As teens in the 90s, a high school history teacher introduced my sister and me to Irish politics. Names like Patrick Pearse and Bobby Sands became common in our house, the music of Black 47 and the Wolfe Tones blasting from our bumper sticker-covered car. FX’s new show Say Nothing has me thinking a bit more complexly about that time and what it means to idolize a cause.
The show, based on a 2018 non-fiction book, released its full nine episodes on November 14 on FX and Hulu. At first it seems like it tells two different stories, though it’s quickly obvious that they’ll converge: the 1972 kidnapping of Jean McConville, a mother of 10 who was “disappeared” by the IRA; and the story of how sisters Dolours and Marian Price came to join the IRA, involvement that included a London bombing that saw the sisters go on hunger strike in prison. The narrative is structured around Dolours recording tapes for Boston College’s Belfast Project, interviews with IRA members and others started after the Good Friday Agreement that the researchers promised would be kept secret until after participants’ deaths, giving them the freedom to say who had done what for an organization that Say Nothing drives home thrived on secrecy and silence.
Besides teaching me a ton of history I knew nothing about (and a real “hey, did you know” fact in the form of: did you know actor Stephen Rea was married to an IRA member?), the show’s semi-dual narrative and long time frame lets it move beyond just telling a story of how Dolours and Marian become radicalized and what they do with that passion. While the action sort of peaks with the London bombings and their aftermath, the show keeps going: we see the interpersonal and political conflicts that arise as alleged IRA leader Gerry Adams becomes a politician (each episode ends with the note that Adams has always denied his involvement), and we see Dolours and Marian try to figure out how to live out their later years after their youthful fervor and its consequences. They struggle with the trauma of what they did for the cause and who they are if not front-line fighters, as well as anger over the Good Friday Agreement and whether it constituted a “win” for the IRA (The Guardian describes the Agreement as “a masterclass in constructive ambiguity, allowing all sides to agree to disagree and maintain their opposing goals.”).
If your parents, like mine, told me you’d get less radical as you got older, Say Nothing presents a nuanced if not sometimes depressing vision of how untrue that is. Dolours and Marian never waver in their commitment to the cause of Irish independence, but they do come to question their methods, especially regarding actions like McConville’s kidnapping, which seemed to go against the idea that the IRA was fighting for the Irish people. While the trailer above makes the show seem like it will be a romanticized action romp about girls in short skirts robbing banks, Dolours becomes a tragic figure in her later years: bitter and struggling with addiction, trying to find peace and figure out what was and wasn’t worth the harm and sacrifices. As someone who spends a lot of time wondering what it means to age as an activist, I found this moving and hard to watch, though also, in an odd way, inspiring, especially in regards to the Boston College tapes.
The whole messy story of the tapes is a bit of an afterthought to the show’s narrative, but is absolutely fascinating to me as a journalist. What is present comes back to this idea of silence from which the show takes its name, and which is what brings the McConville kidnapping into things. We see McConville’s daughter Helen spend years living with the neighbors she knows kidnapped her mother, living her daily life with the sense that everyone knows what happened but no one will tell her. This pain of the “civilian” side of the Troubles filters into the lives of the IRA members, and we see them come to question their commitment to closed ranks silence, especially as comrades and causes change. The tapes, then, represent both a betrayal of the values that caused them to commit the actions they confess to on the tapes, and a commitment to those values, in the form of seeing truth-telling as a way to get their cause back on track and be honest about what they did and why.
Say Nothing does an excellent job of leaning into nuance without becoming wishy-washy. By following its characters through so much of their lives, it tells a story I don’t think we often hear about the entire life of radicals. It’s a story that felt particularly urgent to me personally, especially these days in America, and it also made me reflect differently on what I knew and believed about the IRA as a young person without pushing me toward a simplistic conclusion about non-violence or right and wrong. I came out of it with a whole list of books to read, maybe the highest praise I can give a piece of historical semi-fiction. Even if you don’t know much about Irish history, it’s well worth checking out.
