Mary Lou McDonald, the Sinn Féin leader, is exultant. Gerry Adams — now billed on his Twitter feed as an ‘Optimistic Activist’, and cultivating an increasingly bardic, elder statesman appearance — posted a clip of himself and colleagues enthusiastically singing the IRA song Come Out Ye Black and Tans with lines such as “and the dirty English feet they walked all over us”, and “tell them how the IRA made you run like hell away”.  The lyrics of the song, although officially referring to the old IRA of the War of Independence era, take on a darker, sharper flavour when sung by a Belfast-born former leader of the modern Provisional IRA campaign.

The same song was belted out by Sinn Féin’s Dessie Ellis and his supporters, draped in a giant tricolour, at his victorious election count in Dublin North-West (Ellis, who served 10 years in prison, was once better known as an accomplished Provisional IRA bomb-maker and explosives expert). To be fair, Sinn Féin didn’t save all the songs until after the count: during the campaign itself, a party election van toured Kingscourt, Co Cavan on behalf of candidate Pauline Tully with the chorus “ooh, ah, up the ‘RA!” blasting out the windows (Tully later claimed that “perhaps” the audio had been superimposed on the recording).

There was a time when such republican triumphalism would have wholly alienated mainstream opinion in the Republic of Ireland. Yet today, although many Irish people have indeed indicated their strong unease with such scenes — a discomfort that will no doubt find its voice in coming weeks — a growing number of Irish voters now interpret it as forgivable nationalist exuberance.

That is not how it will sound, I fear, either to the families of more than 1,700 people killed by the Provisional IRA during its long and bloody campaign, or to unionists of any variety in Northern Ireland.

Why does support for Sinn Féin plummet sharply among the over-65s? Perhaps because a 70-year-old, born in the Republic of Ireland in 1950, would have been 20 or so when the Troubles began in Northern Ireland. Over nearly three decades, he or she would have witnessed the raw pain and chaos unleashed by republican and loyalist paramilitary violence. For many of this generation, Sinn Féin remains synonymous with the Provisional IRA, and to them the atrocities committed by the IRA were not abstract, but very real.

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For today’s younger Irish voters, however, IRA violence belongs to history. For those with the inclination to romanticise it, the organisation’s long campaign is now distant enough from their actual experience to count as a form of radical chic. For others, that history may simply dwindle in importance when set next to the current appeal of Sinn Féin’s energetic promises on house-building, health service funding and heavily flagged support for causes such as trans activism. Those who wanted to shift politics to the left could always have voted for Brendan Howlin’s Irish Labour party, of course, but its campaign was widely felt to lack Sinn Féin’s pizzazz.

The scale of Sinn Féin’s success has taken Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael by surprise. It has also taken the party itself by surprise: such were its expectations, it fielded only 42 candidates in the race for the 159 seats. But the fact that there has been a sudden, seismic political change in the Republic of Ireland does not greatly surprise me.

In UnHerd last December I reviewed Fintan O’Toole’s book Heroic Failure, The Politics of Pain, in which he argued, among other things, that Brexit was a uniquely English act of self-harm partly inspired by a misplaced nostalgia for Empire. I disagreed, because I thought that many of the destabilising factors that led to the ‘Leave’ vote in the UK – a housing crisis, income inequality, precarious employment among the ‘working poor’ and a widespread unease about the meaning or dividends of national identity – were held in common with Ireland, and could well erupt there in a different form.

While the UK “somnambulist state” had long ignored voters’ fundamental concerns, I wrote, Ireland would be foolish to do the same, “and to believe that just because Ireland isn’t England, the painful fall-out from such a question is inevitably very far away”.

The fall-out has come even sooner than expected. Irish voters were reacting to long-term Fine Gael policy failures on housing, welfare provision and healthcare, the Irish version of the “somnambulist state”.  The result was a localised brew of the populism that has already intoxicated so many other countries – in this case embodied in Sinn Féin’s combination of energetic Left-wing economic pledges, zeal on ‘social justice issues’ and pugnacious Irish nationalism, all bound up with its chilling legacy from 30 years of armed conflict.

What did surprise me a little, however, was the muted response from a commentator such as O’Toole, who has previously been so intensely and eloquently exercised by populist surges in the UK and the US. Yet, with Sinn Féin electoral successes already looming last week, he quickly concluded in a column that “there can be no progressive government in Ireland without Sinn Féin”. Sinn Féin was a “party of change”, he said, “a radical party” – and although he personally was very uncomfortable at its history, “younger people” have decided that the “political statute of limitations on atrocities” had expired.

O’Toole said, however, that on no account must ministers in a Dublin Sinn Féin government seek instruction from very senior IRA figures, as they had done in Stormont: “This is intolerable in a democracy. If Sinn Féin were to take office in Dublin, a precondition would have to be a strengthening of the official code of conduct for ministers to explicitly ban such unaccountable influence.”

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But who, exactly, might police this ‘precondition’? Would Mary Lou McDonald, for example, be prevented from discussing policy matters with her former party leader Gerry Adams, or Adams be stopped from discussing anything he liked thereafter with the broad range of ‘veteran republicans’ in his acquaintance?

