"It is not those who can inflict the most, but those who can suffer the most who shall win" Terence MacSwiney,* who died in a British prison following a hunger strike.
The Troubles in Ireland always have, for some odd reason, fascinated me. A mix of religious and political strife coupled with a strong dose of tribalism and historical enmity, that any resolution could be found is profoundly reassuring. The fear and hatred are still there, but at least they are no longer killing each other -- unless Brexit recreates a hard border once again. When we visited there and we given a tour by my good friend Tony, who lived in Belfast, the paintings on the enclave walls were still fresh, and Tony cautioned that even in 2010 we needed to be careful about what we said in certain areas.
This book is simply riveting. It mixes well-research history with a murder mystery. The mystery involves the abduction of a woman called Jean McConville, a young widow and mother of 10 children, in 1972. (That year was also the bloodiest, killing almost 500 people, many on "Bloody Friday" when the IRA unleashed a whole series of bombs in downtown Belfast.) Northern Ireland was labeled "an autonomous political lunatic asylum" by George Bernard Shaw and Keefe shows us why. I won't say much about McConville's disappearance; you can read about that yourself -- and you should.
Keefe gives a real flavor for the mental as well as the physical harm to those who lived through this time. "Tranquilizer use was higher in Northern Ireland than anywhere else in the United Kingdom. In some later era, the condition would likely be described as post-traumatic stress." Both, or should I say, ALL sides, (as there were factions within factions) have little to be proud of in their actions.
The British under command of a general who had literally written the book on how to deal with insurgencies, engaged in all sorts of torture. "The British had learned these techniques by studying the experiences of soldiers who were held as prisoners of war by the Nazis or by the North Koreans and the Chinese during the Korean War." The practice was to take a prisoner, put a hood on him, pretending to throw him out of a helicopter and then subject him to numerous psychological pressures. "When the torture ended, after a week, some of the men were so broken that they could not remember their own names. Their eyes had a haunted, hollow look to them, which one of the men likened to “two pissholes in the snow.” Another detainee, who had gone into the interrogation with jet-black hair, came out of the experience with hair that was completely white. (He died not long after being released, of a heart attack, at forty-five.) When Francie McGuigan was finally returned to Crumlin Road jail, he saw his father, and the older man broke down and cried.
In one of the many sad ironies, "In a controversial 1978 decision, the European Court of Human Rights held that the techniques, while “inhuman and degrading,” did not amount to torture. (In the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, when the American administration of George W. Bush was fashioning its own “enhanced interrogation” techniques, officials relied explicitly on this decision to justify the use of torture.) Continuing the ironies, it was when both Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland became members of the EU that the border became irrelevant, in effect completing what the violence could not ever accomplish.
The conundrum of how governments should deal with zealots and terrorists (which side you are on will determine whether a suicide bomber is a patriot or terrorist) was highlighted by the hunger strike of the Price sisters. They had been involved in planting huge car bombs around London. Fortunately all but one were defused and they were caught quickly. The British government was placed in an impossible situation. They couldn't be seen as backing down, but they didn't want the girls to become martyrs. Force-feeding was tantamount to torture.
For the government, this was an impossible crisis. Even as their bodies continued to shrink and wither, the Price sisters took on an iconic dimension. “They were the stuff of which Irish martyrs could be made: two young, slim, dark girls, devout yet dedicated to terrorism,” Jenkins later recalled. He feared that the ramifications of “the death of these charismatic colleens” would be incalculable.
Privately, Jenkins regarded their demand for repatriation to be “not totally unreasonable.” .... But if the alternative was force-feeding, it was turning out to be a public relations fiasco. Many members of the British public regarded the practice as a form of torture. According to their medical records, the Price sisters sometimes fainted during the procedure. On one occasion, when the sisters resisted the feeding, they were forcibly gagged, and a radio was turned up to cover their screams.
It's interesting to read of how the IRA "heroes" fared after the Good Friday Agreement. Resentment of Gerry Adams was high along with a feeling of loss that they had accomplished nothing. The Boston College interviews revealed a lot of "carefully scripted myths." Also, the move of Adams from committed terrorist to republican electoral process. Ironically, it may be Brexit that melds north and the Republic together.
A fascinating story that reveals who the actual killer was. The interview with O'Keefe cited below describes the process by which he discovered the killer's identity, who remains unpunished in spite of the efforts of Jean's children to get justice. With Brexit we may soon see the fruition of thirty years of border disputation. Or, it will result in more violence.
*"According to MacSwiney’s biographer, Dave Hannigan, a young Vietnamese man named Nguyen Tat Thanhn was working in the kitchen of a central London hotel at the time. Upon hearing the news of MacSwiney’s death, he burst into tears, saying “a country with a citizen like this will never surrender”. He returned to Vietnam, changed his name to Ho Chi Minh, and led the Vietnamese resistance movement for three decades, fighting Japanese and French imperialists and later the United States."
Interview with Patrick Keefe https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/brixton-remembers-one-of-ireland-s-most-famous-hunger-strikers-1.3674378
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