It is almost 38 years since the Belfast mother was abducted and killed by the IRA, yet no one has been found guilty of her murder

Amanda Foreman

It is almost 38 years ago to the day that a gang of masked IRA men and women in West Belfast burst through Jean McConville’s door. Jean had been recently widowed and was alone in the house, along with seven of her 10 children. “They came into the house and told my mother to put on her coat,” her son Archie, who was 16 then, recalled at the inquest many years later. “We were all in a panic and the children were squealing everywhere. We were afraid of what they were going to do to our mother.”

They waited all night for her return. And the next. Helen, who was 15, tried to look after the younger children, which included her six-year-old twin brothers. There was no word the first week, nor the second. Finally, after three weeks, the now hungry and terrified family were visited by a stranger who gave them Jean’s purse – with 52p still inside it – and her three rings.

Two months after Jean’s disappearance, the family were split up by social services and sent down into the bowels of the system. These children, who had all witnessed their mother’s abduction, were told again and again that she had deserted them.

So what really happened to Jean McConville? Even now, three decades later, there are so many lies and gaps surrounding her story that the picture remains unclear. Her children are unsure about certain details, though not in the important one: “We just waited and waited from that night, for years and years.”

This is what we do know. Jean was originally a Protestant from East Belfast who converted to Catholicism when she married Arthur McConville. The couple suffered sectarian persecution by both communities and they were forced to move around until they ended up in the Falls Road. Jean’s ambiguous status in West Belfast turned ugly after Arthur’s death from cancer in 1971. Her fate was sealed when neighbours allegedly saw her give aid to a wounded British soldier. The bereaved family had only been in their new flat for a week when she was taken away, the day after being beaten up in a bingo hall.

We also now know that she was interrogated and tortured after the abduction; she was beaten with such force that her bones cracked and her hands were mutilated. The actual cause of death was a single shot to the back of the head. Jean was then taken across the border and secretly buried on Shelling Beach in County Louth. For over 27 years, the IRA maintained that it had no connection with her disappearance.

We also now know what happened next in the great catalogue of crimes committed against Jean McConville. Despite receiving two notifications of her abduction, the RUC failed even to record the complaint. CID inquiries in that area of Belfast, it was later explained, “were restricted to the most serious cases” in those days. Not only was nothing done to locate Jean, but the RUC refused to accept that she missing, preferring, instead, to believe the word of an anonymous tip-off that she had absconded with a British soldier.

The only investigation that did take place was into Jean herself. In 2003, a storm washed away part of the embankment supporting the west side of Shelling Beach car park. Jean’s corpse was exposed. The IRA now admitted responsibility for her murder, with the new justification that she had been an informant. Thus began an intense search for the truth – not into who killed her and why – but whether Jean had been responsible for her own death. Was she or was she not an informer? And, therefore, was she or was she not a secret combatant or the victim of a war crime.

For once in Jean’s tragic history, someone did right by her. The lord chief justice, Robert Carswell, ruled that in this one instance the government should break the policy commonly known as NCND (neither confirm nor deny) and reveal any secret service dealings that had taken place with Mrs McConville. There were none. In 2006, the police ombudsman for Northern Ireland, Baroness Nuala O’Loan, ruled that Jean McConville had never been an agent at any time. “She was an innocent woman who was abducted and murdered.”

The RUC has since apologised for its failure to investigate her crime. The IRA has issued a general apology of sorts, saying it “regrets the suffering” of Jean’s family. No doubt there are some people who believe that this is enough to satisfy the demands of justice. There is certainly an argument to be made that the peace process is too important and too fragile to be held hostage by any single case.

But what lies at stake here is not just peace or justice, but the basic values that unite us and define us as a moral society. First, a man has been publicly accused by two of his confederates of ordering Jean’s murder and disappearance. That man is Gerry Adams and his confederates are the late Brendan Hughes, the commander of the IRA Belfast Brigade, and the Old Bailey bomber Dolours Price. Adams, who “rejects” the allegations against him, is standing for the Dáil and has a very good chance of soon being elected member (TD) for County Louth, the same county where Jean was hidden.

Ireland is a member of the International Criminal Court whose charter clearly states that the definition of a war crime includes the murder of civilians in “an armed conflict not of an international character”. Thus a man whose is alleged to be a war criminal, who is alleged to have broken the law in one of the worst crimes in Irish and Northern Irish history, is poised to become a governor and maker of that country’s laws.

Second, though it was a group of individuals who killed Jean McConville, it is society that condoned her persecution in life and afterwards. Prejudice made her fall foul of the IRA because she had Protestant blood and because she had shown mercy to the enemy. Prejudice, because she was a Catholic from the wrong part of town, made her invisible to the officers of law and order. Prejudice, because she was a social outcast, enabled people to trash her reputation. Prejudice, because she was an uneducated woman without means or connections to men in power – or with guns, has allowed her murder to go unpunished.

It is our lack of will that lies behind the continued denial of justice to Jean McConville. Yet there is something that we can do now for her and for ourselves before our silence turns us from spectators into passive accomplices. We can remember her. We can memorialise her and all that she represents. Teach her story to future generations and at least the moral debt owed to Jean McConville can be repaid.

Jean McConville. Jean McConville. Jean McConville.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2010/dec/05/amanda-foreman-jean-mcconville-ira

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‘Say Nothing’ – Part History, Part True Crime – Illuminates the Bitter Conflict in Northern Ireland

SAY NOTHING: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland – By Patrick Radden Keefe

Reviewed by Roddy Doyle Feb. 22, 2019

Some months ago, I was in Belfast on a Friday evening, wandering, killing the time for a few hours. I was passing a secondhand record store and noticed that its door was open. So I went up the stairs, and in. There were no customers flicking through the records, just a man and a woman, both in their early 40s, I thought, sitting on a step, surrounded by empty beer bottles. The man had a joint in his mouth. They stared up at me.