The idea that assiduous Irish government officials could somehow effectively prevent or sanction the flow of information between Sinn Féin and the IRA is frankly ludicrous. But such statements nonetheless offer a window on to a worrying illusion, that it is somehow possible to invite Sinn Féin into the running of the Irish state and fully expect the party meekly to abide by new rules.

This electoral outcome is what Gerry Adams has long wanted and worked towards. He is not likely to lose interest in it now. Back in 2017, a former member of the IRA’s West Belfast brigade said this about Adams to Henry McDonald of the Guardian: “He still thinks he can push them on to power in the south [Irish Republic] as his final achievement. So he will be staying around, in the back room, working the controls.”

Many in the Republic of Ireland will point out that Sinn Féin has long participated in government in Northern Ireland (admittedly with a recent three-year break, when Northern Ireland had no power-sharing government at all). But the Stormont administration is devolved, with ultimate power still remaining in London. It was designed as part of a difficult, complicated package to persuade republican and loyalist paramilitaries to exchange a violent 30-year conflict for electoral politics, and is therefore a uniquely odd political structure — consisting of compulsory coalitions in which ministries are doled out like fiefdoms to different parties, the mechanism of government is prone to freezing, and irregular financial practices once thrived (as was exposed during the ‘ash for cash’ RHI scandal).

The democratising of paramilitaries in Northern Ireland delivered a welcome cessation of sectarian violence. But it has also paramilitarised democracy: driven Northern Irish voters to the political extremes, entrenched sectarianism, permitted loyalist and dissident republican illegal activity to flourish in working-class areas, and failed to resolve the ongoing horror of paramilitary beatings and shootings, which hardly ever result in a conviction. None of this is an enviable template, I would think, for the Republic of Ireland.

The Republic, in contrast, is an independent sovereign country, which ultimately resolved its own painful arguments over independence and partition to forge a largely successful and confident modern state. It did not need to beckon Sinn Féin and its Provisional IRA legacy into government; its voters have done so not by compulsion, but by choice, because of dissatisfaction with their existing establishment. They have signalled their desire for a very different political party. But I am not sure that all of Sinn Féin’s new voters have realised exactly what forms that difference may take.

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Most modern political parties are haunted by similar things: the long legacies of bad policies, ideological schisms, media gaffes and personality clashes. Sinn Féin is unusual, however, in that it has a particular problem with mothers — mothers who pursue the party leadership asking for justice, even while it is attempting to conduct soft-voiced conversations with a forgetful electorate.

The late Jean McConville is one such mother. A working-class widow, the mother of 10 was seized from her West Belfast home by a group of IRA members in December 1972. She was driven across the Irish border and into County Louth, where she was shot in the back of the head and secretly buried on a sandy beach — or, in the terminology of such killings, ‘disappeared’. McConville’s traumatised young children were split up and sent to care institutions.

As adults, a number of the McConville children courageously began to ask the IRA questions about their mother’s death. They requested answers from the then Sinn Féin president Gerry Adams. The more that came to light about the McConville murder, the more troubling it became for the public image of Sinn Féin: two former Belfast IRA members with close involvement in the McConville murder, Dolours Price and Brendan Hughes, both alleged that the order for the killing was given by Adams himself in his role as their Belfast ‘officer commanding’, something which he denied.

The McConville case — long the subject of newspaper articles — was recently forensically examined in an Orwell prize-winning book Say Nothing, by the US writer Patrick Radden Keefe. It details the IRA’s contemptuous attitude to the human rights of those it regarded as opponents, not least the right to life.

Adams has now retired as Sinn Féin President, ceding the role in 2018 to Mary Lou McDonald, who has spearheaded the party’s electoral drive in the Republic of Ireland. McDonald does not carry the same whiff of cordite: she was born and educated in Dublin and has no direct IRA involvement, although she has in the past been active in IRA commemorations. Yet McDonald, too, was haunted by a mother throughout this election campaign. This time the mother is alive, and her name is Breege Quinn.

Breege Quinn, an elegant, quietly determined Cullyhanna woman, and her husband Stephen, are still seeking justice over the death of their 21-year-old son Paul, who was beaten to death in an October 2007 attack carried out by local members of the IRA.

Paul and a friend were lured to an isolated cattle-shed in County Monaghan on the promise of work. The phone call had come from another friend, who was forced to make the call under threat. Paul arrived to find about a dozen masked IRA men waiting for him.

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It was an intensely brutal and professional operation. His attackers beat Paul with nail-studded clubs and iron bars for over half an hour. At one point, an assailant shouted out to his horrified friends, confined in a nearby shed: “Can you hear your friend squealing?” Paul Quinn died in hospital: every major bone in his body had been broken and his ear was hanging off.

The local Sinn Féin politician Conor Murphy — now a Sinn Féin finance minister in the resurrected Stormont government — said at the time that the IRA was not involved in the murder. He also said: “Paul Quinn was involved in smuggling and criminality, I think everyone accepts that.” A subsequent report from the Independent Monitoring Commission found that current and former members of the Provisional IRA had been involved in the murder, although it concluded that the attack did not happen with the authorisation of the leadership.

