calculation that in order to achieve the outcome that we want and get Irish independence, we have to employ violence, and that that means will be justified by the end. So the challenge is, as the peace process evolves and ends up culminating in the Good Friday Agreement in 1998, you realize that you're not going to get that outcome. And for them, they're sort of haunted by this, to use your word, because their sense is, well, wait, then, why did we do all of that? How do we justify the things we did?
- [19:21]
William Durimpel
And those questions which are going round and round in their heads, it's Building up like a pressure cooker in both of those people in Brenda Hughes and also Dolorous Price, but others as well. Join us after the break where we find out about one particular valve that allows some of that pressure out. We're going to be talking about the stories they can share later on in life.
- [19:49]
Anita Arnan
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- [21:04]
William Durimpel
Welcome back. Let's talk about the way in which that pressure on those who did serve the ira. And as you were saying, you know, not psychopaths. I mean, let's not forget the first time we meet Dolores Price is when she's almost being drowned and beaten to death on a peace march because she does believe that there is a peaceful resolution to the conflict in Northern Ireland. And she's now at this stage in her life. She's a mother, she's got kids. She's seeing the people that she's driven to their deaths in her rearview. There's gotta be some way of letting all of this out. What shape does that come in?
- [21:37]
Patrick Radden Keefe
The really big moment that is the catalyst for all this is 1998. You get the Good Friday Agreement, which ends the Troubles.
- [21:44]
Anita Arnan
And we're gonna have an episode after this with Alastair Campbell, who was part of all that. He'll be coming on the show and telling us firsthand from an eyewitness what it was like to be part of that.
- [21:55]
Patrick Radden Keefe
And I'll look forward to listening to that. Episode. But I think the one key, important thing to remember about the Good Friday Agreement is it's this diplomatic miracle in which they end this conflict that's been going on for three decades. But in order to achieve this. This kind of compromise, they can really only think about the future. They don't address the past. There's no sense of how do we deal with the past. What, who gets prosecuted? Does anyone get prosecuted? Who gets immunity?
- [22:21]
Anita Arnan
And there's no Truth and Reconciliation Committee like South Africa.
- [22:24]
Patrick Radden Keefe
Yeah, exactly. And so the thing I always think about there is I talked to an Irish Republican once, a former Irish Republican prisoner who'd spent a lot of time in South Africa. And I said, why was there not a truth and reconciliation process like there was in South Africa for Northern Ireland? And he said, well, because in South Africa there was a winner. And the. The only way that you can achieve that kind of thing sometimes is that you need somebody who's. Who's sort of got enough leverage that they can force that kind of a process. So you end up with this vacuum. You get this. This piece that everybody, I think, rightly celebrated, but people like Dollars Price and Brendan Hughes are left feeling both this kind of sense of moral injury where they say, well, wait, we didn't get a united Ireland, so how do we justify those things we did? But also that their history is being erased, that the history of. Of their war is being erased. And in that vacuum, a project is born at Boston College. This is in the immediate aftermath of the Good Friday Agreement. There's a kind of a sense that it's kind of the end of history and that there is no provision for recording all that history. And so there's this project called the Belfast Project, which gets funding, and they enlist an Irish journalist, a guy named Ed Maloney, who had written some very good books on the Troubles, to run this project in which they would gather interviews, testimony from paramilitaries on both sides, both the Republican and the Loyalist sides, and then keep that testimony kind of sealed up because it would be quite radioactive to release it in the moment. What they said to people was, come in, speak freely, talk. For in some cases, you know, these. There was many, many interviews. They talked for 12, 13, 14 hours and tell us about your experiences on the front lines, and then we will seal it up until your death, and you won't have any worries about repercussions while you're alive. And both Dolores Price and Brendan Hughes ended up giving these interviews.
- [24:23]
Anita Arnan
And they're incredibly frank. They're really pouring their Hearts out. They think that they're speaking completely off the record for history. So they're saying things they haven't admitted even to themselves.
- [24:32]
William Durimpel
In many cases, not quite off the record. They say they want it on record, but not to be released until they die. That's the agreement. That's the way this is going to work. I mean, they absolutely want it on record because, as Patrick was saying, they feel like they've been deleted, but not until after they die. And that's an important promise.
