Author Timothy O’Grady finds the new Disney+ series too slight to be taken seriously.
THE hit television series ‘Say Nothing’, currently on Disney +, is informed by a sequence of sources that go back to a collection of secret tapes stored in a vault in an American college. They arrive to the television screen by way of Patrick Radden Keefe’s book of the same title. Radden Keefe, a staff writer at the New Yorker, read an obituary of Dolours Price in the New York Times which spoke of her bombing of London in 1973 on behalf of the IRA, her hunger strike and her participation in an oral history project nominally run by Boston College. It made him think about the psychological ramifications for individuals and communities of a long involvement in violent conflict, and wonder if there might be an article in it.
Article became book became television series, with Radden Keefe as executive producer, all focusing on the intersecting lives of Price and her sister Marian, fellow IRA member Brendan Hughes, Sinn Féin leader Gerry Adams and a widowed mother-of-ten named Jean McConville, who had been executed by the IRA on the grounds that she was an informer. Her children, left to fend for themselves, deny this, as does the state.
The Boston College Project was overseen by an Irish journalist named Ed Moloney, who hired Wilson McArthur to interview loyalists and former IRA member Anthony McIntyre to interview republicans, all on the understanding that nothing would be made public until after their deaths. Police, soldiers and British administrators were not approached.
McIntyre thought the peace process was a sell-out, was embittered by Gerry Adams’ participation in it, and chose for his interview subjects those with similar views, most notably Hughes and Price, both central characters in the television series. Theirs was a minority view within the republican movement. Sinn Féin could have no meaningful place in the peace negotiations if they couldn’t deliver the assent of the IRA, several members of which went on to run for office and take part in government, among them Gerry Kelly, who was arrested with the Price sisters and joined them on hunger strike.
In his book, Radden Keefe writes that “for one reason or another” McIntyre only sought out interviewees hostile to the Good Friday Agreement and to Adams in particular. Is he naïve, or feigning surprise? In any event, in the television series Price and Hughes are falsely shown to be speaking for all. In this way Moloney and McIntyre were able to filter their narratives through a seemingly unassailable academic institution and megaphone them out to the world through Radden Keefe’s book and TV show.
Moloney blew the cover on the Boston College Project when Hughes and loyalist David Ervine unexpectedly died and he published a book called ‘Voices from the Grave’, based on their interview material there. The Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) sensed an evidential treasure trove and successfully sued Boston College for access to the tapes.
Once they had them they charged Ivor Bell, a veteran republican suffering from dementia who was one of McIntyre’s interviewees, with involvement in the killing of Jean McConville. The judge listened to the tapes, ruled them unreliable and therefore inadmissible and directed the jury to return a Not Guilty verdict. Adams had been arrested at the same time as Bell in 2014, but had been held for a few days and released without charge long before Bell’s 2019 trial. It was clear by then that the Boston College Project had turned Hughes and Price, among others, unwittingly into police informers. In their earlier lives there had been nothing so damaging and hateful to them as touts, and they devoted their energies to locating and eliminating them.
The Boston College Project was a dangerous fiasco that played out in public for all to see. The archivists lost the codes linking tapes to interviewees, the College’s Irish Studies department said the archive was a perfect model in how not to conduct an oral history project, and a History professor said it tainted the college’s reputation. It crashed and burned, literally so in the case of another participant, author and former republican prisoner Richard O’Rawe, who threw the transcript the college had returned to him into the fire and drank a glass of Bordeaux.
Had the project been allowed to stand it would have given future scholars the impression that the only combatants were republicans and loyalists, with the uninterviewed British trying to keep the peace, and that resistance mortally wounds the psyche because your sacrifice is all for nothing as you get sold out by your leaders. This is a condition psychologist Jonathan Shay, who treated Vietnam War veterans, identified as Achilles Syndrome, because what haunted Achilles was not his experience of war but Agamemnon’s betrayal of him.
Radden Keefe writes in his book about the fatal ambiguities and chaos of Moloney’s project, but “for one reason or another” he follows Moloney’s agenda and his series shows McIntyre as an honest and heroic seeker after the truth as he interviews Hughes and Price.
Radden Keefe’s book won the Orwell Prize, was named by Time as the “#1 Nonfiction Book of the Year”, was lauded by hundreds of influential people from Barack Obama to Dua Lipa and is presently miseducating millions of uninformed television viewers about the nature of the conflict in Ireland. It’s a spectacular feat of leveraging on the part of Moloney and McIntyre.
