The son of Jean McConville, a woman who was murdered and buried in secret by the IRA, has condemned a new Disney series on her death as “horrendous” and “cruel”.
The series is based on the acclaimed book Say Nothing, about McConville and the wider role of the IRA during the Troubles in Northern Ireland, written by the US journalist Patrick Radden Keefe.
She was abducted from her home in Belfast in 1972 and her disappearance remained a mystery until 2003, when her remains were found on a beach in County Louth, south of the Northern Irish border.
Michael McConville, who was a child when his mother was taken away, said her death was “not entertainment” but hurtful reality for him and his nine siblings for the past 52 years.
“The portrayal of the execution and secret burial of my mother is horrendous and unless you have lived through it, you will never understand just how cruel it is,” he said.
“Everyone knows the story of Jean McConville; even Hillary Clinton, who I met a few years ago, knew my mother’s story. And yet here is another telling of it that I and my family have to endure,” he said.
Radden Keefe told BBC News NI that he had met representatives from families whose stories were featured in the series to “make it clear that we were going to approach this story with a great deal of sensitivity”.
The killing of McConville has been the subject of extensive reporting since she was taken from her home in the Divis flats on the Falls Road, suspected of being an informer simply because she was a Protestant who married a Catholic.
One of her daughters spoke out for the first time in 2013 and told how she remembered hearing her mother screaming as she was taken away by a number of men and bundled into a van.
The IRA always denied it had anything to do with her disappearance but admitted its involvement after the Good Friday agreement and the establishment in 1999 of the Independent Commission for the Location of Victims’ Remains.
A chilling 2018 documentary, I, Dolours, came close to explaining who had ordered McConville’s death, with the use of a posthumous interview by the veteran journalist Ed Moloney and the now-deceased IRA militant Dolours Price, who linked her disappearance to the former Sinn Féin leader Gerry Adams.
Price told Moloney, on condition that the tapes would be released only after her death, how she and two other IRA members were involved directly in the murder.
Part of a secret unit of the IRA known as the “unknowns”, she detailed how she and two others had been ordered across the border to kill McConville but stopped short of revealing who had actually pulled the trigger.
Adams has strenuously denied he had anything to do with the murder and has consistently denied he was a member of the IRA. Last week, his solicitors issued a statement saying he had “no involvement in the killing or burial of any of those secretly buried by the IRA”.
The Disney series includes a disclaimer that Adams denies he was a member of the IRA at the end of each of the nine episodes.
“The reason for the disclaimer is pretty obvious, which is that Gerry Adams – it’s not that he will take issue with little bits and pieces of what we show. He takes issue with the whole premise of the series, which is that he was in the IRA,” Radden Keefe said in a recent interview.
