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 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 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 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 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, building on a previous essay 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 of the book, although his collaborator on the Boston College project, Anthony McIntyre, had a more positive 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 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, 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, 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.
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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.
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