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Summary

Amazing story of The Troubles in Northern Ireland, from the late 60’s to the 70’s, and leading all the way up to Brexit. Covers the Provos, the rise of Sinn Féin, and The Disappeared.

Notes

To “loyalists”—as especially zealous unionists were known—this created a tendency to see oneself as the ultimate defender of a national identity that was in danger of extinction. In

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The ambush at Burntollet Bridge. They clambered over the hedge, but the stones kept coming. And now the men started running down and physically attacking the marchers. It looked to Dolours like a scene from some Hollywood western, when the Indians charge into the prairie. A few of the attackers wore motorcycle helmets. They descended, swinging cudgels, crowbars, lead pipes, and laths. Some men had wooden planks studded with nails, and they attacked the protesters, lacerating their skin. People pulled coats over their heads for cover, stumbling, blind and confused, and grabbed one another for protection. As marchers fled into the fields, they were hurled to the          ground and kicked until they lost consciousness. Someone took a spade and smacked a young girl in the head. Two newspaper photographers were beaten up and stoned. The mob seized their film and told them that if they came back, they would be killed. And there in the midst of it all was Major Bunting, the grand marshal, swinging his arms like a conductor, his coat sleeves blotted with blood. He snatched one of the banners from the protesters, and somebody set it on fire.

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But even as this sturdy cop helped usher her to safety, a terrifying realization was taking hold. There were dozens of RUC officers there that day, but most of them had done little to intervene. It would later be alleged that the reason the attackers wore white armbands was so that their friends in the police could distinguish them from the protesters. In fact, many of Major Bunting’s men, the very men doing the beating, were members of the police auxiliary, the B-Specials.

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Sixty buses had been commandeered by Catholics and placed along streets to form barricades, a new set of physical battle lines delineating ethnic strongholds. Everywhere there was rubble and broken glass, what one poet would memorably describe as “Belfast confetti.”

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When Michael McConville moved in, Divis seemed to him like a maze for rats, all corridors, stairwells, and ramps. The interior walls were cheap plasterboard, so you could hear every word of the dinnertime conversation of your neighbors. And because the exterior walls were built with nonporous concrete, condensation developed, and a malignant black mold began to creep up the walls and across the ceilings of the apartments. For a utopian architectural project, Divis had yielded dystopian results, becoming what one writer would later describe as a “slum in the sky.”

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For all the chaos, the number of people actually killed in the Troubles was initially quite low: in 1969, only nineteen people were killed, and in 1970, only twenty-nine. But in 1971, the violence accelerated, with nearly two hundred people killed. By 1972, the figure was nearly five hundred.

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The Falls Road and the Shankill Road run roughly parallel as they move into the center of Belfast, drawing closer together but never touching. The Falls Road was a stronghold for Catholics, and the Shankill for Protestants, and these two arteries were connected by a series of narrow cross streets that ran between them at right angles, and featured rows of identical terraced houses. At some point along each of these connecting streets, Catholic territory ended and Protestant territory began.

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Traditionally, the Catholic minority in Northern Ireland had turned to the IRA for protection during periods of sectarian strife. But when the clashes started in 1969, the organization could do little to stop jeering loyalists from burning Catholic families out of their homes. In the aftermath of these purges, some people began to suggest that what IRA really stood for was “I Ran Away.”

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To Dolours, a split in the IRA came to seem inevitable. By early 1970, a breakaway organization had formed. Known as the Provisional IRA, they were explicitly geared to armed resistance. The old IRA became known as the Official IRA. On the streets of Belfast, they were often distinguished as the “Provos” and the “Stickies,” because Officials would supposedly wear commemorative Easter lilies that stuck on their shirtfronts with adhesive, whereas the more dyed-in-the-wool Provos wore paper lilies affixed with a pin. In 1971, forty-four British soldiers were murdered by paramilitaries. But even as the two wings of the IRA intensified their battle with loyalist mobs, the RUC, and the British Army, they now began to wage bloody war against each other.

