Northern Ireland

Northern Ireland is the six-county region that remained within the United Kingdom after the 1921 partition of Ireland. In Say Nothing, it is more than a geographical setting: its disputed borders, unequal distribution of power, and competing traditions of commemoration shape the lives and political choices traced throughout the book. The name itself is contested. Republicans in the Price family called the region the North of Ireland, a choice that made even ordinary place-names part of the argument over sovereignty. The book follows the region from the civil-rights protests of 1969 through armed conflict, political negotiation, and a peace settlement that left questions of identity, accountability, and historical memory unsettled.

Partition, identity, and political power

The partition followed the Irish War of Independence. Twenty-six counties in the south achieved a measure of independence as the Irish Free State, while the six counties in the north continued under British rule. The resulting boundary produced competing senses of minority status. Protestants were the majority within Northern Ireland but a minority on the island as a whole; Catholics were a majority on the island but a minority within the six counties. Each community could therefore understand itself as threatened by the other’s national ambitions.

The imbalance was not only constitutional. Northern Ireland had a devolved political system based at Stormont, outside Belfast, but Catholics faced marked discrimination in employment and housing and had little political power with which to change their circumstances. For half a century, no Catholic held executive office. Catholics were excluded from shipbuilding and other desirable professions, and many emigrated to England, America, or Australia in search of work. Although the Catholic birth rate was approximately twice the Protestant rate, the Catholic population remained virtually static during the three decades before the 1969 march to Derry, as emigration offset population growth.

The region’s political culture also gave commemoration an immediate public significance. The Price family’s republican tradition looked back to the 1916 Easter Rising and to Patrick Pearse, one of its leaders, as a revolutionary hero. In Northern Ireland, however, rituals associated with Irish nationalism were regulated under the Flags and Emblems Act; displaying the tricolour could lead to imprisonment. As a girl, Dolours Price wore an Easter lily to mark the rising and covered it when she saw a policeman approaching. In this setting, a commemorative emblem was both a family inheritance and a visible act of defiance.

Civil rights and the arrival of the army

On 1 January 1969, student protesters gathered at Belfast’s Donegall Square to begin a march of roughly seventy miles to Derry. They sought to draw attention to discrimination against Catholics and deliberately took inspiration from the American civil-rights movement. Bundled in duffel coats and linked arm in arm, the marchers carried civil-rights placards and sang We Shall Overcome. The march placed Northern Ireland’s local inequalities within an international language of protest, while the pattern of discrimination it challenged was rooted in the region’s own political and economic structures.

The deployment of the British Army followed the Battle of the Bogside and the riots of 1969. When soldiers arrived in Belfast and Derry, many Catholics initially welcomed them. The Royal Ulster Constabulary and the B-Specials were regarded by many residents as sectarian authorities, while the army appeared comparatively neutral. In West Belfast, Catholic mothers even brought tea to soldiers at their sandbagged posts. That welcome did not last. The soldiers’ limited understanding of Belfast’s complicated communal geography contributed to a rapid change in how they were perceived: rather than a neutral referee, the army came to be seen as an occupying force allied with the police and the B-Specials.

The landscape made that changing relationship tangible. At Divis Flats, the British Army took over the top two floors of a twenty-storey tower as an observation post, giving its lookouts a view across the city. Below, Catholics armed themselves and exchanged fire with loyalist adversaries, police, and eventually soldiers. Snipers used rooftops, while the army and police returned fire with heavier weapons. The B-Specials shot out street lights, and soldiers patrolled dark streets in Land Rovers with their headlights off. The escalation can be measured in the death toll: nineteen people were killed in 1969, twenty-nine in 1970, nearly two hundred in 1971, and nearly five hundred in 1972. The figures register how quickly a political crisis became a sustained armed conflict.

