And they say - with good reason, I think - what could she possibly have known, this woman who was a widow and a mother of 10? What type of information could she have been passing to the British? Nobody would tell them what had happened to their mother.Īnd I should say that they, to this day, really strenuously object to any suggestion that she had been an informant. And so the children had suspicions, but they really didn't know. KEEFE: Exactly, which was a paramilitary group that was very deeply embedded in that part of West Belfast at that time. KELLY: The IRA, the Irish Republican Army. KEEFE: Well, there were rumors from quite early on that the IRA had taken Jean McConville away and that they'd done so because she was an informant. There was no body, no opportunity for the family to grieve or bury her. KEEFE: The intruders told the kids that their mother would be back, that they just needed to talk to her for a short while. As Keefe tells it, one evening, gunmen entered the family apartment and took Jean McConville. They lived in Divis Flats, public housing in West Belfast. She was 38 years old, a widow, a mom of 10 children. KELLY: This was the backdrop for the disappearance of Jean McConville. And then you have a whole series of paramilitary groups planting bombs and shooting at each other in the streets. You have British soldiers on the streets. PATRICK RADDEN KEEFE: At the point where my story begins in 1972, you have the beginning of what was really an all-out war. Protestant paramilitary groups fought back. The book is "Say Nothing: A True Story Of Murder And Memory In Northern Ireland." It's about the Troubles, the decades of conflict when the Irish Republican Army and other Catholic paramilitary groups used bombings and kidnappings and murder to try to force the end of British rule in Northern Ireland. In his new book, journalist Patrick Radden Keefe uses one crime to tell a much bigger story.
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