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The chief of staff of the Provos was a man named Seán Mac Stíofáin. A moonfaced teetotaler in his early forties, with a cockney accent and a dimple in his chin, he’d been born John Stephenson in East London, and was raised by a mother who told him stories about her Irish upbringing in Belfast. After serving in the Royal Air Force, he had learned the Irish language, married an Irish girl, adopted an Irish name, and joined the IRA. It would later emerge that Mac Stíofáin was not Irish at all: his mother, who was given to storytelling, had been born not in Belfast but in Bethnal Green, in London. But sometimes it’s the myths that we believe most fervently of all. (Some of Mac Stíofáin’s IRA colleagues, when they wanted to get a rise out of him, would “forget” to use his Irish name and call him John Stephenson.)

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A special meeting of the Provisionals’ Army Council was convened, and it was determined that for the first time in history, women could join the organization as full members. This was likely driven in large measure by the ambition (and unimpeachable republican lineage) of Dolours Price. But Price herself would speculate that another factor may have played a role: because men were being locked up en masse by the authorities, the Provos may have felt that they had little choice but to start admitting women.

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Often, the Price sisters transported incendiary material. They came to know the scent of nitrobenzene, an ingredient of improvised explosives: it smelled like marzipan. Bomb-making materials were prepared in the Republic and then smuggled north across the border.

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one chilly Sunday afternoon in January 1972, British paratroopers opened fire on the crowd, killing thirteen men and wounding fifteen others. The soldiers subsequently claimed that they had come under fire and that they only shot protesters who were carrying weapons. Neither of these assertions turned out to be true. Bloody Sunday, as it would forever be known, was a galvanizing event for Irish republicanism.

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The year 1972 marked the high point for violence during the entirety of the Troubles—the so-called bloodiest year, when nearly five hundred people lost their lives.

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At twenty-four, Hughes was small but strong and nimble, with thick black eyebrows and a mop of unruly black hair. He was the officer commanding—“the OC”—for D Company of the Provisional IRA, in charge of this part of West Belfast, which made him a target not just for loyalist paramilitaries, the police, and the British Army but for the Stickies (the Official IRA) as well. Eighteen months earlier, Hughes’s cousin Charlie, his predecessor as OC of D Company, had been shot and killed by the Officials. So Hughes was “on the run,” in the parlance of the IRA: he was living underground,

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Some of the residents were intimidated by the Provos and felt they had little choice but to cooperate, while others assisted out of an unforced sense of solidarity. When property was damaged in one of his operations, he would pay compensation to the family. He cultivated the community, knowing that without the sea, the fish cannot survive. There was a local invalid who lived on Cyprus Street, “Squire” Maguire, and at the height of the madness, with fires and police raids and riots in the street, residents in the area would occasionally see Brendan Hughes carrying Maguire on his back a few doors down to the pub so that Maguire could have a pint, then dutifully returning to bring him home a short while later. Once, a British soldier in the Lower Falls area caught Hughes in the sights of his rifle. Finger on the trigger, he was ready to open fire when an elderly lady stepped out of some unseen doorway and planted herself in the path of his weapon, then informed him that he would not be shooting anybody on her street on that particular evening. When the soldier looked up, Hughes was gone.

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But perhaps the most concrete application of Frank Kitson’s colonial philosophies in the context of the Troubles was the MRF. This was an elite unit so murky and clandestine that nobody seemed to agree even on the baseline matter of what precisely the acronym MRF stood for. It might have been Mobile Reconnaissance Force. Or Military Reconnaissance Force. Or Military Reaction Force. The MRF consisted of thirty or so special operators, both men and women, who were handpicked from all across the British Army.

