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\u003cp style=\u0022color: #; background-color: #; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0.7em; margin-left: 0px;\u0022\u003eThe Northern Irish Troubles, relative to their scale, are the most studied conflict in modern history. They took place in a province the size of Connecticut with a population of around 1.6 million people, and they claimed fewer than 4,000 dead over the course of 25 years of continuous low-intensity warfare. The satirist P. J. O’Rourke called Northern Ireland “heck’s half-acre.” Early in the conflagration, the British government’s cynical policy was to maintain “an acceptable level of violence,” at least until one minister was indiscreet enough to admit it.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp style=\u0022color: #; background-color: #; margin: 0px 0px 0.7em;\u0022\u003eYet the Troubles have enthralled generations of writers and scholars. And no wonder: preceded by centuries of injustices against the Irish perpetrated or supported by the British, a quarter century of simmering conflict and ritual murder engendered intense resentment and distrust between the mainly Protestant unionist majority in Northern Ireland, which wants the province to remain part of the United Kingdom, and the primarily Catholic nationalist minority, which believes it should unite with the Republic of Ireland. Although the 1998 Good Friday Agreement ended the fighting, the question of Northern Ireland’s sovereignty still hovers forebodingly over the island.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp style=\u0022color: #; background-color: #; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0.7em; margin-left: 0px;\u0022\u003eThe situation remains combustible, all the more so thanks to Brexit, which 56 percent of Northern Irish voters opposed. The United Kingdom’s departure from the EU promises to hurt the Northern Irish economy by restricting trade with the rest of Europe and ending the European Union’s subsidies to Northern Ireland. It might also force the British and Irish governments to reimpose a militarized border with the republic, which could antagonize nationalists and reopen old wounds that the EU’s leavening of sovereign boundaries had helped to heal.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp style=\u0022color: #; background-color: #; margin: 0px 0px 0.7em;\u0022\u003eIf Northern Ireland’s unresolved sovereignty and the aggravation of Brexit aren’t enough to explain writers’ perpetual fascination with the Troubles, add to those reasons the conflict’s location in a developed and Anglophone great power, the military success of the Provisional Irish Republican Army (the organization reigned supreme among militant groups in Europe, easily outkilling Spain’s Basque militants, Italy’s Red Brigades, and West Germany’s Baader-Meinhof Gang), the Troubles’ status as the United Kingdom’s last and most recalcitrant colonial problem, and the romantic urgency that talented and fervent writers and scholars of Irish lineage—inside and outside Ireland—have conferred on it.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp style=\u0022color: #; background-color: #; margin: 0px 0px 0.7em;\u0022\u003eThe title of Patrick Radden Keefe’s new book, \u003cem\u003eSay Nothing,\u003c/em\u003e draws from the work of perhaps Northern Ireland’s most famous writer, Seamus Heaney, whose poem “Whatever You Say, Say Nothing” the IRA adopted as a slogan. \u003cem\u003eSay Nothing\u003c/em\u003eilluminates the uneasy proximity of barbarity, self-worth, and a kind of comfort in violently divided societies. Like Jez Butterworth’s brilliant recent play, \u003cem\u003eThe Ferryman,\u003c/em\u003e the book concerns the IRA practice known as “disappearing,” whereby the group would execute those deemed inimical to the cause of a united Ireland without acknowledging or attributing the murder, leaving the family to wonder about the victim’s fate. Keefe focuses on one famously cruel disappearance perpetrated by the IRA. The victim was Jean McConville, a 38-year-old mother of ten, widowed for less than a year and deeply depressed. Her primal offense was apparently to console a British soldier who had been shot, presumably by the IRA, and was crying for help on the road outside the McConvilles’ apartment block in West Belfast.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eRead the full review at \u003ca href=\u0022https://www.foreignaffairs.com/reviews/review-essay/2019-05-20/price-peace-northern-ireland\u0022\u003eForeign Affairs\u003cbr /\u003e\u003cbr /\u003e\u003c/a\u003e\u003c/strong\u003e\u003c/p\u003e","className":"richtext reading--content font-secondary"}), document.getElementById("react_Jw6Nu0knl0K2XgmrRUZpA"))});
\"Say Nothing\" shows how slow reconciliation can be.
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