- [24:48]
Patrick Radden Keefe
That's exactly right. They both are thinking very much about the historical record. And I should say, I mean, these things are quite fraught, right? So eventually Adams and his people who are sympathetic to him would kind of denigrate this testimony and say, oh, this is all just kind of a get Adams exercise. And I think they're not altogether wrong in the sense that I think part of what was motivating both Dolores Price and Brendan Hughes was a sense of a kind of antagonistic sense that they wanted to get back at Adams. I think the problem is assuming that that means they made things up. I think it's more that they wanted to tell the truth and commit it to the record because they felt as though he had so skillfully kind of evaded any real reckoning with his own history.
- [25:33]
Anita Arnan
And at this point, Adams himself tries to denigrate them and he talks about dollars of having a drink problem and having too many pills, which kind of stokes their fire, doesn't it?
- [25:43]
Patrick Radden Keefe
Well, yeah. So you've got to remember we're talking when. We're talking about the period of time when they gave the interviews. At this point, the project is secret. Adams doesn't know about the project. It's in the early aughts. So this is really kind of 20 years ago that we're talking about 20 years ago now, kind of 2001, 2, 3, 4, sort of in there. And Adams doesn't know that they're secretly talking to the project. He does know that they are speaking out against the Good Friday Agreement and the way it was all handled. And at that time, he starts to distance himself from these people, which only makes them more angry because they feel as though this is my former commanding officer who's kind of disowning me now. And you end up in this situation in which these interviews which they gave, I should say, not to some academic researcher, but to a guy named Anthony McIntyre, who himself was a former member of the Iraq and somebody who was a good friend of theirs and quite sympathetic to them. And so Somebody who they kind of trusted and felt comfortable with and somebody, I should say, who. Who shared their dim view of Gerry Adams. So this was not what you would think of as a kind of pristinely academic exercise. It was more a very intimate dialogue between people who had been together in the trenches, kind of telling war stories about the bad years.
- [27:03]
William Durimpel
The one thing I suppose people are desperate to know is, did they talk about Gene McConville? Did they say what happened to Gene McConville?
- [27:10]
Patrick Radden Keefe
Yeah, I mean, it's amazing. So Brendan Hughes did talk about it. Dolores Price has this incredible moment in her interview with Anthony McIntyre, which I've talked to Anthony McIntyre about. And this would be an area in which it might have been better to have an academic researcher. Of course, there's all kinds of things that she probably wouldn't have said if you had somebody she wasn't as comfortable with. But at a certain point she said to Anthony McIntyre, I had something to do with Gene McConville's death, and I think I want to talk about it. And the interviewer said, don't do it, Dollars, not on tape. And what he said to her, he has. He has a particularly poetic way of talking, this guy. He said, you know, if you acknowledge having had something to do with the killing of Gene McConville, your children will wear the mark of Cain. And so he turned off the tape recorder and then she told him, did.
- [28:08]
William Durimpel
You actually listen to all of those tapes? Have you had the chance to hear their voices? I'm just very curious to know what they sounded like when they were talking and saying these things.
- [28:16]
Patrick Radden Keefe
So I've listened to parts of Brendan's and I have a transcript of Brendan's complete interview. But all of this went spectacularly awry because initially this archive was set up with an idea that it would not be a kind of football of the political or the law enforcement process. You know, the idea is we won't release the tapes until people are dead, and so you can't use it to prosecute people and what have you. And it would really just be available to historians and journalists and families who wanted to know what might have happened to their loved ones and what have you. You. And it was all secret. But then what ended up happening is the Dor couldn't stop herself from talking about it. She sort of couldn't wait until she was dead and her tape would come out. And so she was giving interviews to the press. She would get drunk at night and call journalists. And word filtered out that there was this archive on the other Side of an ocean full of the reminiscences of IRA members talking about the illegal things they did when they were in the Iraq. And at this point, the police service of Northern Ireland decided to subpoena the archive to say to Boston College, now, hang on, you have all these records of these confessions of these IRA members. We'd like those, please.
- [29:35]
Anita Arnan
And it couldn't happen today that an American university would buckle in the face of the law. We'd never see anything like that. Can you imagine that?
- [29:43]
Patrick Radden Keefe
They would completely fold at the arrival of the first sternly worded letter.