When Paul’s death became an issue in this election, Mary Lou McDonald denied that Murphy had made an allegation of criminality about Quinn, until journalists confronted her directly with Murphy’s quotation to the BBC at the time. At that point McDonald admitted that Murphy had indeed said it, whereupon he – at last – apologised for his remarks and “unreservedly withdrew them”.

In the immediate aftermath of the Quinn killing, Murphy had done everything he could to minimise any suggestion of IRA involvement, including making an allegation that caused continuing pain to the Quinn family. The allegation was only retracted 13 years later, under considerable political pressure in the heat of a landmark general election.

Quinn’s family say that Paul was in fact murdered because he got into arguments with the local IRA. The IRA members resented the fact that he seemed unafraid of them. In that, this terrible killing followed a recognisable pattern for the post-ceasefire IRA — its recurrent, disproportionate fury at young, physically strong Catholic men who refused to kowtow to local IRA authority.

Over 20 years ago, I reported on the IRA murder of Andrew Kearney, a 33-year-old West Belfast man who had reportedly been involved in a fist-fight with a north Belfast IRA commander in which the IRA man came off worse. That victory was unlucky for Mr Kearney, because in July 1998 — only a few months after the Belfast Agreement was signed — at least five IRA men battered their way into his flat in the New Lodge, where he was looking after his two-week-old daughter. They disabled the telephone and the lift, overpowered Kearney — allegedly with chloroform — dragged him out to the landing, shot him three times and left him to bleed to death.

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I recall meeting his white-haired mother Maureen Kearney, a life-long Irish republican who was now doggedly demanding answers from Sinn Féin: as a gesture, she took her son’s funeral bill to Sinn Féin headquarters, but never got a reply. Gerry Adams called at the house to commiserate with her loss, and promised to return, but never did. Maureen Kearney died a year later, broken-hearted. No-one was ever convicted of Andrew Kearney’s killing.

Then, in January 2005, Robert McCartney — another 33-year-old Belfast Catholic man — was murdered outside a Belfast city centre bar. An altercation had occurred between McCartney and his friend Brendan Devine and a group which included prominent IRA men and numerous Sinn Féin representatives. It ended in a ferocious attack in which McCartney and Devine both had their throats slit: McCartney died in hospital. More than 70 people were in the bar at the time, yet there were no witnesses. During the dispute, it appeared that they were all in the toilet. After the murder, the IRA sealed off the scene, removed CCTV and forensically cleaned the bar.

Mr McCartney’s sisters and fiancée fought a long-running international campaign to bring his killers to account. Despite a trial involving three men — including one who was charged with McCartney’s murder — no-one was convicted. The case failed due to the lack of witness testimony and undisputed evidence.

One of the two men charged with, and acquitted of, affray in relation to the McCartney attack, Jim McCormick, was the Sinn Féin treasurer in South Belfast at the time. He was later sentenced to 14 and a half years for the attempted murder of another man, Joe Henry, by stabbing.

The McCartney case had notable similarities with a murder that happened a few months later, in Dublin, of a 29-year-old called Joe Rafferty. Rafferty, a hard-working courier and fitness fan, had got into a dispute with another local man after the man allegedly assaulted his sister. The man threatened him, speaking of his connections to the IRA, and the threats escalated, followed by approaches of Rafferty’s worried family to a Sinn Féin councillor to have the threats withdrawn, and his reported assurance that nothing more would come of it. In April 2005, Rafferty was shot twice and killed as he left his Dublin flat to go to work. An Independent Monitoring Commission report found that “a member or former member of PIRA may have been involved” and that members of Sinn Féin and PIRA “were aware in advance of the threat and did not take sufficient action to prevent it”.

In 2016 the jury at an inquest into Rafferty’s murder delivered the verdict that he had been unlawfully killed by a person unknown. Rafferty’s sister, Esther Uzell-Rafferty, said, “that line is hard to listen to because we know who killed Joseph. It makes me so angry” – but, to secure a conviction, they needed more witnesses to come forward with information.

Despite the ongoing torment of the families involved, a popular line of argument during this election has been, “Why does this stuff even matter? It’s all in the past, isn’t it?” Sinn Féin, under McDonald, are keen to represent themselves as progressive and forward-thinking, increasingly distanced from IRA violence while simultaneously profiting from a carefully sentimentalised and historicised vision of “the armed struggle”.

Yet this election has shown that Sinn Féin does not want to disown its IRA past; it wants to control, curate and selectively celebrate it — to turn the agonising human detail of an intensely sad, squalid sectarian conflict into something hazy, generalised and noble.

