[[link removed]]

PORTSIDE CULTURE

SAY NOTHING TURNS THE IRA’S SECRET HISTORY INTO TV DRAMA  
[[link removed]]


 

An interview with Josh Zetumer
December 7, 2024
Jacobin [[link removed]]


*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

_ The new FX TV show Say Nothing dramatizes one of the most
controversial stories in modern Irish history, with characters that
include former Sinn Féin leader Gerry Adams. Showrunner Josh Zetumer
spoke to us about the challenges of producing the serie _

Lola Petticrow portrays Dolours Price in Say Nothing. , (FX)

 

The new television series _Say Nothing _dramatizes one of the most
contentious episodes in modern Irish history. In 1972, members of the
Irish Republican Army (IRA) abducted Jean McConville, a mother of ten
children in Belfast who they accused of working as an informer for the
British Army. They killed McConville and buried her body in secret.
McConville’s murder later became the subject of bitter controversy
when IRA veterans Brendan Hughes and Dolours Price accused Sinn Féin
leader Gerry Adams
[[link removed]] of
having been involved in giving the order for her killing.

Hughes and Price both gave interviews to an oral history project under
the auspices of Boston College that was coordinated by the journalist
Ed Moloney. After the death of Hughes, Moloney published a book
called _Voices from the Graves_
[[link removed]] based
on his testimony and that of David Ervine, a loyalist paramilitary
turned politician. The Boston College project collapsed when the
Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) filed a subpoena 
[[link removed]]with
the US authorities demanding access to the interviews so they could be
used in criminal prosecutions.

Although the PSNI took Adams in for questioning, there were ultimately
no charges filed against him in relation to McConville’s death.
However, there was an attempt to prosecute Ivor Bell, another IRA
veteran who had become bitterly hostile to Adams and gave an interview
to the Boston College archive. Adams was called as a witness in the
2019 trial, which ended with Bell’s acquittal
[[link removed]] after the
judge ruled that the material from his Boston College interview was
inadmissible.

In 2018, US journalist Patrick Radden Keefe published a book
called _Say Nothing_
[[link removed](book)], building on a
previous essay
[[link removed]] he
had written about the McConville case for the _New Yorker_. _Say
Nothing _proved to be a bestseller and won the National Book Critics
Circle Award for nonfiction in 2019. Ed Moloney was highly critical
[[link removed]] of
the book, although his collaborator on the Boston College project,
Anthony McIntyre, had a more positive
[[link removed]] view.
Gerry Adams declined to speak to Radden Keefe for the book and has
strongly denied any responsibility for McConville’s death.

_Say Nothing _has now been adapted for the screen in the form of a
nine-episode Disney+ series. The series focuses on the Price sisters,
Dolours and Marian, from their early activism in the civil rights
movement of the late 1960s to their role in the bombing of London’s
Old Bailey courthouse; it also features Gerry Adams and Brendan Hughes
as central characters. Josh Zetumer, the showrunner for _Say
Nothing_, spoke to _Jacobin_’s Daniel Finn about the challenges of
creating a television drama about controversial, real-life events.
Since the interview was recorded, Marian Price’s lawyer
has announced
[[link removed]] that
she plans to sue Disney+ for defamation.

Daniel Finn

What was the point at which you felt that this book could be the basis
for a television series, and what were the first steps that you took
toward putting it into practice?

 

Josh Zetumer

Reading a book that was written in a very cinematic style, you knew
very quickly that it could make a TV show, albeit one that would be
very difficult to get made, given how fear-driven everything is in
Hollywood, and how unlikely it was for a series that was set in
Northern Ireland ever make it to screen. It’s a miracle when even a
bad film or a bad television show comes together, let alone something
like this: an epic, spanning decades, that deals very honestly with
radical politics.

Reading a book which was written in a very cinematic style, you knew
very quickly that it could make a TV show, albeit one that would be
very difficult to get made.

Reading the book, I felt it was a brilliant piece of work, but it
would certainly be a challenge to get it to screen. One of the chief
challenges of the work was reconciling my own ambition for the series
with making a network show and the budget limitations and all of those
things. But I knew quickly that the book was tremendous and would make
a great show.

Daniel Finn

What was the process of bringing it to a network and persuading them
it was a story that could be told and that people would want to see?