I wondered about Radden Keefe as I read his book and watched his series. Ed Moloney claims Radden Keefe once worked in military intelligence at the Pentagon. The author is Irish American, but writes that he didn’t “relate to the shamrock-and-Guinness clichés and the sentimental attitudes of tribal solidarity” that might be thought typical of Irish America. He’d not yet been born when the main events of his story took place. He had no more interest in the war in Ireland than in any other war in the news and had never met any of the people he writes about. He had, as his countrymen say, no skin in the game. You’d think he would keep himself out of the way when telling his story if he was to survive with any writerly authority intact. Yet he repeatedly intrudes with his opinions.
When Dolours and Marian join the IRA they are joining “a cult of martyrdom”. When they are arrested and put themselves through a 208-day hunger strike that included forced feeding by a tube thrust through calipers, he writes, “There is a morbid but undeniable entertainment in watching a hunger strike unfold…[it’s] a sport for rubberneckers, a bit like the Tour de France.” Having described Gerry Adams as a gifted and intelligent strategist who’d endured imprisonment, torture and an assassination attempt and who “commanded respect and loyalty inside the walls of Long Kesh”, he suddenly, without explanation or evidence to support his change of heart, begins mid-book to deploy such phrases about him as “homespun whimsy mingled with armed insurrection, cake fairs with a dash of bloodshed”, or “well-heeled statesman… gliding along from one photo opportunity to the next… possessed of a sociopathic instinct for self-preservation”.
What, you wonder, has goaded him into such biliousness? Does he offer no explanation for this extraordinary change of character because there was no such change and therefore no explanation, and that it just suited the “human drama” he wanted to write about revolutionaries betrayed by an ambitious leader?
In his Acknowledgements he thanks the Rockefeller Foundation for granting him the use of their retreat on the shores of Lake Como. Did he write such phrases there? Could he not resist the temptation to try to appear worldly, and above the people and situations he writes about? Did no-one tell him that his snideness appears borrowed and unearned and trivial beside the epoch-making, life-and-death events he describes, or that the discrediting of the Boston College Project places his book and series upon foundations that can’t even be called shaky?
The attitude towards the peace process and Adams in his book and series come from Brendan Hughes and Dolours Price. They are shown to have been resourceful and ingenious and incalculably brave in their war. They went to prison, survived hunger strikes, came out and eventually retired from the struggle, while the struggle went on. No-one questioned their right to do so, including Gerry Adams. They were welcomed and honoured by their community. When it became clear that the peace process wasn’t going to deliver the free, independent, socialist republic they’d fought for, they remembered what they’d suffered and made others suffer, became bitter and came to believe it had all been for nothing. Their alcoholism made their suffering worse. Gerry Adams became the focus for their distress. They blamed him for not saying he was in the IRA and for negotiating a deal that left the British in Ireland.
The former charge seems a red herring. Gerry Adams has no extant convictions. Why would he inculpate himself? If Dolours Price had been stopped in the Falls Road in 1972 and asked by the police if she was in the IRA, would she have said Yes? In his Boston College tape Brendan Hughes can be heard saying, “I’ve never, ever admitted to being in the IRA. Until now.” He did so with the assurance that no one would hear it until he died and was beyond prosecution.
The final three episodes of this nine-part series first take aim at Adams and then attempt to solve the mystery of Jean McConville’s death. In the earlier episodes the actor Josh Finan portrays Adams as a contemplative but authoritative stillpoint in the midst of the chaos of the conflict. Michael Colgan takes over as the Adams of the peace process and makes him look cold, humourless, weak, shifty, calculating and fearful of being exposed. Hughes, his old friend and comrade, is shown being afforded only a few minutes in Adams’ office before being dispatched and later gives a speech about Adams being on a boat sailing forth while he and others who fought the war are left stuck in the mud with their psychic wounds and sense of betrayal. Price says Adams is only interested in political power, a Nobel medal, Armani suits and a big house.