The real stories stubbornly resist that narrative. Andrew Kearney. Robert McCartney. Joseph Rafferty. Paul Quinn. All these post-Belfast Agreement killings — of fit young Catholic men who could handle themselves in a fight — have certain factors in common. A perceived slight by the victim against a local IRA member or members. An IRA retaliation of extraordinary violence, resulting in murder. A cover-up, a public denial of IRA involvement by Sinn Féin, and the spreading of rumours about the victim’s alleged involvement in criminal activity. The intimidation and silencing of witnesses. The politically soothing judgement that the killing was not “officially sanctioned” by the IRA at the highest levels. A persistent campaign by relatives of the dead man who refuse to be cowed by the IRA, resulting in a measure of media attention — which, when it reaches a critical point, leads prominent Sinn Féin politicians to utter conciliatory words and publicly seek contact with the victim’s family.

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When the spotlight moves away, however, the “concern” for victims quickly evaporates. An insight into how Sinn Féin really views those who have been harmed or bereaved by the IRA was given by a 2017 WhatsApp chat linked to the Sinn Féin TD Dessie Ellis and used by party members.

When the prospect of a snap general election was raised, one user complained that it would result in the media being “on the phone to Cahill, Stack, Quinn and all and every other waster they can wheel out with a sob story”. The names cited referred to Mairia Cahill, who went public with the testimony that she was abused as a teenager by a senior IRA member and that the IRA covered up the abuse; Austin Stack, the son of a Portlaoise chief prison officer murdered by the IRA in 1983; and the parents of Paul Quinn.

Sinn Féin is clearly resentful of the fact that these individuals speak to the media at all. They’re supposed to know their place, and keep quiet. A common theme among Sinn Féin supporters on social media during the election campaign was that the media had disgracefully ‘exploited’ the Quinn family. It fell to journalists such as Suzanne Breen, an experienced Northern Ireland reporter and commentator, politely to remind Twitter users that she had been covering the Quinn story in detail since Paul’s murder in 2007, when his parents first began their campaign for justice. If the public hadn’t paid attention before, it wasn’t for a lack of available information.

A significant proportion of the Irish electorate, however, has decided that Sinn Féin’s history is no longer an issue – and the principle of democracy is that what voters want, or think they want, voters get.

Yet, looking North, there is one particular paradox of Sinn Féin’s success. Since it is the most hardline nationalist party, its poll-topping performance has already caused some to talk of a border poll and a united Ireland as a genuine possibility. At the same time, the triumphalist nature of its republicanism also makes unionists much less likely to see their future in an agreed united Ireland.

Post-Brexit, some Remain-voting Unionists – particularly among the middle classes – were softening in their attitude to joining an economically successful, socially liberal Republic of Ireland. One component of this softening was the belief that the air in the Republic of Ireland was not as toxic, in sectarian terms, as that of Northern Ireland, where the loyalist UDA and UVF and Sinn Féin regularly commemorate members linked to appalling deeds which in any conventional war would be considered war crimes.

Sinn Féin’s sudden accession in the Republic will have stalled that instinct in some unionists, and replaced it with a deep apprehension. The atmosphere has changed: even the most post-political unionist would now think twice about entering a united Ireland to the theme tune of “ooh, ah, Up the ‘RA!’”.

There’s a line of Milan Kundera’s, “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” The steep ascent of Sinn Féin towards power in the Republic of Ireland represents the temporary triumph of forgetting. In the past the party, too, has shown itself to be very effective in enforcing silences. One can even sense a silence spreading in Ireland now, as many of those who are normally loquacious on Twitter fall uncharacteristically quiet on their opinion of the election results, as if trying to puzzle out their own place in the altered political order. I predict that ultimately Sinn Féin’s victory will create a new ideological schism in mainstream Irish society.

Once the election excitement dies down, however, Ireland must surely brace itself for a different and searching national conversation. The questions for Sinn Féin, and the grieving relatives, won’t go away, you know: memory has a way of knocking to be let back in.

That year, from one March to the next, saw rising IRA and loyalist paramilitary violence, the introduction of internment, and the fateful events of Bloody Sunday, on which British army paratroopers shot dead 13 unarmed demonstrators at a Londonderry civil rights march. Thereafter, things descended into greater mayhem: the summer of 1972 ushered in Bloody Friday, on which 20 IRA bombs exploded across Belfast in different locations.

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I was too young to be aware of such events, but by the time that I was even dimly cognisant of our contorted politics — in the mid-to-late 70s — individuals and political patterns were entrenched in ways that were to endure for decades. Ian Paisley, who began as a young loyalist firebrand, had by 1971 gained both a Westminster seat and his own party, the Democratic Unionists.

Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness had been identified as key representatives of the IRA when they were flown to London for secret talks with Willie Whitelaw in 1972. By 2007 such “players”, formerly of the extremes, were firmly at the centre, and in charge: Paisley and McGuinness were leading a new Stormont government as First and Deputy First Minister respectively.

The family that I grew up in was pro-Union and Protestant but non-sectarian. My father was a barrister and also an independent Unionist politician, but I had little notion of Catholics as alien: we had Catholic relatives and family friends. It seemed to me that aspiring to a united Ireland by peaceful means, like an attachment to union with the UK, was a justifiable political viewpoint that could be debated.