Josh Zetumer

I was brought in at a very early stage in the process before the book
was out there in the world for too long, and certainly before it
started accumulating all of its accolades. I did a pitch to the
network alongside Brad Simpson and Nina Jacobson of Color Force and
the author, Patrick Radden Keefe.

I laid out the series for the heads of the network and talked about
some of the themes of the work. I talked about the price of peace, and
the romance and the cost of radical politics, as well as the
destructive power of silence and what the culture of silence
surrounding the IRA did for the culture at large and for people who
wanted to come forward and tell their stories but felt like they
couldn’t. That was true for both the victims and the perpetrators in
this case. There was an emotional cost of a culture of silence for
both the individual and for society at large.

It’s a testament to FX Productions, because what they like at FX —
and certainly what Brad and Nina like at Color Force — is a kind of
literary pulp material that feels propulsive and (for lack of a better
word) watchable, but which also has deep ideas at the center of it.
That was always the challenge: how to create something that people
wanted to watch, but that also dealt with very heavy themes and real
psychology.

That was always the challenge: how to create something that people
wanted to watch, but that also dealt with very heavy themes and real
psychology.

On top of that, one of the other challenges was that I was determined
to create something authentic. One of the reasons I got into
television was because of _The Wire _and its incredibly authentic
portrayal of Baltimore. While the show is not _The Wire_ — it’s
not very similar to _The Wire_ in fact — the idea of getting all
this granular detail was foremost in my mind.

The magic trick that the show needed to pull off would be to create
something that felt like you could live in Belfast and watch the show
and feel like it accurately reflected the world that you were living
in, but at the same time would be accessible to people who had never
set foot in Belfast and knew nothing about the Troubles. That was the
tightrope I was trying to walk in adapting the series.

Daniel Finn

Watching it, I wondered if there was something about the story that
would appeal to a filmmaker or television maker, in the sense that
there’s something meta built in from the start. You have the opening
scenes of Dolours Price and Brendan Hughes sitting down with the tape
recorder to talk about their younger lives. If you didn’t know
anything about the story, you might think, “That’s a classic
narrative device — the person looking back from a later stage.” Of
course, it’s not just a narrative device — it’s what really
happened. I remember that when Patrick Radden Keefe had the original
essay in the _New Yorker_ that was the basis for the book, he was
clearly fascinated by the detail of Price having married the actor
Stephen Rea. Not only did Rea play an IRA member in _The Crying
Game_ — he even did the voice-over for Gerry Adams at the time of
the broadcast ban for Sinn Féin in Britain. Did that meta level to
the story appeal to you?

Josh Zetumer

You’re right that this jumping back and forth between characters who
are young and idealistic and characters who are older and more
disillusioned is something that we’ve seen in television shows
before. You could compare it to a show like _True Detective_ or
something like that, using the interviews to inform the story. I was
aware that it had been used before, but it felt so organic to the
story, and the friction that it created immediately gave the story
another level.

From the very beginning, the first episode ends with Dolours saying,
“I believed in all these things about the IRA, and ultimately it was
all lies.” You need that friction in order to tell the story of
someone who’s young and idealistic. Without that friction, it could
have felt like you were glorifying what the IRA was doing. But
instead, you’re with the sense that this idealism ultimately does
not end well. You know that it doesn’t end well, both because the
series starts with the abduction of Jean McConville, but also because
of your narrators.

This spine of going from idealism to disillusionment was always the
key for me. Very early on, I knew it would be primarily the story of
Dolours: she would be the gravitational center, and we were going to
follow her from idealism to disillusionment. When it comes to the meta
conceit of Stephen Rea, that was a sort of icing; in episode seven, we
see her start the romance with Rea.

Very early on, I knew it would be primarily the story of Dolours
Price: she would be the gravitational center.

I was attracted to the idea of star quality, more than anything,
because Dolours was somebody who moved through her life feeling like a
star from a very early age, frankly. As a Republican — she talked
about this in interviews — she felt like she was part of an elite.
She had a sort of secret knowledge that the rest of the kids at school
didn’t really have, which had been imbued in her by her mother and
father.

She was also very pretty and charismatic and turned a lot of heads.
There are many men who have written about being infatuated with
Dolours, and at the same time there are a lot of people who think that
she was a monster. She had the quality of being very special from an
early age, so it felt only natural that she would end up with a movie
star.