- [29:47]
Anita Arnan
But this is exactly what happens again.
- [29:49]
William Durimpel
So when. When all of that stuff then becomes public. Jean McConville. Jean McConville. In my head is Jean McConville, because her family's still looking for her body. They still want to know what's happened to her. They do get some. I mean, as part of the peace process. They say there can't be any peace until we know where we want to bury our mother. There is a false start, isn't there? In. In their quest to find their mother, how are they told that actually she might be buried here? There is a moment where they think they found her.
- [30:15]
Patrick Radden Keefe
So what ends up happening is that the IRA acknowledges having disappeared people because of the organization of those families speaking out. The IRA acknowledges that, yes, they did disappear people. They have a list of people. Initially, it's an incomplete list, and the IRA is scrambling to try and find these bodies. But you can imagine these are people who are disappeared in the early 1970s. People's memories change. You have all kinds of situations in which they're buried at night or, you know, somebody says, oh, it was a. I buried them by that copse of trees, but the trees have since been cut down or what have you. I mean, there's all kinds of reasons why it's difficult to find the bodies. And in the case of Gene McConville, there are these false starts where there's information and the family will gather in certain places and there will be these digs. And I should tell you, I mean, just as recently as this morning, I got news they thought that they'd found another of the members of the Disappeared, but it turned out it was a mistake. And the person that they dug up with the DNA tests proved that it was not this person. So this is even going on today in 2025. But it starts back in the 1990s when you start to get these digs and the family gathers around, and eventually what happens is in 2003, there's a storm that sort of churns up the ground near this beach. And there's a guy walking on the beach with his dog. And the dog starts pulling at some fabric it finds coming out of the sand near the edge of a parking lot. And it turns out that these are the remains of Jean McConville. So it's not found because the IRA gave the name. It was found just by a civilian walking along.
- [31:51]
Anita Arnan
And very poignantly, the clothes have attached to them the safety pin that she always wore, which all the children remember her having on her the night that she was taken away.
- [32:02]
William Durimpel
A blue safety pin? Yeah, that's it, isn't it? They can't identify very much, but she has that.
- [32:09]
Patrick Radden Keefe
The children called it their nappy pin that you can imagine. A mother of 10 kids was always sort of needed one handy. And so she would have this blue pin on her clothes and that when the children went in to see these basically just bones and some old clothes. There's a very heartbreaking moment, actually, where one of her children says, is there a nappy pin? And the people in the morgues initially say, no. And so then they think, oh, well, maybe it's not her. And then they fold over the lapel of the sweater and it's there.
- [32:36]
William Durimpel
Can I ask you what we found out, though, about the accusations made about Jean McConville? Because you looked into this, There are the tapes. I think Brendan Hughes says, yeah, she probably wasn't out. I don't know what you get from the body of evidence that you've looked at, because there'll be now police records that are opened up, a part of the police process. Some of those will be open. What do we know of what Jean McConville was?
- [32:58]
Patrick Radden Keefe
I mean, I'm sort of tempted to say it's a controversial question, but I don't know. I don't know. On the basis of all the evidence I've seen, I can tell you for certain that the IRA really ardently believed that Gene McConville was an informant. Her children pushed back hard on this and said, come on, what could she possibly have been informing on? This was a woman who was struggling to take care of her own kids. What could she possibly have known? According to Brennan Hughes, there was a radio found in her apartment and that she presumably would have been communicating with the British army about movements of the IRA using this radio. And there are some people who very ardently believe that because Brennan says this, it must be the case. Now, Brennan didn't see the radio himself, interestingly, in this same story, what he says is that the IRA found this radio and then said, oh, well, we're just going to take it away. Please don't do it again. Which I find a little tough to buy, that they would have been quite so forgiving. And then indeed, that a second radio was found, that her handlers in the army gave her a second radio, which just seems kind of suicidal, right, that she would take in a second radio. So her children have questions about that. Nuala oh Lone, the police ombudsman for Northern Ireland, did an investigation in which she said that there were no records found to indicate that Jean had been an informant. I don't know that I find that dispositive, necessarily, in the sense that there's been a long history of the British army and the British government deleting, burning, you know, not disclosing records. But listen, here's the thing. There's a whole chapter in my book about this in which I kind of go in very deep in the television series. They kind of had to decide something because they're not going to litigate it all. And so I think that the writers sort of decided on balance that they thought she probably wasn't an informant. This was probably some sort of a. A mistake on the part of the ira. My issue is this. It's more that there's been a lot of ink spilled on this question of whether or not Jean McConville was an informant. But even if she was, I don't think it in any way diminishes the terrible cruelty of what happened to her. So to me, on some level, it kind of doesn't matter that much. You know, we could argue about it for days. I think the notion that that becomes the big question. I sort of worry ends up becoming a little bit of a tacit justification of what happened to her.
