Election campaign done and dusted, and a comparatively slow-motion government formation process is under way. I’ve been watching the Disney Plus series Say Nothing, based on Patrick Radden Keefe’s book of the same name about the abduction and murder of Jean McConville. It’s riveting.
It’s about much more than the murder of the unfortunate McConville, a widowed mother of 10 who was dragged from her screaming children, shot in the head and secretly buried at a beach in Co Louth in 1972. The IRA suspected her of being an informer – a “tout” – something her children have always fiercely denied and for which no evidence was ever produced. Her remains were finally located in 2003.
It’s about the Price sisters, Marian and Dolours, IRA volunteers, bombers and hunger strikers. It’s about Brendan “the Dark” Hughes, a famous Belfast IRA leader in the 1970s, and his later disillusionment.
And it’s about Gerry Adams. The series depicts Adams as having a leadership role in the IRA during the early 1970s. At the end of every episode, a disclaimer appears on the screen, telling viewers that Adams has always denied being a member of the IRA.
Smart people still insist the truth of a patent absurdity – that Gerry Adams was never in the IRA
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Ten years ago, Adams was actually arrested and questioned by the police in Northern Ireland about the disappearance and murder of McConville. In a statement released at the time, he said that his arrest and “the very serious attempt to charge me with IRA membership during the 1970s is damaging to the peace process, and the political institutions.”
[ Gerry Adams told Irish officials ‘pretend we are the IRA’ during secret talksOpens in new window ]
He has always denied being a member of the IRA and in a recent statement to The Irish Times for an article about the television series, his lawyers said he “had no involvement in the killing or burial of any of those secretly buried by the IRA”.
Nobody with any interest in or knowledge of the subject believes Adams’s denials of IRA membership, though some might understand the reasoning behind them and think, “fair enough”. As time goes on, more and more people will think it’s all ancient history now anyway.
Adams’s role as an IRA commander has been carefully established and described by independent journalists, participants in the conflict and former comrades. He was, as Ed Moloney’s Secret History of the IRA details, a long-time member of the IRA’s governing body, the army council, and was chief of staff at one point during the 1970s.
The backstory to Disney's IRA thriller Say Nothing
Adams the peacemaker will go down in history as one of the most significant figures in the past half century of Irish history. But before he made peace he made war, long and bloody. I always wonder what he would say to it if they ever set up a truth and reconciliation forum.
Anyway, all this is well-ventilated elsewhere, and this is not a column about Gerry Adams. But as Sinn Féin seeks to understand what has happened to it in the past 12 months and chart the road ahead, I think an underappreciated dynamic – and not a healthy one for the party – is the secrecy and trauma of its past.
There is a vast and hidden psychological archive of the Troubles which must cast a sort of mental shadow over the organisation and the people in it. The visible part of this is that smart and able people have to insist that a patent absurdity – that Gerry Adams was never in the IRA – is true. But leave that aside – what are the invisible parts of it? How long is the shadow’s reach?
People said nothing because to say something might have lethal consequences. Sinn Féin maintains a formidable culture of discipline and a tradition of secrecy that is the envy of its rivals and a defensive redoubt against what it regards as a hostile media. Is it really an advantage, though? When scandal and wrongdoing in the party is covered up? When everyone looks the other way? When honesty above all is required if the party is to understand what befell it in recent months?
One of the things that Say Nothing shows is not just that people did unspeakable things in the pursuit of their cause, but that the moral toll on some of them was crushing.
And though republicans are especially attached to commemorating and celebrating aspects of the past, the great psychological wound of that trauma, and the thousands of individual traumas that make it up, is hardly confined to Sinn Féin and the IRA. It afflicts Northern society as a whole.
Northern Ireland has a suicide rate way higher than the rest of the UK and more than twice the rate in the Republic, even allowing for differences in data collection. The use of diazepam in the North, often prescribed to treat depression or anxiety, is much more prevalent than in other parts of the UK, with people there 3.5 times more likely to be prescribed it than people living in England, according to 2020 figures.
A 2011 study at Ulster University found the North has the highest rate of post-traumatic stress disorder of “any country in the world” where it has been studied. Other post-conflict research found that 39 per cent of the North’s population had conflict-related trauma, and 39 per cent met the criteria for a mental illness.
[ Troubles-linked trauma in North untreated for decades, report findsOpens in new window ]
The observation that “the past is never dead – it’s not even past” seems especially true in Northern Ireland. More than 3,500 deaths, 34,000 shootings, 14,000 bombings and countless other acts of violence, brutality, human savagery perpetrated by all sides; thousands of people who did terrible things, and thousands more who had terrible things done to them.
The damage and trauma to an entire society from the Troubles – damage this Republic and its people were largely spared – is no small thing. It will be an important factor if and when referendums on Irish unity come meaningfully on to the political agenda. It’s the biggest single difference between the North and the South, and ignoring it will not make it go away.
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