Of course, it gets to be more complicated when she’s no longer the
star, I would say. I didn’t want to comment on that, because I
didn’t know what that was like inside her and Stephen’s
relationship, so that’s not factored in as a big part of the show.

But certainly, her star quality curdles a little bit as she gets
older. As with so many of us, the things that make her a magnetic
young person — the garrulous personality, the need to talk — sort
of curdle as she gets older and start to be a little too much. That
felt like something that was not only specific to her, but also
applies to a lot of people who have big personalities and then hang
around the scene too long.

 

Daniel Finn

In the opening episode, it’s almost like a subversion of a fairly
stock view of people from that ’60s generation who were imbued with
the spirit of left-wing radicalism, having political arguments with
their parents. Except in this case, the two younger family members are
arguing with the parents who say to them, “Peaceful protest is a
waste of time — armed struggle is the only way.”

Josh Zetumer

Yes, absolutely. I loved that. The dinner table conversation was
always a thing that really roots you in the story. It is like a twist
on _All in the Family_ or something like that, where you don’t
normally have a father who thinks violent insurrection is the only way
forward. That fundamental perversity and the taboo of that was really
central to the characters.

Then, I think, there’s a more complicated read on what Dolours is
trying to do there that is, I think, probably a little more nuanced
than the show has time for, given how much ground it has to cover. But
she was part of an organization, the People’s Democracy
[[link removed]],
and what they were trying to do was unite working-class Catholics and
working-class Protestants.

If it was a kid today or in the last twenty years in America, it would
have been somebody who was very pro–Bernie Sanders, someone who
thinks that wealth is the enemy and that if the workers of the world
can unite, they can throw off the shackles of poverty that have been
put on all of them. Because there were lots of people who believed
that the Protestants who lived in Northern Ireland at the time might
have been privileged [in relation to the Catholics], but many of them
were also still poor. It was a very complicated, nuanced situation
where Dolours thought, “If we can unite people, that’s the only
way forward.” When that didn’t work, violence for her became the
only way.

Daniel Finn

I want to ask you in a bit more detail about the challenges of
producing a dramatic work that’s based on real historical events. I
understand, of course, that you can’t judge a work of art, whether
it’s a television series or a film or a novel, by the same standards
that you’d apply to a history book. There has to be a certain
process of simplification and condensing, and it has to work on a
dramatic level. Bearing that in mind, I wanted to ask about some of
the particular choices.

For example, Ivor Bell didn’t feature as a character in the story.
Was that a choice where you felt that it was just too much to bring
into the story for the audience to concentrate on? Did you feel the
dynamic between Gerry Adams and Brendan Hughes was enough for the
audience to get their teeth stuck into, and bringing in other
characters would have been overly complicated?

Josh Zetumer

I’m impressed with this question — you were the first person to
ask me about Ivor Bell! Were there versions we worked on that included
Ivor? Of course; we had thought of a composite character who would
represent him. For people who don’t know, Ivor Bell was one of the
people who spoke out against Gerry Adams regarding those who had been
“disappeared.”

The only way to make it function as a TV show was if the aperture was
very tightly focused on our characters: the Price sisters, Gerry
Adams, and Brendan Hughes.

When creating the story, ultimately, the only way to make it function
as a TV show was if the aperture was very tightly focused on our
characters: the Price sisters, Dolours and Marian, and then Gerry
Adams and Brendan Hughes. I couldn’t really tell you about Ivor’s
relationship with Brendan, and I don’t know if Ivor had a
relationship with Dolours at all.

I think, and correct me if I’m wrong, Ivor ultimately ended up being
a thorn in the side of Gerry Adams while this was all happening, but
he was outside the periphery of Dolours, Marian, and Brendan, at least
in the research process that I went through during the show. As a
result, anything outside of that, their immediate emotional vicinity,
whether it was another character or even a seismic event in Irish
history, ended up getting cut from the show because there was simply
no way to include it all. If you tried, the episodes would be too
diffuse.

Daniel Finn

The other specific choice I wanted to ask you about was related to the
Boston College project. That is sketched out in the show, and Anthony
McIntyre features as a character, but Ed Moloney is not referred to.
Was that also a question of simplifying things or were there
particular reasons for it? I know Ed Moloney had ended up having quite
a fraught relationship with Patrick Radden Keefe after the publication
of _Say Nothing_.