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One frigid January evening a couple of months earlier, seven republican prisoners had stripped to their underwear, slathered their bodies in butter and black boot polish to insulate against the cold, sawed through an iron bar, squeezed through a porthole, dropped one by one into the icy water of the Musgrave Channel, and swum several hundred yards to the opposite shore. The prisoners had come upon the idea for the escape after watching a seal navigate the barbed-wire netting that had been placed in the water around the ship. All seven men made it to the far shore and scrambled out of the water. They were soaking wet, dressed in their underwear, and smeared with shoe polish. Looking as if they had just crawled out of the Black Lagoon, they proceeded to hijack a bus. Fortuitously, one of the escapees had been a bus driver before joining the IRA, and he piloted this unlikely getaway vehicle into central Belfast. When they stopped in a neighborhood that was home to many republican sympathizers, local kids immediately set upon the bus, like a swarm of locusts, and started stripping it for parts. The prisoners hastened into the nearest pub, still mostly naked, and the patrons who stood around the bar looked up abruptly, shocked by this sudden, surreal intrusion. Then, without hesitation or, really, much need for explanation, the barflies started stripping off their own clothes and offering them to the fugitives. One of the patrons produced his car keys and tossed them to the men, saying, “Away youse go.” By the time the army mobilized six hundred troops for a manhunt, the men had vanished. After slipping across the border, they held a triumphant press conference in Dublin, where the newspapers anointed them “the Magnificent Seven.”

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fire. One of Adams’s confederates in the IRA, a hard man named Ivor Bell, had insisted that a necessary precondition for any discussions with the British was the release from internment of Gerry Adams. He was still only twenty-three years old, but Adams had become such an instrumental figure in the IRA that there could be no peace talks without him. “No fucking cease-fire unless Gerry is released,” Bell said.

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Gerry Adams said little during the meeting, but Steele watched the rangy, thoughtful young rebel and was impressed. He had been told that Adams represented the IRA in the North and that he was a senior officer in the Belfast Brigade. Steele had expected some arrogant, streetwise ruffian. But when he initially encountered Adams, at a preliminary meeting before the trip, he found him to be personable, articulate, and self-disciplined. These were appealing qualities in an interlocutor, Steele thought, but they also made Adams a dangerously effective adversary. As Adams was leaving one of the preliminary meetings, Steele took him aside. “You don’t want to spend the rest of your life on the run from us British,” he said. “What do you want to do?” “I want to go to university and get a degree,” Adams replied. “We’re not stopping you,” Steele pointed out. “Renounce violence and you can go to university.” Adams grinned and said, “I’ve got to help to get rid of you British first.”

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The centerpiece of the operation was a laundry service, with an office in the city center. Four Square Laundry operated an actual door-to-door laundry service, picking up clothing and linens and then subcontracting to an industrial laundry in Belfast to wash the clothes. But before they got there, the clothes were analyzed by British authorities. Traces of explosives could be detected on garments in order to determine whether bombs were being made or stored at a property. Analysts could also compare the clothing being picked up at a given residence with the number, age, and gender of the people ostensibly living there; a mismatch might indicate that it was an arms drop or a call house. The laundry

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The car bomb, which was first introduced to the conflict in early 1972, represented a terrifying departure, because up to that point the size of most bombs had been limited by the sheer weight of explosives that a few

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Each was carefully fitted with a mammoth incendiary device, more than a hundred pounds of powder explosives hidden in plastic bags, along with a sausage of gelignite. Each payload was concealed beneath the rear seat and was connected by a length of detonating cord to a box under the front passenger seat that contained a timer fashioned from a household alarm clock.

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Then, just before 3 p.m., Marian raised her wrist and looked pointedly at her watch. In a quiet fury, the chief inspector said, “Am I intended to gather that the timing on the other bombs has just expired?” Marian Price just smiled.

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The judge, Sebag Shaw, interjected to ask whether she believed that violence should be employed in furtherance of these aims. “I did not say that,” Price said—she had been speaking of objectives, not of the means that might justifiably be employed to achieve them. She jousted in this manner with both the prosecutor and the judge, unflustered by their bewigged solemnity, unintimidated by the grandeur of the surroundings or the phalanx of security personnel or the gravity of the charges against her. As the trial wore on, Price and her fellow defendants began to openly heckle Judge Shaw, refuting the moral authority of the court, mocking the witnesses, and reveling in their shared contempt for the whole proceeding.

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Before sentencing Price and the other defendants, Judge Shaw announced that the jury was acquitting Roisin McNearney. Addressing McNearney—a small girl with penciled eyebrows, in a white shawl and a pink blouse—Shaw said that he hoped she had learned “not to dabble in murderous enterprises.” Referring to her decision to betray her comrades, he said, “I do not know when you leave this court what other dangers may confront you.” As McNearney was ushered out of the hall, the remaining defendants began to hum a tune, in ominous unison. It was “The Dead March” from Handel’s Saul, a standard feature of the musical repertoire at funerals. Hugh Feeney reached into his pocket and came out with a coin. He hurled it at McNearney, shouting, “Here’s your blood money!” She rushed out of the courtroom, sobbing.