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The heavily electrified dividing-line lay not in religion or political views, but in the means you were prepared to use to get there. Both the republican paramilitaries (the IRA and the INLA) and the loyalist paramilitaries (the UVF and the UDA) openly considered it acceptable to murder people in order either to advance the cause of a United Ireland or to defend the status quo in the United Kingdom. They had a broad and elastic range of “legitimate targets”.

Sometimes the “legitimate targets” were politicians. When I was at primary school in 1981, the IRA shot dead the Ulster Unionist MP Robert Bradford at his South Belfast constituency office. Two years later, the IRA gunned down the young unionist politician and law lecturer Edgar Graham, in the grounds of Queen’s University opposite my secondary school.

Other brutal killings of politicians stuck in our communal memory — back in 1973, Loyalist paramilitaries had murdered the nationalist Senator Paddy Wilson and his girlfriend, Irene Andrews. Both unionist and nationalist politicians were routinely offered personal protection weapons. The entire society was permanently mined with unease.

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By the time I was 10 or 11, it was clear to me that, once the dehumanising of the people on the other side of the political divide got started in earnest, some very dark territory awaited. Separately from that, it was becoming evident that the pro-Union position in Northern Ireland was a psychologically complicated one. It involved a loyalty to Great Britain and a shared history cemented in the losses of two world wars, combined with constant insecurity about the degree to which the affection was requited.

Northern Irish unionists were British in Ireland and Irish in Britain. They belonged to neither nation’s mythic conception of itself. The wider Northern Protestant tradition contained plenty to be proud of — its history of dissent, its industrial capabilities, writers, musicians and sporting heroes — but too often an intensely localised culture of Orange marching bands and gigantic bonfires drew negative media attention and threatened narrowly to define it.

No broader tribe was waiting to welcome Northern unionists warmly, and in any case — from what I could see — tribal loyalties had a way of turning nasty. Although a sense of identity is important to everyone, I began to be suspicious of any overweening communal identification that overrode individual values.

*

I have now lived in London for 25 years. Part of England’s appeal used to be the calmer way in which politics was discussed. Yet something else felt different in London too: a more acute class consciousness. In recent years it has become increasingly apparent to me that, in many ways, class is to England what religion is to Northern Ireland.

George Osborne, as Chancellor of a government heavily dominated by former pupils of England’s leading public schools, pressed home an austerity budget in 2012 with the words: “We’re all in this together”. We weren’t, of course. A report for the Institute of Fiscal Studies in 2015 found that low-income families with children bore the brunt of the coalition government’s austerity drive.

Official austerity collided with a new style of labour market — the rise of zero-hours contracts, without holiday or sick pay — and an overheating UK housing market, mingled with a severe shortage of social housing. The combination has, in recent years, seen the emergence of the “working poor”, who struggle to make ends meet despite being in employment.

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The Leave vote was in part an expression of political frustration from those in England and Wales who had felt marginalised by their new set of circumstances and wished to return their government to more direct accountability.

If many low-income Leave voters seemed unconcerned about the potential economic effect, that is partly because the system was already working out so badly for them that they preferred to accept even a short-term worsening of their circumstances in exchange for a gamble on a different long-term deal. It may be a gamble in which the odds remain stacked against them, but it was not wholly irrational.

There were many means by which this polarisation by geography, class and age — evidence of which bubbled up after the referendum — could have been avoided. One such means lay in how different social groups talked — or rather, didn’t talk — to each other.

Over the decades that I have lived in London, I’ve gradually noticed a broader contempt for the working class creeping into both public policy and the language of the more socially influential and financially secure — the notion that, if poorer people were failing to rise, it wasn’t because of any barriers placed in their way, but because they were simply what the UK meritocracy had left behind. The poor were seen as a kind of inevitable underclass: not quite fully equal citizens, but a form of societal sludge.

The better-educated and better-off have had a tendency to close down discussions which, in all fairness, should have ended with the considered redistribution of national resources.

One example relates to immigration and housing. It is generally accepted that higher rates of net immigration place a greater strain on social housing supply. That’s not because foreign-born UK residents use social housing at any greater rate — foreign-born usage is roughly the same as that of UK-born people — but simply because a rapidly expanding population naturally requires more social housing provision, and construction rates haven’t kept up.

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Not long ago, I watched an edition of BBC Question Time in which a man in the audience said something like: “I’m not racist, but with all these foreigners coming in my daughter can’t get a council house.” I knew that the immediate middle-class reaction to his blunt phrasing about “all these foreigners” would be to conclude that this man was indeed a racist or xenophobe, and dismiss his comments thereafter. And sometimes “I’m not racist, but…” is indeed a prelude to a racist remark.

But suppose policymakers took what the man said at face value? Suppose that, just as he said, he wasn’t a racist, but his experience was that high rates of net immigration — including that of some families categorised as at higher priority need — really did lessen his daughter’s chances of getting affordable, secure social housing?

The discussion wouldn’t have had to end up in resentment of foreigners. A better-functioning democracy, maybe one less imbued with class consciousness, might have actually listened. It might, perhaps, have concluded that — though freedom of movement brought significant benefits for UK citizens — lower-income groups were disproportionately likely to experience any negative effects of a rapidly expanding population.

