For any viewer who knows nothing about the Northern Ireland conflict, euphemistically known as the “Troubles,” the FX show “Say Nothing” is a gripping introduction to the politics and violence of the time. It is told through key players inside the Irish Republican Army (IRA), some still household names in the United Kingdom and Ireland, almost 27 years after the Good Friday Agreement brought 30 years of bloodshed to an end.
As a drama, it is impeccable, with incredible writing and acting, told in nine dense episodes spanning decades of history. But it does far more than simply chart these years of armed struggle. “Say Nothing” shows how even single-minded movements like the IRA, rooted in clear ideals and aims, fall apart as their members age and perspectives change. The splintering of the group as a result of the peace process is engrossing both for its own sake as well as the bigger truths it tells about armed struggles the world over.
Yet what the show doesn’t chart is the ongoing ramifications of these events in the present. The history it tells is far from over, which explains why reactions to “Say Nothing” across the communities involved have been so very diverse. The show can be, and is being, read in many different ways, not just across the sectarian divide but also across generations and class. The Troubles may have gone away in terms of violence, but the fundamental fractures in society have not.
When idealists compromise in return for peace, it is impossible to keep everyone happy, and the resulting situation requires ongoing work that Northern Ireland has not received. The Good Friday Agreement, signed in 1998, included commitments for regular meetings between the U.K., the Republic of Ireland and representatives from both communities in Northern Ireland — the Protestants or loyalists, on the one hand, and the Catholics or republicans on the other — but these have not happened for years. Once violence stops, so do the headlines and, along with the media attention, the political interest. Northern Ireland has long been held up as a model of peacemaking but, as “Say Nothing” shows, it was far from perfect. Drama can do the job journalism and politicians cannot, reminding us of the many stories of those left behind, damaged by the violence and left feeling betrayed. It is a reminder to take peace as seriously as war.
“Say Nothing” is marketed as the story of the disappearance of Jean McConville in 1972, a widow and mother of 10, and the fight to find out what happened to her and other so-called “disappeared,” killed and buried secretly by the IRA for allegedly being traitors to the republican cause. This is how the show is described in publicity material and reviews alike. But it isn’t accurate. This is the framing narrative, to be sure, with the writer clear that he wanted this to be a whodunit first and foremost, with the Troubles as a backdrop. But the show is really about Dolours and Marian Price, sisters single-mindedly committed to the cause of a united Ireland. They were the very first female members — known as volunteers — of the IRA, who dreamt up, planned and executed the 1973 London bombings in which over 200 were injured. The story is told from their — very close — point of view, right down to the torture of being force-fed while on a hunger strike in a British prison and their near-death when this torture stopped and they carried on refusing food.
The whole series is told through extended flashbacks by an aging Dolours taking part in an oral history project, the now-notorious Belfast Project. Academics at Boston College in Massachusetts recorded the accounts of key players, assuring them that nothing would be released until after their deaths. But once the existence of these recordings was made known, law enforcement officials began a battle to have them released for the processes of justice in Northern Ireland — in fact, for the investigation into Jean McConville’s disappearance. After a protracted battle, they won, and the people who had been promised anonymity until after death found their words used against their own comrades. Yet it was all for nothing, with the tapes ultimately being found “unreliable” and, as such, inadmissible as evidence.
Eventually, the project was stopped and the tapes returned to the participants, but the damage was done, not least to future research, for how could people be encouraged to talk after having their anonymity betrayed in this way? “Say Nothing” was the message, yet again; a rare unifying phrase throughout Northern Ireland, though curiously never explained in the series. (It comes from a poem by Seamus Heaney and is picked up throughout society: If you go to Northern Ireland and say, “Whatever you say … ” your interlocutor will without a doubt reply, “Say nothing.”)
One of the reasons the tapes were found unreliable was clear intoxication during some of the interviews and questions surrounding the motivation and mental state of the interviewees. We see the PTSD of Dolours portrayed accurately and sensitively: the startled jumps when there’s a figure at the door or someone comes to stand next to her at a funeral, the addiction to prescription drugs and alcohol, the mood swings, the flashbacks. And through it all, a sense of betrayal of the movement and of being sidelined in a new world order.
It is shocking to realize just how young all the protagonists were: All were in their teens when they began to risk not just their freedom but their lives, and gladly. We first meet the leader, Gerry Adams, as a gawky adolescent, manning a street barricade and directing the violence — an apt metaphor for how he is portrayed throughout, keeping his hands clean, thereby enabling his steadfast denial in the years since that he had ever been in the organization (a denial repeated after every episode). The characters are shown behaving like the teenagers they are, getting drunk before the London bombings, carelessly holding their lives in their hands, all very reminiscent of any number of idealistic fights the world over, so many of which are fueled by the young.
There are many valuable aspects to this packed portrayal of the Troubles. First is how clearly it shows the intergenerational nature of the republican cause and how commitment is nurtured in such familial settings. An early scene shows the Prices’ father, Albert, a former member of the IRA himself, instructing his two tiny girls how to survive a beating in prison. He is derisive about their participation in the nonviolent marches tried first by the Catholic community; he is far prouder of them when they turn to violence, radicalized by the treatment they received on a civil rights march. They live with their aunt Bridie, who is blind and handless as a result of handling IRA explosives, a vivid, constant reminder of the costs of the cause, wholly accepted, proudly paid. We hear their mother on the radio while they are on a hunger strike, making it clear she knows they are risking their lives and is proud of them for doing so. The transgenerational nature of struggles and trauma, as epitomized in aunt Bridie, predisposes people to radicalization, as seen in so many struggles for self-determination across the world.
