Every Irish person abroad has experienced a moment of excited recognition from a well-meaning local. Ah, they say. You must love this famous Irish stalwart: U2, The Cranberries, Colin Farrell, Paul Mescal, or—for a grim period—convicted sex offender Conor McGregor. Today, the reference supplied by middle-brow Americans is more likely to be Patrick Radden Keefe’s 2019 history of the Troubles, Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland. Since its rapturous critical reception on release, the book has sold around half a million copies and was recently adapted into a nine-part FX miniseries.
Read and watch enough histories of the Troubles, and you’ll notice that they tend to rely on the same collection of set pieces, anecdotes, and pithy, grim quotes, most of which are extremely familiar to the people who grew up with them. Burntollet Bridge and the Battle of the Bogside, Bloody Friday and Sunday, Internment. Ten men dead. Greysteel, Kingsmill, Narrow Water. Armalite and ballot box. Birmingham Six, Guildford Four. “Crime is crime is crime.” “We have only to be lucky once, you will have to be lucky always.” Say Nothing is no different; its principal innovation was to repackage these basic elements into an entertaining, pacy thriller, twisting together the rise and fall of sisters Dolours and Marian Price—civil rights campaigners turned IRA militants—with the stories of their comrade Brendan Hughes, a charismatic Che Guevara of West Belfast, and the panther-like military-political strategist Gerry Adams. The heart of the book, however, is the abduction and disappearance of Jean McConville, a mother of ten who was accused by the Provisional IRA of spying for British intelligence.
Now that Keefe’s already accessible history is available as streaming TV, its influence is only likely to grow.
Over more than four hundred pages, Keefe attempts to tell the story of the conflict through the intersection of this handful of people. He frames the story of McConville’s abduction as essentially a true crime narrative, reducible to the familiar framework of a dastardly murder, a trail gone cold, and a cast of conscientious characters determined to uncover the truth. This approach is undoubtedly successful on the level of audience engagement, imbuing Say Nothing with a page-turning quality, but it is far less effective as history. Thirty-plus years of complex, clandestine warfare cannot be contained in an accounting of an individual crime. And the genre conventions from which Keefe takes inspiration force him to skirt or even excise incredibly significant events when they complicate or distract from the main thread of his story.
Reading the book as an Irish person, one is struck by just how much is left out, rather than how much insight is gained. But given that there is no one canonical text on the Troubles, Say Nothing has in some ways stepped into this void, serving as many people’s first and only insight into the conflict. Now that Keefe’s already accessible history is available as streaming TV, its influence is only likely to grow.
The Say Nothing series begins unpromisingly. Ahead of its release, The Cut drew some ire from my compatriots when they tweeted, “Missing ‘Derry Girls’? Try ‘Say Nothing.’” Comparing a knockabout teen comedy with the story of abduction and disappearance is a little brainless, certainly, but they may have been on to something. Indeed, Derry Girls director Michael Lennox takes the helm on four episodes of Say Nothing, including the first two, and for a show ultimately about the wages of paramilitary violence, there is a considerable amount of broad comedy up front. The Price sisters, played convincingly by Lola Petticrew and Hazel Doupe, are sympathetic, funny interlocutors, while Josh Finan’s uncanny young Gerry Adams is introduced with the tone of a Hammer Horror villain, running operations out of a mortuary.
There are better moments and subtler influences too: touches of Ken Loach’s Palme d’Or winning War of Independence drama The Wind that Shakes the Barley. And the fine details are well-rendered, like election posters and appeals for prisoners visible in the background of dingy pubs. But the overarching theme of the series—silence—is delivered with the subtlety of a sledgehammer. Characters put fingers to their lips in slow motion, repeat the title of the show ad nauseam, or instruct each other not to tell anyone anything. One character ruefully recalls, “Silence was our power.”
Aesthetic obviousness is not Say Nothing’s only sin, however. Like its source material, the show’s portrayal of the British army and state is uneven. On the one hand, Brigadier General Frank Kitson and his administration are portrayed as ruthless, brutal even, interning hundreds of people and beating them into confessions. But many of the worst sins of the British state are elided or glanced at, the equivalent of a newspaper headline instead of a full portrayal. The British Army’s killings at Bloody Sunday, for many the defining event of the early Troubles, are absent from the show almost entirely, reduced to a phrase shouted by Dolours as she is dragged into court. In the book, Keefe dispenses with Bloody Sunday in a few sentences.
This is a central problem not only with Say Nothing but with liberal historiography of the Troubles as a whole: the failure to reckon with the reality of state violence, and the implicit insistence that the state has a more legitimate right to kill than a paramilitary. Who gets to be a sympathetic victim? Whose pain is lingered upon, and whose is skated over? In depicting the Old Bailey Bombing in his book—during which no one was killed, though many were seriously injured—Keefe ramps up the tension by drawing our attention to a school bus full of children who could have been, but were not, hurt. (Similarly, the show takes time to humanize the British policemen on the scene; one has a baby on the way.) “This sort of scene might have become commonplace in Northern Ireland,” Keefe writes in Say Nothing, “but it felt deeply jarring in London.” Thus the attack on the mainland is made somehow more shocking and horrific than anything that happens in the colonies, and elsewhere, the death of a soldier worse than that of a civilian. Keefe lingers on the killing of two British soldiers after an IRA funeral, one of whom was photographed “lying with his arms splayed, like Christ,” which he claims is “perhaps the most indelible image of the Troubles.” Even Captain Robert Nairac is listed solemnly among the Disappeared in Say Nothing, despite spending considerable amounts of his short life causing murder and mayhem as a sadistic agent of British intelligence.