To counter this, a succession of governments might have made it a clear priority to build social housing at a much higher rate, so that there was a better supply for all those who needed it. That way, UK-born people on lower incomes wouldn’t have been in competition with a growing number of foreign-born UK residents for a shrinking resource, for which 1.1 million households are now on the waiting list.

None of this national conversation happened, of course. The reason was that, for very many years, those in positions of power quite literally couldn’t find the common language for an honest, pragmatic discussion on sharply rising rates of immigration.

Socially and economically, I’m solidly in the metropolitan middle class. But I’ve absorbed enough lessons from my birthplace to understand the dangers of automatically dismissing and deriding people who don’t think exactly like you.

*

The decision to ‘Leave’ or ‘Remain’ is a genuine strategic and cultural disagreement — in this case on Britain’s long-term economic outlook, our government’s political accountability to the people, the nature of British and European identity, and our role within the wider world.

Despite our current flamboyant political chaos, there are arguments on both sides, neither of which require the automatic reduction of one to “traitors” and “enemies of the people” or the other to “morons” and “racists”. But tribal excitement is in the air.

I like Twitter, for its fast-moving coverage of politics and access to direct sources. For a time now, however, we have all seen the escalation of deeply nasty rhetoric, often from an angry, hard Leave perspective from outside the London sphere of influence — including anonymous, vicious threats to female MPs such as Anna Soubry, Diane Abbott and Jess Phillips. The UK is in a troubling place when judges are receiving death threats from Leave zealots and MPs require police protection from baying crowds on both sides.

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Yet, increasingly, individuals with more prominent public voices, often on the Remain side, are joining in the nastiness, and delighting in crude insults or crafting ornately obscene insults for retweets and likes.

I’m not talking about passionate political disagreement, but statements that relish imputing the basest motives to those who think differently; people with whom, in any future version of the UK, the speaker will nonetheless have to share a country.

A couple of recent examples, among many — singled out only because they are freshest in the memory: firstly, the Guardian journalist Zoe Williams tweeting that the 76-year-old Labour MP Ronnie Campbell is a “scab” for deciding to vote for Boris Johnson’s withdrawal deal. (Campbell, incidentally, is an ex-miner who went down the pits at 14 and was on picket lines during the miner’s strike.)

Secondly, the writer John Niven tweeting a picture of his sweet-faced young daughter about to march in protest against Brexit (while carrying a large banner reading “Cock, Piss, Brexit”) — and attacking anyone who objected as a “gammon” and much worse.

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I have lost count of the number of times reasonably well-known comedians, writers and commentators, incensed by the prospect of Britain leaving the EU, have called people they disagree with politically a “cunt” (although usually the word is embroidered with further eye-catching expletives to jazz it up). Each time, it brings me up a bit short. Maybe this feels to them like a swashbuckling expression of justified fury; they think it’s okay because they’re so sure they’re right. But then people on all sides think they’re right.

My political awakening involved a growing mistrust of tribal intensity, and a wariness of extreme rhetoric. To this I can now add a third element, contrary to what I might once have imagined — the realisation that England really isn’t so different from Northern Ireland, now that Brexit has given it a way to divide itself in two.

Be careful with the excitement, England, for those of you who are presently carried away with the thrill of belonging, the sudden exhilaration of full-throttle hating. After a while, you will become indistinguishable from your means, and your means will distort the ends. Believe me, it won’t be the first time that has happened.

A representative of The Brotherhood, named O’Brien, asks Smith a series of questions to test his loyalty to the revolutionary cause. They range across Smith’s preparedness to commit acts of betrayal, sabotage and murder, including: “If, for example, it would somehow serve our interests to throw sulphuric acid in a child’s face – are you prepared to do that?” Smith answers unhesitatingly that he is.

At the end of the book, with the Party still in power, and the Brotherhood revealed to have been a front for it, O’Brien plays back to a broken Smith the recording of his declared readiness to do those terrible things. He intends to make a mockery of Smith’s residual belief in his own moral superiority, even though Smith never actually carried out any such deed.

Yet another question hangs in the air: when the ends are used to justify the means – and sometimes very brutal means indeed – then how does the psyche retrospectively process its acquiescence in such means, if those ends have not ultimately been achieved?

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This scene, written in 1948, came back to me as I read Patrick Radden Keefe’s masterly book Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland, which has deservedly won the 2019 Orwell Prize for Political Writing.

In it, a similar question of appalling means and unresolved ends returns to haunt some of those who were part of the IRA’s long campaign.

Say Nothing is the intensely sad story of Jean McConville, a working-class widow and mother of 10 who was abducted from her home in West Belfast, murdered and ‘disappeared’ by an IRA unit in 1972.

But it is also the story of those IRA members involved in her murder, in particular Dolours Price, who died in 2013, aged 62, after taking a toxic mixture of prescription drugs. By the time that Price admitted to her role in McConville’s murder – to the journalist Ed Moloney in 2010 – she was a fragile individual outside the mainstream Republican fold, heavily disillusioned with the Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams and his political strategy, and tormented by depression and a history of anorexia nervosa.