This unity of purpose, also seen in how they are treated as heroes in their communities, helps explain how extreme the IRA became in treating its own, to the point of disappearing those accused of undermining the cause. We see the beatings in British army prisons shift to bribery and coercion, leading to an increasing infiltration which the leadership seemed powerless to prevent and which, the show does not make clear, eventually led to the IRA taking part in peace talks: By the end, its leaders knew the organization was riddled with informants and couldn’t win.
The framing has come with charges of one-sidedness, but this is to miss the point. It is one-sided, its value lying precisely in this fine-grained, insider picture of a violent, nationalist group that waged war on the British state. However, there is a significant omission as a result — the activities of the loyalist paramilitaries, the militias on the other side to the republican IRA. The whole impression of “Say Nothing” is that the IRA was fighting the British state in the form of the British army and intelligence, akin to any other struggle against a colonial power. But this is to elide the civil war element of the Troubles: the fact that there were militias killing and maiming on both sides, including the loyalists aligned with the British forces, intent on remaining part of the U.K. This is not to descend into whataboutism, to argue for meaningless balance, not least because there was no balance; the loyalists were on the side of the far more powerful state. It matters because it wrongly characterizes the nature of the struggle.
It matters, too, to the portrayal of the peace process, which suffers from taking the close view of the Price sisters, who, along with others, saw it as a betrayal. Adams, who had been the leader of Sinn Fein (a political party closely associated with the IRA) since 1983, eventually entered into peace talks with the British government, along with other IRA members who do not feature at all in this simplified retelling (another significant omission is the perspective of Martin McGuinness, who never denied his role in the IRA, which is perhaps why he was less divisive among Catholics in the years of peace). The announcement is shown in a pub packed with republicans, including the Prices with their father and their comrades in arms. The betrayal they felt is visceral, with Adams cast as a self-serving political operator, tossing those who risked their lives aside for his own career.
There is no sense at all of the relief so many felt at the cessation of hostilities, the ability to send your child to school safely or get around without endless roadblocks and alarms and running for shelter. There is no sense at all of the gains the IRA did make: the commitment to a referendum on reunification, should the majority of the people of Northern Ireland want it, power-sharing in Northern Irish politics, the ability to hold an Irish passport (with ever more people taking this up thanks to Brexit), the acknowledgement of past wrongs on the community, the withdrawal of the hated British army, early release of prisoners. For some, there was a lot to celebrate.
And so there’s a paradigm shift between the first half of the story and that of Dolours’ post-peace-process state, signaled by the switch in actors: The first is plot-driven and gripping, the second more contrived. In trying to make this single point, to portray the sense of betrayal the Prices and others felt, the peace process is simplified and Adams himself comes across as one-dimensional. “Do you ever feel like it was all for nothing?” Dolours asks Brendan Hughes, another IRA ex-prisoner, featured on murals in Belfast to this day. For them it was all for nothing, but for others the peace process was a pragmatic decision by a leader who knew he couldn’t win and yet still managed to gain huge concessions from the British government.
Perhaps it is wrong to quibble about what the show missed: A nine-part TV series can never capture the complexity of decades of war and peace. It is still a valuable contribution to the ongoing debates about the futures of Great Britain, Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. For those who lived through it, there are uncomfortable recognitions and even more uncomfortable realizations of ignorance: Because of the rigid separations in society that exist until today, many of those who lived in Belfast throughout the Troubles simply did not know much of the history detailed in this show.
Irish culture is very exportable, with its music and humor, and this includes Northern Irish products. “Derry Girls,” a comedy series based around a set of Catholic schoolgirls growing up in the Troubles (while doing their best to ignore them), has proven popular well beyond the borders of Britain and Ireland. But a Protestant friend told me, “We [Protestants] have nothing like this, all we have is being Northern Irish, which means, let’s face it, nothing at all. We have a very shallow cultural identity, with lots of appropriations from Scotland and other parts of the world.”
This made me wonder what a Protestant version of “Say Nothing” would look like, with members of the paramilitaries who are just as disillusioned as the Price sisters with the present frozen peace. “You don’t know what it is to be British,” I was told in Belfast, despite my English accent, “because you’ve never had to fight for it.” His friend chimed in. “People were murdered, maimed, all the time. Now we have to watch them in power? It’s not right, and it never will be.”
With the main Protestant political party in Westminster, the Democratic Unionist Party, mired in scandal, Sinn Fein became the Northern Irish party with the most seats in the 2024 U.K. elections. In the Republic of Ireland, too, it is taking advantage of upheavals in politics. With its power on the rise and the imposition of an economic border down the Irish Sea — a situation the implementers of Brexit repeatedly swore would not happen — with frictionless trade across the border which cuts across the island of Ireland, the stage is seemingly set for reunification. What would Dolours be thinking, if her driving ambition was achieved through such indirect politics as the relationship with Europe and the unpopularity of non-Sinn Fein parties on both sides of the border? Depressingly back-door, perhaps, but nonetheless the purpose of her life and sacrifices. What such an ending would do to the peace and prosperity of the island of Ireland is as yet unknown, but with “Say Nothing,” perhaps the discussion can come out into the open again.
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