Say Nothing by Patrick Radden Keefe **** (of 4)

The decades long civil war in Northern Ireland, like all civil wars, was vicious, and for outsiders, difficult to comprehend. Patrick Radden Keefe's take on The Troubles, as they were known, is to put the lives of four important players under a microscope. Gerry Adams, Brendan Hughes, and Dolours Price were leaders in the Catholic uprising by the Irish Republican Army. Together, when they were not in jail, they spent much of the 1970s and 1980s attempting to dislodge Protestants and the British military from northern Ireland. The fourth, Jean McConville, mother of ten children, and perhaps a spy abetting the British government in tracking down members of the IRA, was kidnapped and murdered during the height of The Troubles.

In a well-told story (listen to the audiobook, if at all possible), an interminable war of attrition grinds on and as is so often the case in civil wars (the Arab-Israel conflict, Hutus and Tutsis in Rwanda, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Sudan) is built upon exceptionally long memories of mutual victimization and what the Irish call, "But What About?" An atrocity perpetrated by one side is defended as retaliation for and of lesser scope than the previous atrocity unloaded by the other to the crime to which it is responding. Combatants invariably reply their bombing or shooting with quick reference to their opponents: "But, what about?..."

Say Nothing is a fine introduction for an outsider because it largely skirts the issue of right and wrong. Yet, Keefe's account is largely sympathetic to the IRA, short shifting many IRA attacks, and personalizing Hughes and Price in ways that are not balanced by personalities of their opponents. Gerry Adams, an early leader in the IRA, and then the leader of Sinn Fein, the political wing of the IRA that eventually brokered peace talks with the British government is an exception. While much of the world credits Adams with making peace, IRA soldiers and the author portray him as a sellout because Adams denied he ever served in the IRA, despite overwhelming evidence he was an IRA mastermind.

Today, after two generations have grown up in a peaceful northern Ireland an old question is back ont the table. Is there sufficient heat in the embers of recollection to reignite a conflagration as Brexit blows fresh oxygen into northern Ireland.