“Are you open?” I asked.

The man took the joint from his mouth and — eventually — said, “I forgot to shut the shop.”

I mention this episode, because it is impossible to imagine it occurring — the wandering, the door left open — in the Belfast I first visited in 1978 when I was 20, or the Belfast described in Patrick Radden Keefe’s “Say Nothing,” which starts with the abduction of a woman called Jean McConville, a young widow and mother of 10 children, in 1972. Keefe homes in on McConville and other individuals and, while doing that, tells a good-sized chunk of the history of Northern Ireland, a place George Bernard Shaw called “an autonomous political lunatic asylum.” In particular, he writes about what became known as the Troubles, and the people who caused or were caught in the Troubles.

The Belfast of “Say Nothing” is a city of religious divisions, security checks, shootings, no-go areas. The city is small; it’s “Blue Velvet,” with none of the velvet. Jean McConville’s children know some of the people who are taking away their mother; they are their neighbors. The last thing she says to the eldest son at home at the time is, “Watch the children until I come back.” But she never does come back. She disappears — she is disappeared.

If it seems as if I’m reviewing a novel, it is because “Say Nothing” has lots of the qualities of good fiction, to the extent that I’m worried I’ll give too much away, and I’ll also forget that Jean McConville was a real person, as were — are — her children. And her abductors and killers. Keefe is a terrific storyteller. It might seem odd, even offensive, to state it, but he brings his characters to real life. The book is cleverly structured. We follow people — victim, perpetrator, back to victim — leave them, forget about them, rejoin them decades later. It can be read as a detective story. There’s a nappy pin (a nappy is a diaper) at the start of the story, and at its end. When the pin reappeared, the novelist in me wanted to whoop but the reader wanted to weep. Because “Say Nothing” isn’t a novel, and that comfort — it’s only fiction — isn’t there. The nappy pin isn’t a novelist’s device; it was a real nappy pin, a small tool carried everywhere by Jean McConville, a mother.

Its closeness to the novel is a strength of “Say Nothing” and — I’m tempted to write — “also a weakness.” But actually, it’s not a weakness, and only rarely a distraction. Occasionally, Keefe lets rip with the similes. “Petrol bombs,” he writes, “broke open on their steel bonnets, blue flame spilling out like the contents of a cracked egg.” That’s asking too much of an egg. On the other hand, his description of Dolours Price, a member of the I.R.A., in jail, on a hunger strike, being force-fed through a thin length of rubber hose, is vivid and quite rightly shocking.

The book is full of the language of my youth, phrases I heard every day — “political status,” “shoot-to-kill policy,” “dirty protest,” “legitimate target.” And it is full of names, names that are more than names — Gerry Adams, Bobby Sands, the Price sisters, Burntollet Bridge, Bloody Sunday, Enniskillen, Margaret Thatcher, Ian Paisley — the names of people and places, events, that carry huge emotional clout, that can still silence a room or start a fight.

It is about who owned the language, or got the most out of it. Yes, the times were known as the Troubles. But as the Belfast writer Jan Carson puts it in her upcoming novel, “The Fire Starters”: “Troubles is too less a word for all of this. It is a word for minor inconveniences, such as overdrawn bank accounts, slow punctures, a woman’s time of the month. It is not a violent word.” So the I.R.A. invented the “armed struggle.” Violence joins injustice — it was the work of a marketing genius and the solid conviction of hundreds, thousands, of men and women: It was their war, their struggle.

What Keefe captures best, though, is the tragedy, the damage and waste, and the idea of moral injury. Dolours Price and many like her believed that, after the signing of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998, she had been robbed of any moral justification for the bombings and abductions. The last section of the book, the tricky part of the story, life after violence, after the end, the unfinished business, the disappeared and the refusal of Jean McConville’s children to forget about her — I wondered as I read if Keefe was going to carry it off. He does. He deals very well with the war’s strange ending, the victory that wasn’t.

While much of the language of “Say Nothing” takes me back to my youth, a new word makes its appearance on one of the final pages: Brexit. “It would be ironic, to say the least,” Keefe writes, “if one inadvertent long-term consequence of the Brexit referendum was a united Ireland — an outcome that three decades of appalling bloodshed and some 3,500 lost lives had failed to achieve.”

A more likely outcome, I fear, is a fresh border dividing Ireland, right on top of the old one. When the Republic of Ireland and Britain joined what became the European Union on the same day, in 1973, the border immediately started to become less relevant. The E.U. is a big part — the boring part — of the story. The border is there but hard to discern; “Spot the Border” is a popular game with people driving across it. Driving north, the kilometers become miles and the road signs are in English instead of both English and Gaelic. But there’s no evidence of the checkpoints or observation towers that were there before the Good Friday Agreement. Since the Brexit referendum, much has been said, and promised, about “soft” borders and “hard” borders. But as someone observed — I can’t remember who — all borders are hard, and the line across Ireland will be the only land border dividing Britain from the E.U. There will be checkpoints; there might also be observation towers. There will be men and women in uniform; there might also be armed soldiers with English and Scottish accents. There will be trouble, and there might also be Troubles.

“Say Nothing” is an excellent account of the Troubles; it might also be a warning.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/22/books/review/say-nothing-patrick-radden-keefe.html

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