the last book I ever read (Patrick Radden Keefe's Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland, excerpt thirteen)

from Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland by Patrick Radden Keefe:

This queasy sense of irresolution was only complicated by Gerry Adams’s refusal to acknowledge that he was ever in the IRA. If people in Northern Ireland were wondering whether it was safe, yet, to come clean about their own roles in the conflict, the continued denials by Adams would suggest that it most definitely wasn’t. “O land of password, handgrip, wink and nod,” Seamus Heaney wrote in a poem about the Troubles called “Whatever You Say, Say Nothing.” There was a sense that, even as people greeted the new day with great enthusiasm, the sulfurous intrigue of the past would continue to linger.