In the show, there is an honorable exception to this erasure. One episode focuses entirely on the imprisonment of the Price sisters in Brixton Prison and their campaign of struggle to be returned to a jail in Northern Ireland after their conviction for the Old Bailey bombings. The sisters were on hunger strike for 208 days and subjected to horrific force feeding by their captors. While Keefe’s book certainly depicts this abuse, he is almost absurdly evenhanded on the question of whether it constituted torture—one example in a pattern of studied magazine objectivity that disappears any time a republican commits an act of violence. The show has no such qualms confirming that it is. The episode is the only one to truly consider what it means to smash one’s body up against the wall of the state, to show just how brutal the state can be in the name of peace and humanity. The act of force feeding is depicted as essentially an act of sexual violence, a repulsive bodily invasion that is genuinely upsetting to watch. The process is repeated on screen again and again, becoming more and more normalized each time. In this episode, Say Nothing demonstrates what a better version of itself would have been.
Unfortunately, the rest of the series is a significant step back. Entire decades are summarized in a montage of violent newsreel footage inscrutable to anyone who does not already know this history. The disappearance of Jean McConville and the reinvention of Gerry Adams become Say Nothing’s exclusive subjects from here on. Adams in the nineties is a budding politician, trading in a life on the run for, as Keefe puts it in the book, “smart blazers,” “an ever-present pipe,” and “gauzy remembrances about his childhood in the Falls.” After two decades plus of warfare, he is trying to guide the republican movement toward a ceasefire; a political settlement that would involve sharing power with unionists; and a gradual, peaceful path to unification. But his plan is threatened by the ghosts of the past, particularly his alleged ordering of McConville’s disappearance. The quality of the acting and writing declines at this point, as the show rushes toward a conclusion that requires the transmutation of real people into heroes and villains.
Keefe’s book dedicates significant time to the question of whether Jean McConville was in fact working in any capacity for British intelligence, while making it clear that, even if she had been, her fate was unconscionable. Over the years, two highly contested explanations have been supplied for her being targeted: an army radio supposedly in her possession, and a dying British soldier in whose ear she supposedly whispered a prayer. Republican ex-paramilitaries like Hughes, as well as some journalists, argue that there is evidence for the radio’s existence. McConville’s children retell the story of the soldier vividly. Keefe suggests that perhaps neither of these stories are true, the former being a justification for her killing by those with guilty consciences, and the latter “a legend around the vanished woman that [the McConville children] could live with.” But the show, notably, dispenses with the radio entirely, depicting the dying British soldier in a foreboding and ultimately decisive scene—and canonizing it on screen as part of the official, acceptable story of the Troubles.
The series, and even more so the book before it, are salvos in a history war that long predates them. While every historical work is revisionist to some degree, Say Nothing presents itself as a conscious intervention, opening with an epigraph from Viet Thanh Nguyen that reads, “All wars are fought twice, the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory.” Keefe asserts, incorrectly, that Sinn Féin had “complete control of the narrative of IRA history during the Troubles,” and in this way, his book fits neatly into the dominant school of Irish historiography from the early 1970s onward, a profoundly anti-republican canon that places the vast majority of the blame for violence in the North at the feet of the Provisional IRA and Adams in particular. As an international bestseller, Say Nothing wields considerable power when it comes to shaping popular understanding of the Troubles today. Michéal Martin, Ireland’s former and incoming Taoiseach, has even cited the book as an influence on his loathing of physical-force republicanism and his adamant objection to Sinn Féin.
What makes Say Nothing’s stature troubling is its refusal to engage seriously with unionism or loyalism, an erasure that the show fatally doubles down on (after the first episode, it becomes a war of attrition between the IRA and the British Army; no other force, paramilitary or otherwise, is mentioned from then on.) In a waspish disclaimer in the book’s back matter, Keefe admits that he chose not to include any mention of loyalist paramilitary violence in Say Nothing and invites the reader to find another book if they’re “feeling whataboutish.” But the issue is much more profound. It is not merely unionist violence that’s missing, but unionism itself as a social and political force. Many commentators have noted that the terms of the 1998 Good Friday Agreement bear a striking resemblance to those hammered out in 1973 in the Sunningdale Agreement, a deal which would have created a devolved power-sharing government in the North that included both unionists and nationalists. SDLP leader Seamus Mallon went as far as to call the Good Friday Agreement “Sunningdale for slow learners.” So why did this older power-sharing arrangement collapse, ensuring another twenty-five years of violence and war? Because a general strike led by a broad front of loyalist paramilitaries and unionist politicians brought it to a halt—context that is entirely absent from Keefe’s account of the Troubles.
