“To be honest, I’d always thought of the Troubles as a male story,” says the US author and journalist Patrick Radden Keefe, when asked what first attracted him to the events covered in his 2018 bestselling nonfiction book Say Nothing. “So, part of it for me was the novelty of the idea that there was this woman in the IRA and she had gone on hunger strike with her sister in 1973.”
Now an executive producer on the TV adaptation of his book, Keefe first heard about its subjects in 2013, when he read a New York Times obituary of the IRA volunteer Dolours Price, which mentioned the abduction and disappearance of widowed mother of 10 Jean McConville. “Right there, in this little article, were the seeds for the whole thing: the idea that there were these two very different women, and how they were connected by these acts of violence.”
This duality is present from the outset of the new series, made – somewhat incongruously – for Disney+. It opens in 1972, within the bustling home that McConville shares with her children in Belfast’s Divis flats. What follows will be familiar to those who grew up knowing one of the most harrowing stories of the conflict, or anyone who’s read Keefe’s book in the years since: a group of IRA members enter McConville’s flat and march her away from her children for a “talk”, amid accusations that she’s a British informant. She is never seen again.
Instead, over the course of nine episodes, it is Dolours Price who takes centre stage. Her trajectory from nonviolent protester to the inner sanctum of the Provisional IRA forms the backbone of the series. That evolution is told via the true-to-life framing device of the interviews she gave decades later, on the proviso they be released after her death (Price died in 2013). The interviews clearly delineate her connection to the McConville case itself.
It’s an unflinching, sometimes harrowing watch, buoyed throughout by exquisite performances from its leads. “I was familiar with the story,” says Lola Petticrew, the actor tasked with bringing the younger Dolours to life (with Maxine Peake playing her older, more regretful counterpart), “but after reading the book it turned out there was a lot I didn’t know.”
Petticrew is, like Price, a west Belfast native who was aware of the story of Dolours – and that of her sister, and fellow IRA volunteer, Marian – from an early age. One scene, eventually cut from the series, required wearing the uniform of the sisters’ alma mater, St Dominic’s Grammar School, the very uniform Petticrew had worn as a child. Despite such connections, there was much in Keefe’s book that jolted. “It made me cry a lot. I had to leave a coffee shop I was reading it in a few times and take breaks.”
The series tracks the sisters’ ascent through the republican movement. Bloodied by their experience at 1969’s Burntollet Bridge attack (in which a peaceful march was ambushed by 400 loyalists – including 100 off-duty members of the Royal Ulster Constabulary – bearing rocks and nail-clubs), the sisters renounce nonviolence and join the paramilitary cause championed by their staunchly republican family. From there, they enter the milieu of the Provisional IRA, namely the fearless Brendan “Dark” Hughes, and his quietly charismatic commander, Gerry Adams (whose denial of ever having held such a position is featured as a disclaimer at each episode’s end). They rob banks, plot attacks, attempt to smoke out double agents and mastermind the 1973 Old Bailey bombing: the first IRA attack on English soil during this era, and the eventual cause of the sisters’ imprisonment and subsequent hunger strike.
“I went to St Louise’s on the Falls Road,” says Anthony Boyle (Masters of the Air, Shardlake), who plays Hughes, “so I walked past a mural of Brendan Hughes going to school.” He maintains that his knowledge going in was “basic stuff”, but admits to early trepidation about taking part in a show written by outsiders. “I was a bit like: ‘I don’t want to do this project if it’s an American writing it.’ And then I was reading it, and it was so amazing and so well researched, [there’s] so much of the current day you could take into this. It gallops at pace and leaves you with these great cliffhangers but it also gives you the humour of the people, the dryness, the suspense, what the atmosphere would have been like in 70s Belfast.”
“It was very important for me that this not be a series with a bunch of English or, God help us, American actors putting on bad Belfast accents,” says Keefe, and the cast is awash with young Northern Irish talent, aided by excellent turns from the Dublin-born Hazel Doupe as Marian, and an uncannily well-accented Gerry Adams from scouser Josh Finan. The script is also filled with specific nuggets of Belfast slang; it’s surely the first major US TV production in which an armed robber addresses his victim as “ye Easter egg, ye”.
“It had to sound authentic,” says Keefe, “even if that meant some people watch it with subtitles, which they may. You need to hear the real music of the language.”
For Boyle, the fact the show is produced and backed by a major US broadcaster gives it a chance to break out beyond local interest and make a splash farther afield: “I think with all good drama, it’s human and universal. If you watch City of God you might not know anything about that life, but you become involved in it. I watched Chernobyl and Shōgun the last two years, and those [show] people and places I have no frame of reference for, but you connect with the humanity.”
The decision to cover this story could never be uncontroversial. The show’s arc puts a human face on IRA volunteers, capturing the messy strands of their competing motivations and the everyday dramas affecting their lives. These are fully formed, contradictory characters, filled with obsession, humour, grief and shame. It also places greater focus on the human cost of their actions than has been seen on episodic television before, casting an unshrinking eye at the horrors done in the name of their cause, and the horrors done unto them in turn; the upset and humiliation of force-feeding during hunger strikes, and the unimaginable trauma borne by the families of the disappeared.
These are all still, to put it mildly, live issues, with living consequences. A 2012 study by the Poverty and Social Exclusion project found that 10% of Northern Irish adults lost a close relative to Troubles-era violence. A third had witnessed a bomb explosion. Three of the 17 people disappeared during the Troubles have never been found.
Hundreds of thousands of people in the north still carry unimaginable trauma with them, feelings that still only find scant expression in mainstream popular culture. Keefe points to a few recent milestones that suggest this tide may be turning, Jez Butterworth’s play The Ferryman and Anna Burns’s novel Milkman among them. On TV, however, he cites just one key landmark. “In a way,” he says, “I think Derry Girls is a radical show about the Troubles because it foregrounds the daily lives of these teenage girls: you see that when you’re living through these things it’s not that regular life is extinguished – it goes on.”
“We didn’t have something like South Africa [the Truth and Reconciliation Commission] in our peace process,” adds Petticrew. “I always find it such an interesting thing. It didn’t feel like a peace process, it felt like putting a Band-Aid on a massive gaping wound.”
This show, Petticrew hopes, could point toward a conversation yet to come. “People my age are starting to talk a lot about intergenerational trauma and the effect it’s had on us. We were brought up by a generation of people that are holding trauma in their bodies and can’t talk about it – like literally cannot talk about it. I don’t know what hope we have of healing if we don’t have some ability to talk about what happened.”
Say Nothing airs on Disney+ from 14 November.