Josh Zetumer

Honestly, there are 215 speaking parts in the show right now — there
are nine episodes with 215 characters. When we were casting the show,
it was wave after wave of auditions. Everything that happened with the
Boston College tapes was so complicated — you could have done an
entire season just about the Boston tapes. I realized very quickly
that if you wanted to include something historical in the show, you
needed to give it its due; and if you couldn’t give it its due, you
should cut it.

I realized very quickly that if you wanted to include something
historical in the show, you needed to give it its due; and if you
couldn’t give it its due, you should cut it.

I wrote long sequences about the fight over the Boston tapes that
involved subpoenas and police going to Boston College and all of those
things. Ultimately, I cut them from the show, because first of all, we
didn’t have the budget to do all the things we wanted, but also from
a creative standpoint, it felt like it was getting away from the
characters that we were invested in and that we had spent the whole
show being invested in.

In addition, from a dramatic standpoint in those final episodes, you
really needed everything to build to a head quickly — you needed to
maintain that propulsive energy. Otherwise, the ending, which is
inherently more somber, would have been a bit flat and a bit too
diffuse. It was really a decision to streamline everything and focus
specifically on this triangle between Dolours, Gerry, and Helen
McConville, and how Dolours, Helen McConville, and the entire
McConville family were all affected by the culture of silence, rather
than going into the nitty-gritty with the Boston tapes.

 

Daniel Finn

In terms of those challenges of translating history into drama, in a
way, there’s a more fundamental issue that goes beyond saying,
“We’ve got this established historical narrative, and we’re
going to translate it into a work of art.” There are bitter disputes
about what happened: this is highly contested terrain, as evidenced by
the fact that every episode has a disclaimer saying that Gerry Adams
has always denied being a member of the IRA, let alone having been
involved in these specific IRA-related activities. Would you say your
approach was to, in a way, take the book by Patrick Radden Keefe and
the investigation he had done as the starting point, use that as the
raw material, and then translate that into the TV series?

Josh Zetumer

Certainly, I think I was very much adapting a book, and then beyond
that, I did a massive research process about the Troubles. I really
went down the rabbit hole. As you can tell from my voice, I am not
from Belfast — I’m an American. I felt that as an outsider, the
only way I would be able to do the story and the material justice
would be if I dedicated myself to creating an authentic show.

Patrick Radden Keefe’s book is so vast, we could have done three
seasons of television out of it.

So I did try to go beyond the four corners of the book. I tried to
read as much as I could — I read all the Gerry Adams biographies,
and I could have spent years just doing that as a way to craft the
story. But I think fundamentally, Patrick’s book is so vast, we
could have done three seasons of television out of it. There was the
question: What darlings do we have to get rid of in order to tell the
story and really make it about the characters?

Then there were other instances where we didn’t have enough
information. This was me and the other three writers who worked on the
show. Those people were Joe Murtagh, an Irish guy who was raised in
England, who created _The Woman in the Wall_ and is a showrunner
himself; Kirsten Sheridan, who is a writer and director and was
nominated for an Oscar for cowriting _In America_; and an American
playwright, Clare Barron, who’d been nominated for a Pulitzer for
her work and really understood the sense of humor and the Price
sisters in particular.

We had those four different voices, including my own, in the writing
of the show. I think we all had access to the character’s stories in
their own words because the characters had given interviews. Brendan
had done multiple interviews about his role in the IRA. We tried to
adapt the book while trying to make it about the characters as much as
we possibly could.

There was a wealth of detail beyond the scope of the book that is
available. For example, we were able to find old interviews with
Albert Price, the father of Dolours and Marian, that came out in the
British papers when they were arrested after bombing London. We would
use those as primary-source documents when creating the show.

Daniel Finn

With the release of the show, there has been some discussion in the
media, certainly in Ireland and Britain, about the reaction from the
McConville family. Michael McConville
[[link removed]],
one of Jean McConville’s children, has said that he rejected the
idea of making this show at all. He said that he hadn’t watched it
and didn’t intend to watch it, so it wasn’t a question of his
objecting to the particular way that it was put on screen. He didn’t
like the idea of it being put on screen at all, which you can
understand, of course, coming from his perspective. Was there any
sense in which you were in contact with or liaising with people from
the family and sounding them out on how they might respond to this?