- [35:26]
William Durimpel
Let's talk about the end of Dolores as well, because, you know, so we had her venting to anybody who would listen. She's done the tapes. She wants the tapes released quicker than her death. But her death is not far away. So just tell us how her life ends.
- [35:42]
Patrick Radden Keefe
Very tragically. I mean, she, I think, was in a bit of a tailspin in her final years. Her marriage did not survive this whole process. It sounds as though it was. The domestic situation was quite unhappy. I think she needed a lot of help. She was getting help, but probably needed more than she was getting. And there's another kind of fascinating thing which is happening here, which is that she had, throughout her life been very close with her sister Marian. And Marian ends up continuing to embrace the cause of violence. Essentially, Marion goes back to prison as a woman in, in middle age because she's working with some of these IRA kind of splinter groups, these, these dissident republican groups.
- [36:30]
Anita Arnan
She's linked to a throwaway mobile telephone which is used to call in a bomb scare.
- [36:37]
Patrick Radden Keefe
Not a bomb scare, no, but in fact to call in responsibility for a shooting which happened in which a number of people were killed at a British army base, including a pizza delivery guy who was an immigrant from Poland. And that guy deserved to die, according to this group, because he was feeding the empire by supplying these pizzas. So Dolores does not continue to be actively involved in that same way. So there's a little bit of a fissure between her and her sister. And she ends up dying of an overdose, basically. She's, she's found dead by her son. She had been drinking, she'd been taking a lot of prescription pills. So she ends up dying and being buried in this, to me, very kind of heart rending scene in which all of these people who'd known her all those years, going right back to that peace march in 1969, some of them people who continued to advocate for peace the whole time, I mean Irish nationalists, but who always opposed violence all the way through, are there at her burial and give a series of, to me, very moving speeches as they bury her in the rain.
- [37:49]
Anita Arnan
So your book is very closely focused on what happened to Jim Convoy. This is a trail that you have followed for many years and there isn't, in the end, final clinching proof one way or the other. What can you tell us, in your view, what happens to Gina Conville?
- [38:07]
Patrick Radden Keefe
Well, it is something that I look into at great length in the book and I would say, I suppose you might say there isn't final clinching proof, but I'll put it to you this way. I name the person in the book who I believe pulled the trigger to kill Gene McConville. I've been doing this work for more than 20 years and that decision to name somebody was the most momentous decision I've ever made as a journalist and author. It was one that I made with a huge amount of consideration and after consultation with lawyers in New York and London and Dublin and Belfast. And I conclude in the book that the person who killed Gene McConville was Marion Price, that the sisters did this together and it was actually Marion who pulled the trigger. What we know from the interviews that Dolores gave is that after Gene McConville was driven by Dolores Price down across the border and turned over to a local unit of the ira. That local unit concluded the men in that unit that they couldn't bring themselves to kill her. There was a kind of failure of nerve, a loss of nerve on the part of that local unit. And so a call was made to Belfast and the Price sisters went back down across the border. And Jean McConville was taken out to kind of an area near a beach. You remember, she was found on a beach. And so Dollars Price went, and she was accompanied by two other people, and they took Gene McConville out. A grave had been dug. And according to Dolores, there was a discussion about which of them would do the shooting. They had one gun. They passed it from one to the next. There was a second person that we know that she names, whose name was Pat McClure, who was with her, he's now dead. Who had been a guy who also worked in the Unknowns. And then there was a third person who she didn't name, and that was the person who pulled the trigger. And I walk you through in the book the reasoning that got me to that being Marion Price. It's kind of a complicated fact pattern. But Anthony McIntyre, the guy who interviewed Dollars Price for the Belfast Project, had told me early on, he said, I know who shot Gene McConville because dollars price told me who shot Gene McConville. And I'll never tell you who it was, but I will tell you that after that shooting, this person was offered the job of being Jerry Adams driver.
