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

The IRA agreed to decommission their weapons in 2005. The chapter opens at an arms collection overseen by Father Reid. It was a tense scene with so many visible weapons and fears of “an ambush by dissident paramilitaries who were not quite ready to give up fighting and might endeavor to repossess the arsenal” (280). This fear was further proof that a threat of violence remained alive in post-Troubles Northern Ireland.

The same year, invigorated from his cathartic participation in the Belfast Project, O’Rawe published a book, Blanketmen, in which he relayed his knowledge of Adams’s sacrifice of the final six hunger strikers. Sinn Féin denounced the book as many others embraced and praised it.

Hughes died in 2008. He left behind directions for Mackers and Moloney: publish his recollections. Moloney did so in the 2010 publication, Voices from the Grave. Like Blanketmen, it damned Adams. Furthermore, the release of the book meant that “the secret of the archive was officially out” (284). The Belfast Project became public knowledge.

A friend of Adams’s requested access to Hughes’s interview tapes. This request exposed some essential oversights in the administration of the Belfast Project.