Looking back at the Troubles and a terrible internecine war

Violence, as has been obvious from the recent drug gang warfare, has its own terrible momentum. It takes on a life of its own. Tit for tat. Anything you can do I can do better.

The tragic violence of The Troubles continues to be the subject of analysis by historians, writers, researchers, sociologists. The retrospection has resulted in innumerable publications, looking at the consequences of the injustices of a sectarian society. Two such books were part of my recent holiday reading.

One is a novel, “Milkman” by Belfast- born novelist Anna Burns. It was awarded the Man Booker 2018 prize.

The second is the recently published (United States) “Say Nothing” (sub titled “A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland”) by Patrick Radden Keefe, an award-winning writer with the ‘New Yorker’.

“Milkman” is the story of growing up, coming of age, in a divided society during “The Troubles,” where the abnormal becomes the normal. Locations are not named though this is obviously Belfast. None of the characters are named. They become middle sister, third brother-in-law, maybe-boyfriend, chef. The 18-year-old story-teller fears her stalker, “Milkman” who is nearly twice her age, and who is not a real milkman, but is a hauntingly sinister character. Some readers may speculate as to whether he exists at all, or whether he is a metaphor for a dysfunctional society.

And that society is identified as “Them” - described as “defenders of the State” and “Us,” the “renouncers of the State.” Though each lives in approximately adjacent areas, they occupy “that side of the road,” we stay on “this side of the road.” They are “over the water,” the story teller is “over the border.” And whether “Us” or “Them, both live in a climate of gossip, suspicion, terrible fear.

Yet, for all of that bleak picture “Milkman” is a chastening but not a gloomy, read. In fact it is unputdownable. It is written in a rapid, gushy style, a stream of consciousness, much like the way a group of young girls would talk to each other, racing from subject to subject, with very little related relevance. Life goes on.

While the novel may be a creative take, an artistic presentation, on the modern history of Ireland, “Say Nothing” is not creative, it is a shocking reality. It confines itself largely to the kidnapping and killing of Jean McConville, the 38-year-old mother of ten children. She was the only Protestant in the warren of the Divis Flats complex, a truly nightmarish place in the concept of town planning.

Her disappearance and murder had never entirely vanished from the news, but it came into the immediacy of public consciousness again when her remains were found on a beach in County Louth, following the erosion of the sand dunes in 2003.

When her now adult children, whose lives had been blighted by her loss, and before actual DNA identification had taken place, were told that a blue safety pin, attached to a piece of clothing, had been found at the burial site, they knew this was their mother. In a large family, when the youngest was still in nappies, the blue safety pin was a vital prop in the identification.

Patrick Radden Keefe researched the death of this poor woman. That research took him through a series of interviews, the script of reported interviews, and the Boston Tapes. Some of the latter had now been made available through legal access, and also because some of those who had originally contributed to the Tapes were now dead. The result: “Say Nothing.”

An opening flyleaf of the book says that “All wars are fought twice, the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory.”

This book does just that - it records the memories of some of those who actually participated in the terrible internecine war - the Troubles - in which over 3,000 people - the vast majority innocent non-involved ordinary people, and over 20,000 - the majority also non-involved ordinary people, going about their daily business, were injured.

In this statistic Patrick Radden Keefe looks at just one death - that of Jean McConville in December 1972. He identifies some of those, including two women, who transported her “over the border.” When her alleged potential execution squad, on seeing this emotionally and mentally fragile woman, for whom they had already dug a grave, they refused to kill her, and here, those that “disappeared” her, including the women, shot her, while she stood in that grave.

In the escalation of the extremes of violence and inhumanity to which humankind can descend, there is the attendant sinister violence of intimation. Jean McConville’s children, cowered and frightened in their home, waited for their mother to return (as her kidnappers told them she would). They were sleepless and hungry when Social Services discovered them. Although they lived amongst hundreds of neighbours in the Divis Flats, not one person called to their door. All were intimidated by the threat of what happened to her could happen me!

Patrick Radden Keefe’s book does not make for an easy or comfortable read. But sometimes discomfort has to be embraced. Lest we forget!