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In 1920, an Irish republican poet and politician named Terence MacSwiney, who had been imprisoned in Brixton on charges of sedition, refused food for seventy-four days, demanding that he be released. The British would not let him go, and he perished. MacSwiney’s death sparked an international furor, and before he was buried, in the uniform of the IRA, tens of thousands of people filed past his coffin to pay their respects, and thousands more rallied in protest in cities around the world. He had eloquently articulated a philosophy of self-sacrifice that would help define the emerging traditions of Irish republican martyrdom. “It is not those who inflict the most but those who suffer the most who will conquer,” MacSwiney declared. When somebody dies on a hunger strike, the moral calculus of causation can be tricky.

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Then, just as she was about to leave, she said, “What are you taking now?” “We’re taking water, Mum. We’re just drinking water,” Dolours said. “Well,” Chrissie said, with gruff composure, “drink plenty of water.”

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It was almost as if “defeat suited them better than victory,” in the words of one historian, “for there was a sense in which Irish republicanism thrived on oppression and the isolated exclusivity that came with it.” During the early 1970s, it had become commonplace for the Provos to declare, every January, that this was the year they would eject the British once and for all. For people of Adams’s generation, who had beheld the fall of Saigon, the sudden toppling of regimes seemed like something that was readily achievable.

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In 1977, Adams was released. On his final day, he paced around the yard with Hughes, talking strategy. He had come to believe that Sinn Féin, the political entity associated with the IRA, needed to operate more “in tandem” with the armed organization. He also believed that the Provos had to be restructured. Traditionally, the IRA had imitated the hierarchical configuration of the British military. But Adams believed that the Provos should reinvent themselves, adopting the type of cellular structure more typical of paramilitary organizations in Latin America.

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And Humphrey Atkins and Thatcher had been wrong when they speculated that among the ten strikers there must be at least one weak link. After Sands died, another nine followed, starving to death one by one throughout that summer. But the link that Dolours Price felt to Bobby Sands ran deeper still. “We were ‘force-fed’ for a long time, it meant we did not die,” she wrote years later.

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In August 1994, the IRA declared a cease-fire. It appeared that the secret negotiations brokered by Father Alec Reid had borne fruit. Dolours Price and other republicans were summoned to a social club in West Belfast to be told about the decision.

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Much blood had been spilled over a quarter of a century in the name of a stark and absolute ambition: Brits out. Yet that ambition had not been realized. This left some members of the movement feeling confused.

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In 1992, Jean McConville’s oldest child, Anne, who had been ill all her life, died at the age of thirty-nine. Helen peered into the coffin at her older sister and was struck by how much she resembled Jean. She pledged to do what she could to find out what had happened to her mother. Seamus started to ask around Belfast. Once, he ventured into a bar on the Falls Road that was known as an IRA hangout. But when he mentioned the name of his mother-in-law, the place went quiet. An old fellow slipped McKendry a bookie’s docket and asked him to go next door to make a bet. On the docket, the man had written: Get away.

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Eventually, on Good Friday, the parties emerged and announced that they had arrived at a pact to which all sides could agree—a mechanism to end the three-decade conflict. Northern Ireland would remain part of the United Kingdom, but with its own devolved assembly and close links to the Republic of Ireland. The agreement acknowledged that the majority of people on the island wanted a united Ireland—but also that a majority of people in the six counties favored remaining part of the United Kingdom. The key principle was “consent”: if, at some juncture, a majority of people in the North wanted to unite with Ireland, then the governments of the U.K. and Ireland would have a “binding obligation” to honor that choice. But until that time, Northern Ireland would remain part of the U.K., and Sinn Féin agreed to set aside its principle of abstention and allow its representatives to serve in the newly created assembly.

