Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland

State armed forces and paramilitary volunteers alike committed illegal acts of violence in the name of their respective causes during the Troubles. Official reports found that the British military and the RUC colluded with, and covered for, illegal loyalist paramilitaries and even perhaps some of the most violent IRA informants. Keefe maintains that formal and paramilitary organizations probably never meant to randomly kill civilians for spectacle. Still, missions like public bombings come with a great risk of collateral damage, and IRA plans often seemed shoddy at best. Amidst the brutality that Dolours Price and other Provos deemed contrary to human nature, those involved often remained steadfast in the ideology that the ends would justify the means, or in other words, that their behavior would be vindicated when the conflict ended in their favor. For many former IRA volunteers, the fact that the British maintained a presence and meaningful political control in Northern Ireland at the end of the Troubles represented a failure that rendered the entire armed strategy tragically wasteful and their personal actions irredeemable. This notion haunted people like Dolours Price and