I will admit that when I heard there was to be a TV adaptation of Say Nothing, based on Patrick Radden Keefe’s book of the same name, released on Disney+, I thought: “Oh no.” I had images of Florence Pugh or whoever got up in a red wig and painted-on freckles, prancing about the Ormeau Road with a petrol bomb in one hand and an Irish tricolour in the other. I pictured plummy English or haughty southern Irish accents with a few mangled Belfast “nowwws” thrown in for colour.
On reflection this wasn’t really to do with the book, a sober and well-researched account of a brutal murder. But more because there can tend to be a slightly goofy way of depicting, and interacting with, the complexity of the history in the place where I am from. Perhaps especially of late.
Say Nothing couldn’t really be arriving at a more advantageous time. Since Brexit (when many in England and indeed down south seemed to discover the existence of the DUP for the first time) there has been a wave of interest in the Troubles and the north that feels like it is building to a crescendo. The huge success of Anna Burns’s Booker-prize winning Milkman – as well as, to be fair, Say Nothing the book and now Kneecap-mania – speaks to this. The interest is particularly pronounced among people around my millennial generation, both in England and the south of Ireland, who see the Troubles as a blind spot in their education.
Declarations of an affinity with Irish culture are everywhere. Many an Essex lad can these days be heard in pub gardens chanting “Split the G” (take the exact swig of Guinness to make the liquid level fall to the middle of the G on the glass). I can barely open my mouth in London, where I live, without someone clocking my accent and starting to explain about their Cork granny (despite the very different recent histories of the south and the north).
For once it is not my pronunciation of certain words that stands out for being a bit clapped. I was recently chatting to a nice young man who rushed to tell me that his dad is Irish. Then he passed me my Guinness from the bar and declared: “Slant-eee!” I replied: “Oh no, babe – you say it like sláinte (slawn-sha, kind of).” Posh English girls are suddenly saying “the north of Ireland” instead of Northern Ireland, signalling their political righteousness. I sometimes imagine them saying that to my grandma (a tough-as-nails Derry woman with her fair share of Troubles tales) and just laugh. I actually texted a family member the other day: “You know all these posh English girlies are calling it the north of Ireland now.” They replied: “It will be Tiocfaidh ár lá next.”
I was pleased to find, after watching half the episodes of Say Nothing, that the show treats its subject matter much more seriously. Say Nothing tells the story of the IRA’s abduction and murder of Jean McConville, a mother of 10. She was accused of passing information to British forces, but no evidence of this has ever surfaced. Her orphaned children (their father died of cancer before her murder) campaigned for justice for many years. In parallel, the show follows the very different lives of IRA militants Dolours and Marian Price, along with figures they associated with, like Gerry Adams and Brendan Hughes.
The Price sisters grew up in a republican family and joined the IRA, one in her late teens and the other in her early 20s. They were involved in peaceful protests before this, including the Burntollet Bridge incident in 1969, when protesters on a civil rights march from Belfast to Derry were attacked by Ulster loyalists. This is depicted in a few terrifying scenes in the show and framed as a moment of radicalisation. Spirited, intelligent and angry, the Price sisters planned and participated in high-profile IRA actions, including the 1973 Old Bailey bombing that injured about 200 people. They were sent to prison and conducted a notorious hunger strike. The two threads converge when Dolours Price participates in McConville’s abduction.
My fears about the show were proved unfounded: there is plenty of great acting by Belfast stars or soon-to-be stars. If there is any justice in the world, Lola Petticrew will launch a major career off their performance of the young Dolours. And Say Nothing mostly does an admirable job of not shying away from the messiness of the material it depicts.
But it is not by any means a flawless account of the Troubles. (And I would hope nobody watches it for a history lesson.) There is nothing, for example, about loyalist paramilitaries. And it is too obvious that the film-makers consider the Price sisters’ combination of glamour and toughness to be hugely unlikely, and expect the viewer to react similarly: there are too many scenes of the sisters got up like nuns bearing guns and so on. I doubt this brand of tough, glamorous woman will scan as at all unusual to anyone who grew up in the north. (Their very hardline IRA activity is another story, of course.)
Say Nothing does avoid the worst pitfalls, though. There is a sanitised depiction of the Troubles, which tends to go down well with Americans or southern Irish people, that frames the conflict primarily as a struggle for a united Ireland and so principally a dispute over national identity. The reality is that the latest phase of Ireland’s long colonial history was triggered because the predominantly working-class Catholic population in the north was denied fair access to jobs and housing, and experienced gerrymandering. Say Nothing, to its credit, opens with a monologue outlining this. Perhaps not the slickest delivery, but it did warrant highlighting upfront.
I suspect this story of the Troubles is less palatable to some because it frames things more explicitly in terms of a good old-fashioned class struggle. You can always tell which elements of any topic remain controversial by whether they are being talked about and celebrated or not. Likewise I suspect that saying “the north of Ireland” is all the rage these days precisely because many people in England don’t really care what it’s called any more. To my mind, one major failure of identity politics over the past decade has been the overemphasis on having the right language. But just like Say Nothing should not be treated as a history lesson, we should never treat talismanic phrases as a substitute for proper, sustained engagement with any topic.
But anyway, I will leave you all to your “slantees” and “north of Irelands”. I’m saying nothing.
Rachel Connolly is a writer and author of the novel Lazy City
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