This review contains spoilers.
When a show features two young Irish girls in nuns’ habits robbing a bank in its very first episode, I know I’m going to keep watching.
In this case, though, I already knew it was going to happen because I had read about it—and because it happened in real life.
I read Patrick Radden Keefe’s Say Nothing on the plane home from a vacation in Ireland. I still feel sorry for my seatmates, who had to listen to me gasping out loud once a chapter or so for the whole flight back to New York.
The 2018 book and its new FX series adaptation tell a true story from the Troubles in Northern Ireland, when the occupying British army, police forces and supporters clashed with local paramilitary groups, most notably the Provisional Irish Republican Army, on the streets of Belfast. The conflict was ethno-nationalist, but it also had a distinctly religious element: A Catholic nationalist minority supported the reunion of Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic, and a largely Protestant ruling government fought to keep Northern Ireland as part of the United Kingdom. The level of brutality was exacerbated by deeply entrenched religious differences and stereotypes.
In the series, you see the conflict from two vantage points: that of the young rebels who attempt to carry out the I.R.A.’s mission of Irish reunification, and that of a family whose mother was kidnapped and murdered by members of that very same I.R.A. Jean McConville disappeared in 1972, and the I.R.A. claimed responsibility for her death in 1999 and provided information about the whereabouts of her corpse. Her remains were not located until 2003.
You meet many young I.R.A. rebels in the nine-part series, but you get to know four of them most intimately: Dolours and Marian Price, sisters and the aforementioned nuns (in costume only) robbing the bank—just the beginning of their armed missions on behalf of the I.R.A.; Brendan Hughes, a fiery commanding officer known to his friends as “The Dark”; and Gerry Adams, the intellectual strategist and leader, who serves as a kind of foil to Brendan’s fighter.
Gerry’s name is the one you’re most likely to know already because he has reinvented himself since the events of the series; though he is still a passionate Irish republican, he is no longer the same kind of radical activist. He has become a successful politician, representing Northern Ireland in the U.K. Parliament and serving as the president of the Irish political party Sinn Féin. His career has seen controversy over the years because of evidence that he was an integral part of the plot to kill Jean McConville.
Since these are real people, their spirits hangs over the whole story; Dolours and Brendan have both passed away in the last two decades, and Marian and Gerry are still alive.
The series succeeds in the same way Mr. Keefe’s book did: It makes you love these people. You see the joy and the vitality of young people with their lives ahead of them, and you fall in love with their quintessentially Irish charm. You root for their friendships and their simple joys. But your heart also breaks for the history that hangs over them, for the starvation and violence and colonial brutality that brought them to the organizing table—and out into the streets. You might be uncomfortable with the bloody outcomes of the war they wage. But even if you don’t endorse their methods, the series makes sure you understand their anger.
This is thanks in large part to excellent performances, in particular from Lola Petticrew and Hazel Doupe as the young Price sisters, who manage to convey both spirit and suffering.
Yet as you process the brutal disappearance and killing of Jean McConville and its haunting effect on the lives of her 10 children, the continuing unraveling of the I.R.A. and the well-being of its members over time, and the fact that the group’s ultimate goal of Irish republican reunification is still unrealized, you keep asking yourself the question: What was this all for?
Gerry Adams’s name appears at the end of each episode—in a written disclaimer denying any involvement in the I.R.A. In later episodes, more is added: He denies any involvement in the murder of Jean McConville. I have never seen a disclaimer that adds so much dramatic effect to a show. It doesn’t just cover the creators’ legal bases; it will make any viewer who’s been watching the story unfold scoff. Not only is Adams distancing himself from a situation of which evidence suggests he was at the center; he is also leaving his former compatriots to hold the burden of past sins, as if he had not been the leader who gave them their orders in the first place.
One thing I was a bit disappointed to see the show downplay is a surprising Jesuit connection. Much of Mr. Keefe’s framing for the book came from an oral history project called the Belfast Project, which sought to create an archive on the Troubles for future historians. Interviews were conducted with participants from both sides of the conflict, including some of our beloved main characters here—under the condition that they would not be released until after the interviewees’ deaths.
The interview tapes were stored at my alma mater, Boston College. (The first of my many gasps, mentioned above, came as I read the opening page, when I caught sight of the name of a library building where I studied almost every day as an undergraduate student.)
But the project did not go as planned. The U.S. Department of Justice, cooperating with British authorities, ordered B.C. to hand over some of the tapes to the U.S. government—because they were believed to contain evidence about the disappearance and death of Jean McConville.
Thus the project was compromised, and Boston College eventually decided to bring it to an end, returning remaining tapes to the project’s living participants.
My bias is obvious (I would have loved to see Boston College’s campus on the show), but to my mind, this part of the story is deeply revealing—about Irish-American Catholic ties to the conflict and about what participants were willing to say on the record.
And speaking of revealing, a moment for a spoiler: The book and series make a conjecture (without conclusive proof) about the identity of Jean McConville’s murderer. And it is a character in the story: Marian Price.
While the version of events presented in the book and series does not suggest Ms. Price acted alone, it does paint her as the one whose gunshot ultimately led to McConville’s death.
Ms. Price has since stated that she will pursue legal action against Disney+ for the show’s depiction of her involvement, but Mr. Keefe has stood by his reporting, saying, “I wouldn’t have published Marian’s name and suggested that she murdered Jean McConville if I had even 1 percent doubt that it was true.”
As the series’ title suggests, the modus operandi in the I.R.A. was to be quiet, say nothing and thus keep yourself and your people safe. The Boston College tapes were a chance to change all that, to let the voices of Belfast be heard. Now the series takes the next step, serving as a kind of oral history project of its own, putting the story of the Troubles into our hands. Here we all are, watching the story unfold—and breaking the code of silence.