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Yet, at one time Price and her sister Marian were not only extremely close to Gerry Adams, but also the poster-girls for militant Irish republicanism in an era when idealised images of ‘revolutionary’ women had begun to attract international attention. The young and glamorous Price sisters drew press coverage for their role in a high-profile London bombing campaign in 1973, for which they were jailed along with six others.

Keefe’s account captures the fanatical and stubborn certainties of these young IRA women as they moved in the thick of a conflict that was dangerously over-heating on all sides – and also their initial, heady excitement: donning disguises, pretending to flirt with unwitting British soldiers, bringing London to a standstill.

The Price sisters came from a Belfast republican family, which took pride in its history of IRA involvement. The girls had imbibed stories of it from an early age: their aunt Bridie, who lived with them, had lost both hands and been blinded while handling IRA explosives and their father Albert had been a prominent IRA man in the 1940s.

Dolours, Keefe writes, was at first confident that a political route would succeed in redressing inequalities in housing and reforming Northern Ireland’s antiquated local election system which discriminated against Catholics. But the concerted ambush in 1969 of a student ‘People’s Democracy’ march at Burntollet Bridge by an armed loyalist mob – whipped up by a young firebrand preacher called Ian Paisley – while police did little to provide protection, changed her mind.

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With her familial radicalism reinvigorated by events, in 1971 the trainee teacher Dolours Price requested to join the nascent Provisional IRA. So did her sister Marian. A special meeting of the Provisional IRA was convened to determine that for the first time women could join the organisation as full members: with the Price sisters, women’s lib had reached the PIRA campaign.

Meanwhile a disastrous British policy of sweeping internment of Catholic youths was followed, in 1972, by the events of Bloody Sunday, both of which contributed heavily to support for the IRA.

Women’s lib had not, however, done much for Jean McConville. The recent widow had fallen into depression after her husband Arthur, a Catholic ex-serviceman, died of cancer. Theirs had been a mixed marriage – Jean was born Protestant – and she was now struggling alone to look after her 10 children, the eldest of whom was 17, in a council flat in Divis Flats. The army frequently patrolled there and republican “paramilitaries were embedded throughout the complex”.

In a city marked by the scarred geography of intensifying sectarian warfare, the McConvilles had found themselves objects of suspicion on both sides: too Catholic for East Belfast, too Protestant for Divis in West Belfast. The McConville children clearly recall an incident – which the author tries and fails to locate in the records – when their mother comforted an injured British soldier and they had “Brit-lover” daubed on their door.

Keefe is both forensic and lyrical in his approach. He successfully evokes the tightening, nauseous claustrophobia of place and time, the swirl of rumour, and the sense of intimate, escalating bullying as the vulnerable McConville family first grew isolated from the Divis community and then was overtly targeted by the IRA. The IRA alleged that Jean McConville was using a radio transmitter to pass local information to the British (something which the McConville family strongly denies, and for which the police ombudsman Nuala O’Loan found no evidence in her 2006 investigation).

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After being beaten up once by the IRA, McConville was abducted, protesting, from the family home one night in December 1972 by a large group of male and female IRA members. Among them was Dolours Price. Jean McConville was never seen alive again. Her children were not told where she had gone, although her rings and purse were returned to them a week after her disappearance.

Footage still exists of the confused, motherless McConville children being interviewed in January 1973 on the local news, Scene Around Six. It is almost unbearably painful to watch: the smaller children huddle into the two older girls like nestlings exposed to the storm. Their mother, unbeknownst to them, had already been ‘disappeared’ by the IRA: shot and buried without trace. In 2003, her body was unearthed on a beach in County Louth, with the nappy pin she always carried still stuck to her clothing.

Say Nothing is about the McConville family and what they courageously endured, a trauma compounded by some horrendous experiences in residential care. It is also about the trajectory of the Provisional IRA movement, of revolutionary ideals begetting deep cruelties and how those deeds return to haunt their perpetrators.

Towards the end of her life, a troubled Dolours Price – who later married the actor Stephen Rea and had two sons – began to talk to trusted contacts, friends and journalists. She revealed that she and her sister Marian were in an IRA unit called The Unknowns, which answered directly to Gerry Adams himself and did what Keefe calls “dangerous, secretive, sometimes unsavoury work”. It was work such as driving alleged informers to their IRA killing, and even (as in the McConville case) carrying out the killing themselves.

Some of Price’s later quotes are chilling, including her disparaging of the memory of the undoubtedly terrified Jean McConville – “she talked too much” – and flashes of the ideological ruthlessness that first propelled her into action: on the question of informers, she told Moloney, she had believed “they were less than human. Death was too good for them.”

Yet she was also clearly tormented by what she had been steeped in, arguing that she had been “required to act in a way that was contrary to my nature”.