- [40:43]
William Durimpel
We should say here, and you've said it in the book, and also the series does make this clear, that Jerry Adams says, and said in 2024 as recently as that, that he had no involvement in the killing or burial of any of those secretly buried by the ira.
- [40:59]
Patrick Radden Keefe
Yeah, but this seemed very tantalizing to me because I thought, how many people have been Jerry Adams driver? I can probably track down all of Jerry Adams former drivers, and then I'll be able to figure out who kill Gene McConville. But then Anthony told me, no, it doesn't work that way, because the problem is that this person was offered the job but turned down. So somebody who was offered the job of becoming Jerry Adams driver, but never actually became Jerry Adams driver. And I just filed that away and I figured, oh, it's a loose end. I won't be able to do anything with it. And years later, as I was finishing my book after four years of research, I went back over a different interview that Dollars Price had done. With that journalist Ed Maloney, in which she was talking in a different context about the early days in the ira. And there was a line that I had somehow just skipped over. I hadn't known when I first read it what it might mean. And I reread this thing. I often do this in my work. You know, you have to keep revisiting the texts that you have because their meaning will change over time. And I reread this passage in which she was talking about the early years of the ira, and she said, oh, yeah, well, I remember that during that period of time, Jerry Adams had a driver because he asked my sister if she wanted to be his driver, but she said no because she thought it seemed like such a boring job. And I should say this was not the only. This was by itself not enough for me to publish. I mean, to me, that was the moment when I knew. I knew kind of 95% of the way. I went back to Ireland, actually, after that and met with Anthony McIntyre and said to him, here's what I figured out. I'm going to publish this. I know that you won't tell me who it was, but. But if I shouldn't publish this, now's the time to tell me. And he didn't tell me. I had the wrong person. I wrote to Marion Price through her lawyer multiple times and said, I know this. I'm going to publish this in my book. And they never responded. For six months, they didn't respond. So she has subsequently denied it, But I did a great deal of due diligence before publishing the name.
- [42:55]
William Durimpel
Patrick. Just finally, we're going to be looking forward to the big macro picture and the Good Friday Agreements and how all of the Troubles finally came to an end. I mean, what do you think the future of Northern Ireland is? I mean, are we going to have a peace that lasts these things? The Troubles will be forgotten. My kids don't know what they mean because, you know, they're too young. They didn't live through any of that. Or is peace such a fragile beast and you think that maybe, maybe, just maybe, things could go the way they were once again?
- [43:26]
Patrick Radden Keefe
I don't think the Troubles are coming back. I mean, I think that the peace is a very cold peace. And if you go to Northern Ireland today, it is still a very divided society, but the peace is held. And remarkably, it is held through Brexit, which, you know, I mean, there are many elements of Brexit that were misguided, but one of them was the sense in which Brexiteers kind of completely forgot about the history of Northern Ireland and the Troubles and the vexed nature of that border and what monkeying around with it might do for that whole situation. There has been some violence on the margins. I don't, I don't mean to underplay it. And I should also say that there's, there's a kind of younger generation which I think has sort of forgotten people who, who weren't necessarily connected to, they didn't live through the awfulness of the Troubles, who might have a tendency to romanticize that period. But I, I generally think that after what that society has been through, there's no appetite to go back. And so I'm not an alarmist when it comes to the notion of, you know, some resurgence of the Troubles. I think that the present is, is tense and delicate, but I think the history is history.
- [44:34]
William Durimpel
Patrick Ratten, Keefe, such a pleasure to have you. Thank you so very much indeed. From, from both of us. It is a fabulous, fabulous book. The series also magnificent. Go watch, read your hearts out. Let me give you a little bit of advice. Make sure you tap the follow button wherever your podcast platform might be, and you're going to get all our new episodes in your feed whenever they're released. And as we mentioned, next time we're going to be interviewing Alistair Campbell about what really happened at the negotiating table of the Good Friday agreement. But for now, it's goodbye from me.
- [45:08]
Anita Arnan
Anita Arnan, and goodbye from me, William Durmp.