No one who grew up in the UK in the 60s, 70s and 80s, as I did, could have been unaware of “the Troubles”, the terrible conflict between Irish Republicans and Loyalists that blighted Northern Ireland and occasionally spilled over to mainland England, claiming more than 3,500 lives.  Bombings, shootings, kidnappings, assassinations – this was the stuff of the nightly TV news in those years, punctuating a civil war that never seemed to end.  Say Nothing, written by an American journalist, approaches the history of the Troubles from an unusual angle by focusing mainly on one of its best known and most shocking incidents, the abduction by the IRA in 1972 of Jean McConville, a widow and mother of ten children. The cold-blooded kidnapping is used as the jumping-off point for a vividly told history of the conflict in which key figures in the Republican movement such as Gerry Adams, Dolours Price, and Brendan Hughes feature prominently.  Readers who know little or nothing about what happened in Ireland in this period couldn’t ask for a better introduction to the politics, important events, and some of the leading personalities, though it concentrates pretty much exclusively on the Republican side of the story.  The gradual move from armed conflict to negotiation and conventional politics – from the bomb to the ballot box – and the tensions that went with the journey from idealism to pragmatism are told very well here.

The carnage of those decades is long behind us. The social inequality that sparked the violence is mostly a thing of the past and Northern Ireland has been enjoying a long period of prosperity and stability.  But talk of introducing a “hard border” between the Irish Republic and Northern Ireland in the wake of Brexit has awoken old fears, not least of the possibility of a slow sliding back to tribalism and conflict.