It is not merely unionist violence that’s missing, but unionism itself as a social and political force.
This isn’t the only way he shows his hand. Keefe displays a strong personal animus toward Gerry Adams, who, closer to home, has long been treated like a cartoon villain by the Dublin liberal intelligentsia; his denial of IRA membership approaches a national obsession. It irritates Keefe so much that he even complains about it in Say Nothing’s “Note on Sources,” of all places. He expresses bafflement at Adams’s insistence on maintaining this fiction, then repeatedly answers his own question as to why Adams might do so, noting first that the “British government had endeavored to persecute Adams on a so-called membership charge in 1978,” and that “even after the Troubles, you could still be prosecuted for having been a member of a paramilitary organization in the past.” As late as 2014, Adams was arrested and questioned over McConville’s death. Beyond his personal desire to stay out of prison, one of Say Nothing’s more insightful chapters concludes that “the fiction that Adams had never been a paramilitary created a political space in which interlocutors who might not want to be seen negotiating with terrorists could bring themselves to negotiate with him.”
There are of course many legitimate complaints to be made about a man whose career straddles fifty years of paramilitary violence and electoral participation, but some of the charges Say Nothing levels against him are laden with bizarre contradictions. Both book and series abound with sympathy for Adams’s republican comrades who felt left behind by the peace process and by Adams’s conversion to cuddly grandfather. Brendan Hughes, Dolours Price, and others shake their heads ruefully at the betrayal of the cause. Yet, if we accept peace as a good and precious thing—which Say Nothing seems to—are we to sympathize with those who wanted to continue the armed struggle?
Keefe even attempts to summon the reader’s sympathy for Seamus Twomey, a former IRA chief of staff who was “squeezed out” by Adams and died in relative obscurity. Twomey was, in reality, far more reckless an operator than Adams, hugely responsible for the escalation of indiscriminate civilian bombing and even accused of authorizing nakedly sectarian killings. These are the kinds of contortions that Say Nothing‘s depiction of Adams demands. Only after a long denunciation of Adams’s character can Keefe admit to a grudging respect for the manner in which he “steered the IRA out of a bloody and intractable conflict and into a brittle but enduring peace” and acknowledge that it was his iron discipline over the republican movement that brought most of the hardened militants on board, sidelining those who refused to disarm. This is the truth about Adams that drives people insane: he was unapologetic in his support for violence, likely responsible for the deaths of many, and simultaneously perhaps the person most responsible for this violence ending.
Keefe’s book culminates with the Belfast Project, a clandestine oral history of paramilitary violence run by Boston College, which caused chaos when its existence was revealed. Ed Moloney, a veteran Irish investigative journalist and one of the driving forces behind the project, is thanked effusively in Say Nothing’s acknowledgements. But after the book’s release, he was strongly critical of Keefe for errors, elisions, and particularly for his failure to disclose that he had worked as a policy advisor for the Office of the U.S. Secretary of Defense in 2010–11.
It is troubling for a journalist who has worked for the American security state while the United States waged multiple bloody wars to wield such power over the interpretation of Irish history, particularly when the U.S. government continues to exert an enormous, baleful influence on what violence is deemed legitimate. IRA leaders are not the only ones to coldly decide acceptable casualty levels: in Afghanistan, Iraq, Gaza, and many other conflicts around the world, American politicians and generals have done so on a far greater scale. (Unsurprisingly, one of the only times Keefe labels someone a “terrorist” in Say Nothing is when mentioning Palestinian militant and politician Leila Khaled.)
Both book and series hang on a fairly simple proposition: that paramilitaries in general and the IRA in particular were governed by a suffocating omertà, a code of silence that spread like a blanket over the wider population and allowed ghastly things to be covered up indefinitely. But in this story about silence, there are an awful lot of people speaking into microphones. Individuals, even those who have killed and struggled, are fragile. They age; they crack. Their elaborate codes dissolve as they grow old and have less to lose. So, who really keeps a stony, unbreakable silence?
Governments. Militaries. Institutions. The state does not get weepy and commit to tape what they have done. They shut up shop, seal and vanish records, stonewall until all parties are dead. This fact is even alluded to in an early episode of Say Nothing, when a character rues that we cannot know the true story of what Frank Kitson and the British did in the Mau Mau Rebellion in Kenya because all the records have been destroyed. Indeed, the real Kitson was knighted for his efforts and died just this year, unpunished, at the age of ninety-seven. The 2023 Legacy Act, passed by the UK’s last Tory government, was a formalization of this policy, attempting to seal the casket and protect the guilty soldiers still alive. The act, which Keir Starmer’s Labour government is in the early stages of trying to repeal, banned official and legal inquiries into violence during the Troubles in an attempt to stop what Boris Johnson called “vexatious prosecutions” of soldiers accused of serious crimes. In the silence the state mandates, all we can hear are the justifications of the perpetrators.