Quotations (13)

Say Nothing

a True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland
1 to 13 of 13 items
“Outbreeding Unionists may be an enjoyable pastime for those who have the energy,” Adams once remarked. “But it hardly amounts to a political strategy.”
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?
The anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss once observed that, “for the majority of the human species, and for tens of thousands of years, the idea that humanity includes every human being on the face of the earth does not exist at all. The…
Fearful, perhaps, of his powers of ideological seduction, the Thatcher government imposed a peculiar restriction, “banning” the IRA and Sinn Féin from the airwaves. What this meant in practice was that when Adams appeared on television,…
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.
A fresh-faced, headstrong young IRA prisoner organized cultural classes. He wrote poetry and would become the official press officer for the republican prisoners. His name was Bobby Sands.
Force-feeding was a controversial practice that had been used on another group of unruly women, the British suffragettes. After being force-fed in Holloway Prison in 1913, one of the suffragettes, Sylvia Pankhurst, called it torture,…
A subsequent investigation by the British government found that some of the interrogation techniques used against the so-called Hooded Men constituted criminal assault. But in a controversial 1978 decision, the European Court of Human…
McGuigan and his fellow detainees were stripped naked and examined by a doctor, then subjected to a series of procedure that were classified, in the army’s euphemistic bureaucratese, as “interrogation in depth.” For days, the prisoners…
He reportedly quipped, of locking people up without trial, “It’s better than killing them.”
...some of the more introspective soldiers were forced to wonder: What would success look like? How would you define victory? They had been sent to Northern Ireland to quell the unrest during the summer of 1969, but since their arrival,…
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…
In the words of one English journalist writing at the time, the unionists in Northern Ireland were “a society more British than the British about whom the British care not at all.”