The impossible task Say Nothing (Disney+ from Thursday) sets itself is to deliver a pacy – even rip-roaring – portrait of the Troubles while acknowledging the suffering of the victims of political violence and the moral price paid by the perpetrators.
This immensely bingeable yet ultimately sober-minded nine-part miniseries comes close to achieving that daunting feat by retracing the “disappearing” and subsequent murder of Jean McConville and the experiences of Provisional IRA bomber Dolours Price both as young revolutionary and disillusioned veteran. Strange though it may sound, it is hugely exciting in places but never in a way that feels disrespectful toward those who suffered during the conflict – a high-wire act pulled off with flair and great empathy.
The story – adapted from the 2018 non-fiction book by Patrick Radden Keefe – begins in 1972 with recently widowed mother of 10 McConville (Judith Roddy) receiving a knock on the door from a shadowy IRA unit dubbed “The Unknowns”. Her kids have no idea what is happening – but she understands the Provisionals do not pay courtesy calls and that she will never see her family again.
It feels as if we are being set up for an extended plunge into the dark heart of the Troubles. But Say Nothing then pulls off an ingenious sleight of hand by pivoting to Price, the IRA bomber who watched McConville being taken away and lived with that knowledge the rest of her life.
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The young Price is played with devilish energy by Lola Pettricrew, while in later life she is depicted by Maxine Peake as a guilt-ridden shell. We have a ringside seat as she and her sister Marian (Hazel Doupe) rise through the Provo ranks in early 1970s west Belfast after their belief in peaceful protest is beaten out of them in a run-in with a loyalist mob.
Many Irish viewers will have strong feelings about the North and the degree to which the Provisional IRA’s campaign was or was not justified – and just like Dolours Price, some will have modulated their views across the years. That even concrete beliefs are sometimes built on quicksand is a core message of Say Nothing. The series accepts that the “cause” could seem thrilling and romantic to young operatives such as Dolours and IRA hit-man extraordinaire Brendan “Darkie” Hughes (Anthony Boyle in his youth/Tom Vaughan-Lawlor in regretful middle age).
It goes so far as to sweep us up in that excitement when the sisters raid a bank dressed as a nuns in a scene that could have come straight from Tarantino (the tension is even more acute as they subsequently attempt to bomb London’s Old Bailey). But the series is likewise at pains to confront the horrors of the lives lost and the traumas inflicted on those left behind. It forces the viewer to interrogate their assumptions about political violence as the characters on screen take the same agonising journey.
Say Nothing also gets British attitudes towards Ireland exactly right. A puffed-up general flown in to sort out this spot of local trouble, as he sees it, keeps on banging on about his time fighting insurgents in Kenya – the show’s way of telling us that colonialism in Ireland was part of a continuum of British oppression in Africa and elsewhere.
Still it does run low on steam now and then. One problem is that this cannot be a tale with a happy ending. Instead, it sinks slowly into the moral murk – a necessary but not terribly gripping reckoning with violence’s inevitable aftermath. In the later episodes, the adult McConville children (Emily Healy plays the eldest, Helen) demand the IRA reveal the fate of their mother while the older Price holds Sinn Féin leader (as he then was) Gerry Adams responsible for the orders given to her during her time in The Unknowns.
Adams has repeatedly rejected suggestions he was member of the IRA or had anything to do with the death of McConville. Those denials appear at the end of each episode – and clash directly with the Adams on screen who, as played in his youth by Josh Finan and in respectable middle age by Michael Colgan, comes across as Lenin-in-a-Geansaí. He is a charming ideologue whose defining quality is his ruthlessness.
But if Say Nothing becomes more stoic in its latter half, it still functions as a powerful eulogy for the tragedy of the Troubles. It doesn’t try to tell the entire story – Bloody Sunday is mentioned just in passing, the SDLP, John Hume and the unionists feature not at all. But it threads a tricky needle by bringing the period vividly to life without ever denying the immensity of the suffering or the horrors that ensue when violence becomes a way of life.