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In his speech, Adams couldn’t exactly declare victory. But he was upbeat, saying, “The Good Friday Agreement marks the conclusion of one phase and the beginning of a new phase of struggle.” He wanted to see “a new Ireland,” he said. “An Ireland in which the guns are silent. Permanently. An Ireland in which all of the people of this island are at peace with each other and with our neighbors in Britain. An Ireland united by a process of healing and national reconciliation.”

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The Belfast Project, as it became known, seemed to address an obvious shortcoming in the Good Friday Agreement. In their effort to bring about peace, the negotiators had focused on the future rather than the past.

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But there was no provision for the creation of any sort of truth-and-reconciliation mechanism that might allow the people of Northern Ireland to address the sometimes murky and often painful history of what had befallen their country over the previous three decades. After apartheid ended in South Africa, there had been such a process, in which people came forward and told their stories. The explicit understanding in that case was that there was an exchange: if you told the truth, then you could receive legal immunity.

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“O land of password, handgrip, wink and nod,” Seamus Heaney wrote in a poem about the Troubles called “Whatever You Say, Say Nothing.” There was a sense that, even as people greeted the new day with great enthusiasm, the sulfurous intrigue of the past would continue to linger.

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One day, Mackers went out to see a former IRA man he had known for years, having first met him in prison in 1974. The two of them were close, so these interviews would have an easygoing, intimate quality. Like Mackers, the man had found himself deeply disillusioned with the peace process, and had cut ties with Gerry Adams and Sinn Féin. Now he had a story to tell. In the materials that Mackers would eventually mail to Boston College, the man was identified only by his code name, “C.” His real name was Brendan Hughes.

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By denying that he had ever played a role in the conflict, Adams was, in effect, absolving himself of any moral responsibility for catastrophes like Bloody Friday—and, in the process, disowning his onetime subordinates, like Brendan Hughes. “I’m disgusted with the whole thing,” Hughes said. “It means that people like myself…have to carry the responsibility of all those deaths.” If all of that carnage had at least succeeded in forcing the British out of Ireland, then Hughes might be able to justify, to himself, the actions he had taken. But he felt robbed of any such rationale for absolution. “As everything has turned out,” he said, “not one death was worth it.”

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In the summer of 1981, after Bobby Sands and three other hunger strikers had died, O’Rawe was helping to lead the negotiations from inside the prison. According to O’Rawe, the prisoners received a secret offer from Margaret Thatcher that would have granted almost all of their demands. It wasn’t a complete capitulation, but it guaranteed that they would be able to wear their own clothes—one of their chief requirements—as well as other key concessions. O’Rawe and another negotiator smuggled a message to the Provo leadership outside the prison, indicating that they were inclined to accept the British offer and call an end to the strike. But word came back from the outside—specifically, from Gerry Adams—that what Thatcher was proposing was not enough, so the strikers should hold out. Six more men died before the strike concluded. The public narrative had always maintained that it was the prisoners themselves who insisted on persevering with the strike, and O’Rawe had never spoken out to question this version of history, deferring to what he came to think of as the “carefully scripted myths” that had solidified around these dramatic events. But privately, he felt enormous guilt for not standing up at the time and being more forceful. He wondered why Adams and those around him would have sustained the strike rather than take an offer that the men on the inside had been prepared to accept.

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At one point, long after the strike, Hughes bumped into McKenna in Dundalk. McKenna had brain damage, and his eyesight had been permanently affected by the strike. “Fuck you, Dark,” McKenna said to Hughes. “You should have let me die.”

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But the doctor’s kindness had meant a lot to Hughes. Later, he learned that after watching all ten men die in the hunger strike, Dr. Ross had taken his own life, with a shotgun, in 1986.

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When Mackers asked about the disappearance of Jean McConville, Hughes told him that Gerry Adams had known about and approved the operation. In Hughes’s view, the murder had been justified. “She was an informer,” he said.

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So you would have him travel to the suburbs or to the country. But these were often quite parochial individuals, who had grown up in one pocket of the city and never ventured beyond it. Too many buses and trains and they were liable to get lost. Campbell would take informants out of town for a meeting in a beachside village and they would stand there in awe, as if a single bus transfer had deposited them at the end of the earth. Campbell liked to meet his contacts in the countryside, but not too far into the countryside. In some rural areas, like South Armagh, the locals knew every car. The presence of a single unfamiliar automobile was enough to put the neighbors on alert. The challenge of finding a safe location in which to meet was often secondary to the challenge of communicating the need for a meeting in the first place.

