Say Nothing

I feel thick as champ for not realising until recently that actor Stephen Rea had been married to former paramilitary Dolours Price. It's one of those things I probably was aware of 10+ years ago while researching my PhD but hadn't appreciated the significance of, and then my trauma-addled, burnt-out brain erased the knowledge. It may also be that I take so little notice of celebrities' personal lives that I simply never knew. Plus she died at a time when the flag protests were causing havoc in Belfast and I was starting a temporary and all-consuming new life in Aberdeen. Either way, it's a revelation to me now, and one that feels like an oversight in my PhD and the subsequent book based on it, specifically their conclusions which confront the pervasive legacy of the Disappeared. 

The ramifications of Rea voicing Willie Doherty's video installation Ghost Story (2007) now hit me like a punch to the gut. It is Buried (2009), which became an unvoiced companion to Ghost Story in subsequent exhibitions, that makes more visual reference to potential unceremonious burial sites for the individuals who were executed by the Provisional IRA for being informants. Many of these accused were delivered to their fates by Rea's former partner Price during her years of active duty. Oddly, she never directly came up in my studies which finished in 2011, and I am yet to view I, Dolours which was released in 2018. She and her sister Marian were often revered as legends by the former inmates of the women's prison Armagh Gaol in the film projects I analysed for chapter one of my Old Borders project. These now feel like errant dots in urgent need of joining. I hope someday I'll manage a revised and expanded edition, but there's too much eroding and shifting ground from Brexits and pandemics just now to find purchase and clarity. For now, such interjections as these must suffice. 

It is from reading Say Nothing (Patrick Radden Keefe, 2019) that brings all this up. I'd been putting off reading it for ages, then quickly found it too compelling to put down (although there are parts where I had to take a breather). Quite quickly after beginning the substantial volume, I figured the Boston College tapes must have been a significant resource. Knowledge of the Belfast Project's secret recordings with former paramilitaries that were to be kept sealed until after their deaths had recently become public knowledge as I began my PhD in 2008, and I remember attending an event at Queen's University Belfast, perhaps in 2009, with Ed Moloney heatedly defending the archive. I've just learned from Keefe's book that tensions amongst the creators and holders of the documents had erupted around this time, as there had been no agreement about when the tapes would be released or to whom. With the stipulations of the Good Friday Agreement leaving so many victims - not least the families of the Disappeared - in the cold, and no provision for any mode of amnestied truth commission as there had been in South Africa following the end of apartheid, the tapes across the Atlantic tantalisingly held testimony that could have brought some modicum of closure to so many and confirm things we already know but are persistently denied. 

Stephen Rea has never shied away from taking on roles that directly confront the legacies of the Northern Ireland conflict. He's one of few actors from Ulster who has refused to lose the accent, apart from masking it for appropriate roles, for example, as Leopold Bloom or Inspector Bucket. When I was studying Doherty's work - and I did so extensively - it was his own experience as a child during Bloody Sunday and decades of mediated memories I would home in on. I didn't think of Rea's voice in Ghost Story beyond the explicit baggage brought by his roles in films such as The Crying Game (dir. Neil Jordan, 1992). It didn't occur to me to delve into the actor's personal life, which, it turns out, he's closed about anyway. It may just be indicative of the smallness of the place and population, but I now wonder how conscious if at all Doherty was in casting Rea to voice what would become perhaps his most recognised work (even more than the two nominated for the Turner Prize). When I consider the extent to which this could be incidental, I recall the deliberate casting of Colin Stewart and Kenneth Branagh in Non-Specific Threat and the amount of his video and photographic works that imagine the environments of sites of disappearance and dumped bodies, and the ones highlighting the duality of language around volunteering and victimhood. It was the slide-set Same Difference way back in 1990 that placed the ambiguous word 'volunteer' against mug/headshots of women, introducing the underlying relationship between women and language as being one of violence through what is said and what is implied by what is left unsaid.

The explosive revelations in the Boston College testimonies that Keefe managed to access often hinge on Price's interviews and, it seems, truths therein lie in the questions that went unanswered. Central to the republican testimonies is someone who is very much still alive and prosperously enjoying the spoils of a fragile peace at a move from its repercussions. When the tapes were not protected against subpoenas, it seemed that even then only testimonies about the self could be taken as confessions while claims about others were written off as conjecture. Hence the most successful survivor of the whole business is someone who opted for denial, deflection and downplay from the outset.

What is clear to me is that the trauma caused by the chaos of the 1970s, 80s and 90s is itself blocking access to the truth. The testimonies, from what researchers and journalists managed to glean before the Belfast Project documents were returned to participants and likely destroyed, contain further potentially earth-shattering revelations. These testimonies were given by people who, as well as perpetrating acts that caused trauma, were traumatised themselves, and felt disillusioned and betrayed by organisations and leaderships that opted for positions of power in an uncomfortable peace. Many were ill and in pain. Memory at the best of times is unreliable, but add trauma, the passage of time and a degree of resentment and all it does is muddy the already dank waters of unresolved, unresolvable pasts. There are things that we know but that cannot be proven. There are things that are indicated but no one will confirm, and will certainly deny. Whether or not it is known or anyone is willing to admit it, the persistent secrecy, rumours, lies and unprovable certainties are passing this collective trauma down through the next generations. I am not convinced that hope is enough to save them, particularly not now that the Brexit fall out is diverting already overstretched resources from dealing meaningfully with the past. This would also need to be addressed in serious debates around reunification and what a new Irish society could look like. This island full of traumatic recall and violent legacies needs compassionate leadership at all levels to begin to heal. How can this be attained with so many of the old systems remaining firmly in place? Will anyone be willing to listen to suggestions for creative solutions and a total overhaul of the current power structures? Can a society ever truly move on without justice or truth and when future generations are sentenced to carry the unknowns of the past?