An Irish Female Victim - Women so often victims in war, and always forgotten

In 1972, Jean McConville's teen aged daughter stepped out to the store to pick up something for the afternoon meal for her mother and her nine siblings. She was gone 20 minutes but when she came back her brothers and sisters, all under twelve, were screaming in terror because half a dozen men and women from the IRA - the Irish Republican Army, had forced their way into the house nd kidnapped their mother. She was never seen again. Jean McConville was 38 and had been pregnant 14 times already with ten surviving children, the youngest two twins. She was married to a British soldier stationed in Belfast. Jean had been raised Protestant but converted to Catholicism to marry her Catholic husband. She had been harrassed and intimidated, but no one would have expected her to be kidnapped and murdered. There was no proof that she was a spy for the British but that was the excuse the IRA used for her kidnapping and murder. At some point an independent investigation had been carried out and found no trace of any espionage on the part of Jean McConville.

The Northern Irish Constabulary apparently didn't give a tinker's damn about her life either and they waited years to investigate her disappearance, while her children begged for food and were finally taken in by CARE and divided up for placement.

The IRA and Gerry Adams spent a long time denying any responsibility after initially claiming she was punished for being an 'informant.' Eventually, years later, her body was found and she was given a proper burial, her casket carried by her surviving sons, gray haired men now. Two members of the IRA in an oral history project, admitted to having taken part in her kidnapping and execution. There was never any proof of her having done any spying only that she was married to an English soldier. Where, you have to wonder would the poor woman have found any time for such activities when she was 38 when killed and married at 18 with 14 pregnancies and ten live births in those 20 years - that is a pregnancy and nursing baby every two years or more often counting the four who died at birth or shortly thereafter. Where would she have found the time? She was constantly pregnant and nursing, not to mention caring for the ones already born.

Her daughter, the one who was out shopping for 'tea' still pursues legal accountability with, so far, no success, but she vows they will continue until the last of Jean's children is dead. She says, "If we give up then they win." >p/> It made me think of the casualties in all wars, the civilians brutalized, murdered, the children left orphans. We write about, read about, celebrate and honor the generals and the heroes and the politicians, but, like Jean McConville, the ciilians are most often lost in the story, disappeared. Since this is Women's History Month, I wanted this woman, this Irish woman, Jean McConville remembered here by me.