Viewers who don’t know otherwise might just go along for the ride. What the series doesn’t show is that before the 1981 hunger strike led by Bobby Sands, Hughes called a hunger strike which lasted fifty-three days but then cancelled it precipitously in confused circumstances, with calamitous effect for the prisoners’ campaign for political status; that ten men elected to go on hunger strike after him and died; or that he stayed with Adams and his wife when he came out of prison and that the movement found him a house and a job; or that Price absented herself from the IRA command structure in Armagh prison when she was repatriated after winning her hunger strike and was then released early under Royal Prerogative of Mercy. Nor do we see all the commemorations, anniversaries, orations, coffin-bearing, pamphlet-writing and numerous gestures public and private participated in and conducted by Adams on behalf of IRA veterans, or the daily work he continues to do to advance the united Ireland that Hughes and Price fought for. Both Hughes and Price talked and gave the names of comrades who were later arrested.
DOUBLE TAKE: Josh Finan plays the young Gerry Adams
We can see what they offered and what they endured for the movement. We as viewers can sympathise with them. But in later life they would seem to have violated the oaths and practices of the organisation they signed up for. This may not have sat easily with them. If they were left behind by the ship it is because they chose not to get on board.
The series arrives to its final moment with the execution of Jean McConville, an event much publicised and investigated but still unsolved. Radden Keefe says he found the elusive answer and the series shows Marian Price putting the bullet into the back of Jean McConville’s head. How does he know? We see McIntyre asking Price about McConville and her asking for the tape machine to be switched off.
We are made to presume that when we see Marian pulling the trigger that Dolours has told him that this is what happened. The book has McIntyre saying to Radden Keefe he knows who killed Jean McConville and won’t tell, but that it was someone who was once offered the job of being Gerry Adams’ driver. Radden Keefe depicts himself having a Sherlock Holmes Eureka moment – “I sat bolt upright” – when he happens to remember an obscure line in an old transcript that has Dolours mentioning that Marian was once asked if she’d drive for Gerry Adams, but declined. The flimsiness of this evidence, given the stakes, is shocking. Scores of people might have declined to be Adams’ driver. Dolours once recounted being with him and others and when he offered them a lift, they all threw up their hands in unison and said, “No thanks!”, knowing he’d been a target for assassination nearly all his life.
The series takes some pains to dismiss similarly flawed evidence by having Dolours tell a journalist she knew Jean McConville was an informer because she’d been in a barracks identifying IRA suspects from behind a sheet and her red slippers could be seen. The journalist replies that many people might have such red slippers and it doesn’t justify them being executed. It’s hearsay. McIntyre is the only source. If he can be said to know anything, it would only be something he’d heard from a person who can’t be cross-examined because she’s dead. Radden Keefe himself points out the invalidity of the evidence he presents – “There must have been other people, over the years, who declined an offer to be Gerry Adams’s driver.” But he then goes on to say, “The more I mulled over the suggestion that Marian Price was the third Unknown at the graveside and may [my italics] have fired the shot that ended Jean McConville’s life, the more it made sense.” He knows nothing at all, but fingering Marian Price allows his project to be marketed as a “true crime story”, a “murder mystery”, and a “whodunnit” that he alone has solved.
Marian Price still lives with her family in Belfast, as do several of Jean McConville’s children. ‘Say Nothing’ shows her firing the gun that killed their mother. That this horrific act has been turned into public entertainment appalls them, and they have publicly denounced the series. McIntyre laid the trail that led Radden Keefe to make this accusation against Marian. Why? Hard to say. Marian was maid of honour at McIntyre’s wedding. The evidence Radden Keefe presents is too slight to be taken seriously. More substantial evidence was dismissed by the judge as worthless in the Ivor Bell case. Just last week, Marian began a case against Disney. It’s difficult to imagine a just court not finding in her favour.
What is ‘Say Nothing’ for? It ‘entertains’. It allows audiences to share in the derring-do of IRA operations, sympathise with victims and even perpetrators and to feel they’ve understood something profound about the conflict known as the Troubles, all without their having to leave their sofas. It psycho-pathologises the North of Ireland. Where once there were ‘terrorists’, now there are broken and bitter shell-like creatures. A war zone has become a ward full of depressives. If you resist the state you will live with regret. It’s a convenient narrative for an imperialist. But while the war may have been futile, there should have been more of it because its end was a betrayal. A little thought and inquiry and a visit to West Belfast would quickly dispel the picture put forward by this book and series.
What does ‘Say Nothing’ say, then? It says nothing, beyond demonstrating what a writer will do in in order to create a ‘hit’.
A version of this article first appeared in Byline Times. Timothy O'Grady's novel Monaghan will be published in June and can be pre-ordered here.