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Without elaborating to his wife about the delicacy of this predicament, Campbell excused himself, walked over to the bar, and greeted the IRA man with the kind of gruff nonchalance he would normally reserve for someone whom he saw every day. The man returned the greeting. Then he said, casually, “Is that your wife?” “It’s somebody’s wife,” Campbell replied. “Knowing you, it’s probably somebody else’s wife,” the man said with a smirk. Campbell acknowledged the joke with a thin smile. Then, selecting his words with care, he said, “Are you going to sit at this bar all night? Or are you going to go to the phone and call someone?” After a carefully attenuated pause, the man murmured, “Go back to the good woman. Enjoy your meal. Then fuck off out of here.” “Who was that?” Campbell’s wife asked when he rejoined her. “Guy I know, workwise,” Campbell replied, and left it at that.

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Campbell lived by a principle: Everyone is recruitable. Sometimes you just need to find the right button. You could haul the same person in fifteen times and he would not break; then, the sixteenth time, something would happen. Circumstances change. The man suddenly found himself on the outs with his crew. Or he was in a spot and needed money.

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In Northern Ireland, you could list the victims on the back of an envelope: Joe Lynskey, Seamus Wright, Kevin McKee, Jean McConville, Peter Wilson, Eamon Molloy, Columba McVeigh, Robert Nairac, Brendan Megraw, John McClory, Brian McKinney, Eugene Simons, Gerard Evans, Danny McIlhone, Charlie Armstrong, Seamus Ruddy. But to name the dead was one thing. To find them was another.

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To Brendan Hughes, it was appalling that Adams would go to Jean McConville’s children and pledge to get to the bottom of what had happened to their mother, as though it were some great mystery to him. “He went to this family’s house and promised an investigation into the woman’s disappearance,” Hughes told Mackers in one of his Boston College sessions. “The man that gave the fucking order for that woman to be executed! Now tell me the morality in that.” Only a “Machiavellian monster” could do such a thing, Hughes concluded.

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This was a cruel twist: some of the children could no longer remember what their mother had looked like, apart from the one surviving photo of her, but they still recognized the faces of the people who took her away. Once, Helen took her children to McDonald’s and found herself staring at one of the women who she knew had taken her mother. The woman was there with her own family. She shouted at Helen to leave her alone. On another occasion, Michael climbed into the back of a black taxi on the Falls Road, only to look up and see that the driver was one of Jean’s abductors. The car pulled away from the curb and the two men rode in silence. Michael didn’t say a word. What could he say? Instead he sat, unspeaking, until they reached his destination, then he handed the man the money for his fare.

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to a tribunal in Dublin, one handler who worked in British military intelligence estimated that by the end of the Troubles, as many as one in four IRA members worked, in some capacity, for the authorities. At the most senior levels of the IRA, he suggested, that figure might be closer to one in two. Of course, that also is the kind of story that could be fabricated, as a psy-op to undermine republican leadership, and Adams and other Sinn Féin officials would discount any such statistics that emanated from the British as inherently unreliable.

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Stakeknife was “our most important secret,” in the words of one British Army commander in Northern Ireland. He was “a golden egg.” Stakeknife wasn’t Gerry Adams. He was Freddie Scappaticci.