Conflict, political change, and settlement

Northern Ireland remained the central arena of a conflict whose actions and consequences repeatedly crossed its borders. The 1988 killing of Mairéad Farrell and two associates took place in Gibraltar, but the return of their bodies brought a mass funeral procession through Belfast. Farrell had been imprisoned alongside Dolours and Marian Price before returning to active service. Her killing, and the public mourning that followed, showed how events beyond the six counties could be absorbed into Northern Ireland’s local landscape of loss and republican commemoration.

Political change also took shape within the region. After abandoning violence as her own means of pursuing Irish unity, Dolours Price canvassed for a Sinn Féin candidate for Belfast City Council and later campaigned for Gerry Adams. In 1983 Adams sought a Westminster seat representing West Belfast, while promising, in keeping with republican abstentionism, not to take his seat if elected. Price supported him, urged voters to back Sinn Féin, and drove people to polling stations. Her activity reflected a wider change in strategy: electoral politics increasingly accompanied, and sought to replace, armed struggle.

The Good Friday Agreement established a constitutional framework for that change. Northern Ireland would remain part of the United Kingdom while having its own devolved assembly and close links with the Republic of Ireland. The agreement recognized both the aspiration for Irish unity among a majority on the island and the preference of a majority in the six counties to remain within the United Kingdom. Its principle of consent provided that a future majority in the north could choose unity, and that the UK and Irish governments would be bound to honor that choice. Sinn Féin agreed to set aside abstention and participate in the new assembly. The settlement therefore addressed Northern Ireland’s constitutional status through a procedure for future choice rather than declaring the competing national claims resolved.

A divided peace and the unfinished past

The peace settlement did not include a formal truth-and-reconciliation process for the violence of the preceding decades. Unlike post-apartheid South Africa, Northern Ireland had no clear victor and no agreed mechanism that exchanged truth-telling for legal immunity. The Good Friday Agreement concentrated on the future, including the release of paramilitary prisoners, while leaving the region without a shared process for establishing how the past should be investigated or commemorated. The Royal Ulster Constabulary was rebranded as the Police Service of Northern Ireland, and much of the structural discrimination challenged by the civil-rights movement had receded, but the absence of a reckoning remained consequential.

The Belfast Project arose against this background of political stalemate and continuing silence. Gerry Adams’s refusal to acknowledge membership in the Irish Republican Army made it harder for others to judge whether it was safe to describe their own roles in the conflict. Martin McGuinness later acknowledged that he had been a member and second-in-command in Derry in the early 1970s, but did so in the context of an inquiry into Bloody Sunday, where he would receive immunity from prosecution. The Project’s recordings would in turn become part of a legal dispute: a request passed from the Police Service of Northern Ireland through the United States Department of Justice sought the original interviews of Brendan Hughes and Dolours Price in connection with an alleged murder. The demand brought the unresolved history of Northern Ireland into a new setting, where personal testimony, legal process, and promises of confidentiality collided.

By 2015, nearly two decades after the Good Friday Agreement, official assessments described the main paramilitary organizations as still in existence. The Provisional IRA was said to continue in much reduced form, with access to weapons, although the report described the organization as no longer engaged in violence and as having a wholly political focus. Gerry Adams rejected the assessment. Meanwhile, the physical separation of communities remained conspicuous: Belfast’s peace walls still divided Catholic and Protestant neighborhoods, and there were more of them than at the height of the Troubles. Their opposing sectarian slogans made plain that the end of large-scale conflict had not erased communal hostility.

The unresolved past also remained a practical burden on policing. With no comprehensive mechanism for dealing with conflict-related crimes, inquiries proceeded through inquests, police investigations, and special government inquiries, amid persistent accusations of bias and limited resources. The Police Service of Northern Ireland’s legacy unit faced a backlog of nearly a thousand cases. The book’s account of Northern Ireland therefore ends not with a settled history but with a society negotiating the relationship between peace and justice, political accommodation and continuing division. Its research process reflects that difficulty: four years of research, seven trips to Northern Ireland, and interviews with more than one hundred people still left many unwilling to speak, or withdrawing after initially agreeing. The region’s history, as the book presents it, remains alive in its contested names, separated neighborhoods, unanswered cases, and silences.