The 30-year conflict known as the Troubles is frequently cited as a useful, and potentially hopeful, analogy to the entrenched hostilities in Israel-Palestine. That makes the FX limited series “Say Nothing,” a scripted adaptation of journalist Patrick Radden Keefe’s nonfiction account published in 2018, queasily well-timed. More than a year into the latest war in the Middle East with no end in sight, “Say Nothing” is a tragic, empathetic, evenhanded study in a similarly self-perpetuating cycle of violence from recent history — and the trade-offs required to bring it to a close.
Created by Joshua Zetumer (“Patriots Day”), the nine-episode “Say Nothing” is largely faithful to Keefe’s reporting, which used the disappearance and murder of single mother Jean McConville (Judith Roddy) to examine the Troubles’ human cost in Northern Ireland, a territory once bitterly contested between members of the Irish Republican Army and English authorities allied with the area’s Protestant majority. (Catholics were a persecuted minority within Northern Ireland subject to widespread discrimination, while Protestants felt threatened by the prospect of unification, which could put them in the same position.) But because McConville is absent from the story and her 10 children were still young at the time, the active drivers of the narrative and de facto protagonists of “Say Nothing” are the IRA fighters themselves, particularly real-life figures Brendan Hughes (Anthony Boyle) and Dolours Price (Lola Petticrew).
Hughes and Price were both participants in the Belfast Project, an oral history that traded honest accounts of the IRA’s guerilla warfare for the promise that the tapes would remain sealed until after the interviewee’s death. This exercise in collective memory offers Zetumer and his writers a convenient framing device, as older versions of Dolours (Maxine Peake) and Brendan (Tom Vaughan-Lawlor) narrate their younger selves’ exploits with hindsight and a heavy twinge of regret. “It was all lies,” Price bitterly says of the Republicanism she was raised in, though it’s not clear what she means by that until her story has played out in full.
As an adaptation, the boldest choices in “Say Nothing” are reserved for the final episode, when the freer rein of fiction allows the show to imagine McConville’s final moments, including the identity of her killers, in more detail than Keefe ever could. But the general truth of what happened to Jean is already clear enough: the IRA, made paranoid by the English use of informants, likely killed an innocent woman on the ill-founded suspicion she was spying on her neighbors in Belfast’s Divis Flats, a notorious Republican stronghold. What “Say Nothing” offers is a convincing account of what can push people to such acts of extremism, and the toll those actions take on perpetrators and victims alike. It’s a project many would balk at in the abstract, but “Say Nothing” and its uniformly strong cast bring specificity to the IRA’s cause without excusing its atrocities.
After a teenage Dolours is radicalized after a mob beats her at a peaceful protest, she and her sister Marian (Hazel Doupe) take up armed struggle like their father, aunt and other family members did before them. The Prices quickly become media sensations by engaging in flashy operations like robbing a bank while disguised as nuns, a raid that yields precious little cash but lots of attention. “Say Nothing” lets the audience get as caught up in the excitement and derring-do as the Prices do, because the initial high powers them through the dark times to come.
Dolours and Brendan’s close compatriot is none other than Gerry Adams (Josh Finan), the future head of Sinn Féin and face of the Good Friday Agreement who denies any IRA affiliation to this day, a claim reiterated each episode in a disclaimer that precedes the closing credits. Together with Adams, Hughes and the Prices conspire to plant car bombs, execute enemy combatants in broad daylight and enforce a ruthless internal discipline, often requiring Dolours to chauffeur doomed detainees into the South. On the other side, British officer Frank Kitson (“The Diplomat” star Rory Kinnear, once again typecast as a villain) deploys the same brutal counterinsurgency tactics he once inflicted on colonial subjects in Kenya. “Say Nothing” recognizes the validity of the IRA’s grievances, and illustrates a commitment that’s both admirable and dangerous when trained on the wrong target.
The sixth and most harrowing hour of “Say Nothing” depicts the Prices’ monthslong hunger strike while imprisoned in England, where the two led a plot to set off four separate bombs in central London. The hour is also a turning point; the Prices would win their campaign for a transfer to their native island, but would remain behind bars for eight years. After their release, “Say Nothing” shifts from the heat of battle to the survivors’ long-term trauma — and from protracted fighting to negotiated settlement, a transition symbolized by Adams’ pivot into politics.
This back third of “Say Nothing” contains its most moving, complex material, and to the extent the series frustrates, it’s that these elements get less real estate than they deserve. (Though in a TV landscape blighted by bloat, wanting more is less a critique than a testament to quality.) Dolours settles down with “Crying Game” actor Stephen Rea (Damien Molony), but we see little of their marriage beyond their initial courtship and none of their divorce, an untaken opportunity to explore the impact of Dolours’ increasing substance abuse. As the peace process starts up, the grown McConville kids wage a public campaign to find their mother’s remains, but we learn little about the circumstances of their lives since the family was ripped apart. Adams’ change of heart occurs offscreen, though that choice is entirely in line with a character who’s meant to be inscrutable, obscuring vast swathes of his past in the name of forging a brighter future.
As the McConville case quite literally digs up the past, sending bulldozers to a public beach in search of Jean’s remains, Dolours starts to ask herself if her struggle, incarceration and, ultimately, war crimes were in vain. (The IRA always considered the Troubles a war against foreign occupation, the Brits a domestic insurgency.) The soul-searching is necessary, but also a less interesting question than the one posed by Adams’ trajectory. The title of “Say Nothing” refers to the rigorous omertá lethally enforced by militants. But it also refers to the silence requested from the militants themselves in the name of moving forward and leaving sectarian violence behind. Peace and justice, “Say Nothing” convincingly argues, don’t always go hand in hand; perpetrators have to be integrated into society once they’ve laid down their arms, leaving victims without true closure. Sometimes, silence comes with a price. Sometimes, it is the price, though “Say Nothing” never definitively concludes whether it’s worth paying, a rare and precious antidote to absolutism.
All nine episodes of “Say Nothing” are now available to stream on Hulu.