Josh Zetumer

Yes, absolutely. Members of our team — specifically the director,
Michael Lennox, and Patrick Radden Keefe — were in contact with the
families and had multiple meetings, each of which lasted for hours. I
can attest that in the writers’ room, we were thinking about the
families and the victims the whole time and doing everything we could
to make the story feel as sensitive and humane as possible.

When people see it, particularly in those final episodes with the
depiction of the McConville family, I hope that it does come off as
sensitive and humane.

When people see it, particularly in those final episodes with the
depiction of the McConville family, I hope that it does come off as
sensitive and humane. I know that Michael has the feelings that he
has, and obviously I’m saddened by that. But if it was my mother, I
would probably feel the exact same way — I wouldn’t want to watch
it either.

I admit that I will never know what it feels like to be in his
position, and it must be so difficult when your personal trauma is
part of a very public history. I think, despite his feelings about the
show, we’ve heard from so many people along the way that this was a
very important story that needed to be told. I feel that when it comes
to violent conflict, you should be able to talk about what happened.
The show is called _Say Nothing_, and I suppose the point of the show
is that the real problem is silence — the real problem is what
happens when you don’t tell stories like these.

Daniel Finn

There is quite a long tradition of filmmaking about the Irish
republican movement, going back to directors like John Ford and Carol
Reed in the 1930s and ’40s, with the likes of Neil Jordan, Jim
Sheridan, and Ken Loach in more recent times. Some very good films (as
well as some very bad ones) have been made about the IRA. Was that
something you spent time working with in the process of putting the
series together — to see how you could position yourself in relation
to that tradition, so to speak?

 

Josh Zetumer

I’ve seen as many films about the Troubles as I possibly could, and
we knew that we were standing on the shoulders of giants in many ways.
Thinking of Jim Sheridan’s contributions, _In the Name of the
Father_ should be required viewing for anybody who wants to
understand the conflict. There were a number of films that were made
by people who had direct experience with the subject, and then there
were a number of films that were touchstones made by outsiders who
didn’t live through it, such as _Hunger_ by Steve McQueen
and _’71_ by Yann Demange.

One of the things I tried to do with the series was not judge the
characters.

That was one thing I was holding onto in the writing of the series. As
an outsider, as an American, you’re standing out there on the front
porch, knocking on the window saying, “Please let me come in.” If
the people are nice enough to let you in, you don’t want to drag mud
all over the carpet, so there has to be a fundamental respect and
sensitivity when telling the story.

But at the same time, the thing that you hopefully get as an outsider
is just a little sense of objectivity and enough distance from the
story to be able to tell it without taking sides. Obviously, there are
people who lived through the conflict who can do that as well. But I
think that’s one thing that you’re afforded.

One of the things I tried to do with the series was not judge the
characters. Even if at times that was very difficult, like in episode
five, when the sisters decide to put multiple car bombs in London. I
obviously have a personal opinion about that, while at the same time,
I knew that it was something the sisters could very easily justify,
given their political beliefs. They had no problem doing that.

For me, it was really about trying to just present the facts of what
happened, including the fact that after they did it, they doubled down
on their political beliefs. They felt that they were stronger than
ever in their convictions after those bombs went off. Some people will
think that’s monstrous, and some people may agree with it. But it
was something that, right or wrong, I just wanted to present as
history.

Share this article

Facebook  Twitter  Email

Contributors

Josh Zetumer is a film and television writer who created the show Say
Nothing.

Daniel Finn is the features editor at Jacobin. He is the author
of One Man’s Terrorist: A Political History of the IRA.

 

* Subscribe [[link removed]]
* Donate [[link removed]]

“Trumpism,” our issue focusing on the global right, is out
now. Subscribe [[link removed]] to our
print edition at a discounted rate today.

* say nothing
[[link removed]]
* Sinn Fein
[[link removed]]
* irish republican army
[[link removed]]
* irish republicanism
[[link removed]]
* Northern Ireland
[[link removed]]
* disney+
[[link removed]]
* FX
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web
[[link removed]]

Submit via email
Frequently asked questions
[[link removed]]
Manage subscription
[[link removed]]
Visit portside.org
[[link removed]]

Twitter [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 



########################################################################

[link removed]

To unsubscribe from the xxxxxx list, click the following link:
[link removed]