An Entreaty from the Talbot County Free Library

by Bill Peak

Recently I came across a glowing review of a television series on Hulu called Say Nothing—the true story of two sisters, Dolours and Marian Price, who as teenagers, at the height of the Troubles, joined and fought for the Irish Republican Army.

Northern Ireland's Troubles are said to have lasted from the late 1960s to 1998, when the Good Friday Agreement was signed, but the worst of the violence occurred in 1970, '71, and '72, when I was in college and more concerned with the violence taking place in Vietnam than some Protestant/Catholic conflict that seemed like a throwback to the religious wars of the 1500s. I remember the black and white photographs taken in Belfast at the time, the city's rubble-strewn streets, its makeshift barricades, but it was the color images coming back from the Mekong Delta that really held my attention (I turned 18 in 1969).

Dolours Price turned 18 in 1968, so we were of a like age. And as did I at 18, she admired Martin Luther King, Jr., and, through him, Mahatma Gandhi. She believed peaceful, nonviolent protest was the way to bring about social change. So in January of 1969, she joined a peace march from Belfast to Derry to protest against the discrimination practiced against Catholics in Northern Ireland by the Protestant establishment.

All along its route, the marchers were subjected to jeers and insults from roving mobs of Protestant men, but marching down a country lane hemmed in on both sides by hedges and high ground, things turned truly ugly. Some three hundred Protestants—armed with clubs, rocks, and shovels—descended upon the far smaller crowd of peaceful protesters. Uniformed members of the Royal Ulster Constabulary stood by and watched as the marchers were beaten bloody.

Given the level of violence perpetrated upon them and their friends that day, you can almost sympathize with Dolours' and Marian's decision to renounce nonviolence and join the Provisional IRA, the Provos. But violence as the means to an end, however noble, inevitably grows messy. The two sisters began their IRA careers couriering messages and supplies, but once the girls' courage and bravado became evident, their assignments grew more dangerous and complex.

In any insurgency, the authorities in power will go to great lengths to cultivate intelligence about the rebels hidden among the civilian population. IRA members who succumbed to British pressure (beatings, torture, the ever-present possibility of a bullet in the back of the head) to become informants were—once their comrades discovered their treachery—dealt with harshly: often a kangaroo court followed by summary execution.

Many of these extrajudicial killings took place over the border in the Irish Republic. Dolours and Marian were sometimes tasked with ferrying unsuspecting IRA informants to their deaths—unsuspecting IRA informants they often knew and had even cared for.

And then, apparently inured now to acts of moral ambiguity, these two young, beautiful idealists suggested and carried out a bombing campaign against civilian targets in London itself.

The Hulu series was excellent, but wanting to know more about the Price sisters and the Troubles I had mostly ignored as a young man, I turned to that great source of in-depth knowledge, the Talbot County Free Library, and checked out the book the series was based upon.

Patrick Radden Keefe's Say Nothing (364.1523 KEEF) more than satisfied my curiosity. It offers a detailed account of the Troubles from the sisters' point of view and that of several of the most famous Provos, including Gerry Adams and Bobby Sands. But it does more than just recount history, it gives its readers an almost granular sense of how dirty and soul-numbing a conflict becomes when people begin to accept the notion that their next-door neighbors may be unfit to live.

I love the library, but the knowledge it provides can sometimes upset my apple cart. Just as I grew content with what I had learned of the Troubles and consigned same to a mental file marked “The Safe & Distant Past,” I strolled into the periodicals section and picked up a copy of the Nov. 11 edition of The New Yorker. On page 38 of that magazine I found an article entitled Preparing for a Second Civil War.

I started upon the piece expecting to read about lonely, end-times misfits living in tar paper shacks in Idaho, but was dismayed to discover that the well-armed hideout has now gone mainstream. According to the article, liberals and conservatives alike are buying guns and purchasing expensive access to survivalist compounds that feature guarded, barbed-wire perimeters, astonishing amounts of firearms and ammunition, generators, and enough supplies to last out an apocalypse. The people building these compounds talk not of if but when.

I have to tell you, coming so fast upon the heels of Say Nothing, this New Yorker article worried me. I have worked at the Talbot County Free Library in one capacity or another for almost twenty years now, and it has taught me to love this place and its people.

But we are a people with strong, heartfelt beliefs. I know liberals here who think Donald Trump's election marks the end of American democracy, and I know conservatives here who believe his election is democracy's only hope. In my experience, both types are good people, salt of the earth types who would do anything for a neighbor or friend, regardless of political affiliation. But sometimes, some of them—when they talk about the other side"—stray a little too close to the language of violence.

There are any number of lessons to be learned from the Troubles in Northern Ireland and America's own Civil War, but surely one of those lessons is that such language, when it goes unchecked, can lead to mindless brutality. And so I am writing this column as a sort of prayer, a plea, that all of us never forget that, together, we create and recreate this community every day. We owe what we have here not to some insubstantial political philosophy, but to each other.