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If Price continued to malign McConville’s character at least in part to assuage her own nagging conscience, it may have been because she had done more than simply drive the widow to the border. “I need to know the facts,” said Moloney. “Okay, well, we were called back,” Price said. “She’d been there for about four to five days. And we were called back to Dundalk.” The local unit had dug a hole in the ground. All they had to do was take McConville across a field to the freshly dug grave and shoot her. But they hadn’t. “They didn’t want to do it,” Price said. It was because McConville was a woman, she thought. “So you guys had to do it,” Moloney said. Price said nothing, just made a small murmur. “Is that right?” he pressed. She murmured again. Then she uttered, “Yeah.” “Do you want to talk about that, or not?” Moloney asked. There were three members of the Unknowns with McConville when she died, Price said: Wee Pat McClure, another volunteer, and Price herself. They had only one gun, and they worried about their consciences and decided that they would each take a shot, so that they could never say for certain who it was that dealt the killing blow. This is an old trick used by firing squads—one of the gunmen’s rifles will be loaded with a blank so that afterwards, each of the shooters can tell himself that he might not have been the one to take a life. It can serve as a comforting fiction, though in this case, because they had only one gun, there would not be much ambiguity about which of them did the killing. “We each in turn fired a shot,” Price said. When Price fired hers, she deliberately missed. Then one of the others pulled the trigger, and McConville collapsed.

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Yes, they resented Adams, and yes, they had demons, and yes, they were bitter, and yes, that was probably why they put their accusations on the record, Eamonn McCann wrote in The Irish Times. “But he isn’t obviously right in suggesting that these feelings caused them to concoct wicked lies to discredit him. It is at least as likely that they broke the IRA’s code of secrecy because they believed it had been rendered meaningless by the strategy adopted by Adams and his close associates.” McCann concluded that “what they’d been driven to do was not to tell lies but to tell the truth.” As Price herself said, “I wanted very much to put Gerry Adams where he belonged—and where he had been.”

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There was just one problem with their theory: he could not have been the commanding officer of the Belfast Brigade in 1972, because he never joined the IRA in the first place. Describing his own theory of how best to survive under interrogation, Adams had once recalled the time he was arrested as a young man and questioned before being locked up on the Maidstone. That was the interview in which he stubbornly insisted that his name was not Gerry Adams. The whole pretense had been an obvious charade, he conceded later, but it was also “a crutch to withstand their inquisition.” To remain silent was the best policy, he had decided as a young man. “So even though they knew who I was, it was irrelevant. I couldn’t answer their questions, on the basis that I wasn’t who they said I was.”

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Long after Hughes and Price called an end to their strikes and attempted to reintegrate into society, they nursed old grudges and endlessly replayed their worst wartime abominations. In a sense, they never stopped devouring themselves. The official pronouncement in the coroner’s report for Dolours Price was “death by misadventure.”

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Anthony McIntyre was also harshly critical of the effort to prosecute Rea. How will the truth of what really happened during the Troubles ever come out, he asked, if the authorities file murder charges against anyone who has the nerve to talk about it? “I would describe the PSNI stance as one of prosecuting truth, rather than procuring truth,” he said in an interview.

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Mackers was terrified: the whole oral history was a chronicle of his years in a banned organization. His account, like the accounts of other former paramilitaries, was full of stories about illegal things he’d done. If government officials were out to get him, as he believed they were, and if there was no statute of limitations on these crimes, then the state could fish happily from his oral history and bring trumped-up charges against him forever. The best indication of the government’s bad faith, in Mackers’s view, was the shoddiness of the allegations against him. Had the police actually checked their own records, they would have discovered that Mackers couldn’t have taken part in the pipe bombing—because he was in police custody when it happened.

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Z. He found himself wishing, almost daily, that he had left history alone and never undertaken the Belfast Project in the first place.

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In the transcript, Moloney asks about the positions that Gerry Adams held in the various brigades and battalions of the IRA during the early 1970s. At a certain point, Price says, “Actually, he may have been moved to Brigade at that stage—because he wanted my sister to be his driver.” She says it casually, in passing, and Moloney does not press her on it or interject. “You know, he always had to have a driver,” Price goes on. “And she refused, because it was such a boring job.”

LOCATION: 6015

The legal actions against Ivor Bell and Anthony McIntyre appear to suggest that if a person implicates himself in a Belfast Project oral history, those utterances can be used against him in court, but if he implicates somebody else, that is simply hearsay, rather than admissible evidence.

LOCATION: 6032

At the end of 2017, Gerry Adams announced that he would retire from his position as president of Sinn Féin and hand over authority to the party’s longtime deputy, Mary Lou McDonald. At forty-eight years old, McDonald had come of age, professionally, in the period after the Good Friday Agreement, so she was untinged by paramilitary history.

LOCATION: 6051