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The abandonment of the IRA ‘armed struggle,’ which came as such a relief to the rest of the world, had left many of its former combatants psychologically high and dry. If – seen through Price’s eyes – the involvement of the British state in Northern Ireland was indeed Big Brother, then the ‘armed struggle’ had ended with Big Brother still in situ, and the IRA responsible for roughly 1,800 dead.

Adams would assure his supporters that he was playing the ‘long game’ and that Irish unity could be pursued more effectively through political strategy. Time may or may not eventually prove him right. Since the ceasefires, Sinn Fein has retrospectively sought to cast the IRA campaign as more about ‘civil rights’ than a united Ireland (the dissident republican Kevin Hannaway, Adam’s cousin, countered this tendency with: “If they were out for an Irish Republic, they failed. If they were out for civil rights, they got it in 1973. So what the fucking hell was the other 30 years of war for?”) For ex-IRA members such as Price, however, who had gone through imprisonment, hunger-strikes and force-feeding for a united Ireland, Adams’ long game felt more like ‘game over’.

As Keefe writes: “Price felt a sharp sense of moral injury: she believed that she had been robbed of any ethical justification for her own conduct.” Extreme means had left their scars, even on those who dispensed them, and ends had not been delivered. Meanwhile, there were growing revelations about the degree to which the inner circle of the IRA had been penetrated by British intelligence.

As Price talked openly about the details of what had gone on, she made one particularly explosive allegation: that Adams had a decisive role as her ‘officer commanding’ in ordering McConville’s murder and disappearance.

Her claim was backed up by the late Brendan Hughes, a prominent former Belfast IRA man and one-time close companion of Adams, when Hughes gave evidence to the controversial Boston College academic project. The project confidentially recorded testimonies from the Troubles on the basis that they would only be released after the interviewee’s death or with their consent. Hughes died in 2008.

Along the way, the Irish republican revolution had devoured many of its own children, in particular those who – for personal or political reasons – felt they could no longer be part of the enveloping post-conflict Sinn Fein worldview. It did not, however, devour Gerry Adams, who emerges from these pages as an icily strategic figure with an unusual ability to compartmentalise his personal history. He has always denied being in the IRA, a position which may have begun as a practical strategy to avoid arrest but has ended up looking like a canny distancing from the bloody reality of what the IRA did.

Yet Hughes and Price both alleged that it was Adams himself who gave orders for McConville not only to be killed but also ‘disappeared’ (despite the objections of the veteran IRA hard-liner Ivor Bell who, Hughes said, argued for McConville’s body to be displayed openly as a warning to others accused of defying IRA edicts). Their emphatic recollection sits in direct opposition to what Adams personally told the McConville family – that he was certain the IRA had killed their mother, but he had no idea who authorised it.

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In 2014, Gerry Adams was arrested and questioned over Jean McConville, but prosecutors later announced that he would not face any criminal charges. Ivor Bell, in contrast, was charged with involvement in the McConville murder, but the prosecution was abandoned on the grounds that the elderly Bell was ‘unfit for trial’.

Of all the ghosts created by the IRA, it is perhaps Jean McConville who has returned to haunt the organisation most relentlessly and powerfully. In this book, Adams’s insistence – as alleged by Price and Hughes – on ‘disappearing’ McConville would seem to echo Adams’ wider strategy through his long and morally complex history: to bury stomach-churning realities, layer them in ambiguities and denials, and forever seek to elude wider judgement.

That strategy, broadly speaking, has served him well. Today, Adams’ Twitter feed is a curated mixture of social justice campaigning, jokes, poetry and sanitised Troubles reminiscences. Last year he published a ‘Negotiators’ Cookbook’ full of homely dishes that he said sustained the Sinn Fein team in the run-up to the Good Friday Agreement.

He is TD for Louth, the very county in which Jean McConville met her lonely death with a shot to the back of the head. And he appears now to be officially feted in the US as Ireland’s most authentic representative: in 2018 the New York Mayor Bill de Blasio publicly awarded Adams freedom of the city and anounced that he was renaming St Patrick’s Day ‘Gerry Adams Day’ while the Taoiseach, Leo Varadkar, looked on. Throughout, Adams has appeared to suffer little of the psychological distress which clearly beset Price, Hughes and numerous other ex-IRA members.

As a journalist who grew up in Northern Ireland, I am familiar with many of the histories in Say Nothing, but Keefe weaves them together with gripping clarity and skill. He adds some fresh hypotheses of his own, chiefly the suggestion – arrived at by piecing together information from Dolours Price and other sources – that it was Marian Price who fired the shot that killed McConville, something that Marian Price vehemently denies.

This book should be read by anyone who wants to understand Northern Ireland during the Troubles, its sadness and squalor, and its complex, feverish texture. Keefe grew up among the Irish Americans of Boston, a community that – as he says – has tended to view IRA violence through “the sentimental attitudes of tribal solidarity”. But there’s no touch of green mist permeating the writing here – or, indeed, mist of any variety. For those of us who have grown weary of selective ambiguities, it comes as a relief to watch a stranger take our murky, disputed past and lay it out, as clearly as he can, under the light.