Talking Gets Us Nowhere

Ryan Hamilton reviews Disney+/Hulu’s series about the Troubles in Northern Ireland, “Say Nothing.”

By Ryan Hamilton December 31, 2024

• Television

• Politics

IN THE FIRST episode of Say Nothing, now airing on Hulu in the United States and Disney+ internationally, Dolours and Marian Price, Catholic sisters growing up in 1960s Belfast, are arguing with their father Albert at the kitchen table. Dolours (Lola Petticrew) and Marian (Hazel Doupe) are heading out on a nonviolent civil rights march against anti-Catholic discrimination, rejecting the violence of the Irish Republican Army (IRA), their father’s former organization. Albert (Stuart Graham) asks his daughters, “Since when has going on a walk ever changed anything?” Dolours retorts with “[Y]ou lost, remember? Tried bombing the Brits and what have you got to show for it?” Dolours and Marian join the march, where they are attacked by a sectarian Protestant mob as the police stand by. They soon abandon nonviolence, rise up the ranks of the IRA, kill in the name of a free Ireland, are arrested when they try to bomb London, and nearly die on a hunger strike in prison. Afterward, both sisters, carrying mental and physical scars, leave the IRA only to become disillusioned with the Irish peace process in the 1990s, feeling it leaves them with nothing to show for decades of sacrifice. Marian eventually returns to the IRA, and her father’s logic of 30 years before, telling her sister, “[T]alking gets us nowhere.”

Say Nothing, adapted from the best-selling 2018 book by Patrick Radden Keefe, is fascinated by the cycle of violence, and how people and societies try and fail to escape it. It is a masterful adaptation, dealing with difficult themes of violence and memory, and deserves its place on the many “best shows of 2024” lists. The principal characters of Say Nothing—the Price sisters, along with Brendan Hughes (Anthony Boyle) and Gerry Adams (Josh Finan), their commanding officers in the IRA—were all born into the conflict. Following the Irish War of Independence in 1921, the majority Protestant Northern Ireland remained in the United Kingdom, and the IRA engaged in an on-and-off conflict thereafter in an attempt to end British rule. Say Nothing is set during the most intense part of that conflict, known as the Troubles, which lasting for 30 years before the Good Friday Agreement in 1998 reformed Northern Ireland’s government while keeping it in the United Kingdom.

In the show, the Price sisters grow up with their ex-IRA father and their Aunt Bridie (Eileen Walsh), another former Republican who was blinded and lost her hands when one of her own bombs exploded. Inheritors of the war, they try to break the cycle by winning it anew. They never achieve victory, though, and by the end of the series, the sisters begin to resemble Aunt Bridie, whom the series treats as a living motif of the futility of war. Marian even starts dressing like her, a fact that Dolours pokes fun at. Maxine Peake is fantastic as the older Dolours, haunted by her actions, embittered by the futility of her sacrifices, and driven by a constant anger pulsing beneath the surface.

In Say Nothing, this cycle is not limited to the main characters. Niall Ó Dochartaigh, a historian of the Troubles, has argued that the conflict itself became a cause of the conflict, as violence sparked retaliation and further escalation. This idea runs throughout the series. From the security cages at the doors of bars to the child who keeps reading his comic book as British Army gunmen rush by, Say Nothing deeply understands how brutal violence both completely transforms and also co-exists alongside ordinary life. The depiction of a British Army raid in episode one—from the banging of garbage lids at night to warn the neighborhood to the brutal violence of the soldiers who smash through the door and tear the home apart as mothers try to protect their children—is terrifyingly accurate. It’s very easy to understand the motives of those who joined the IRA after an experience like that.

Yet there is a poignant irony to this discussion of the inescapable cycle of violence in Northern Ireland—because that violence has ended. Northern Irish politics remains polarized and often unstable, but it has stayed peaceful. Belfast continues to bear the scars of the conflict, from the persistence of religiously segregated schools to the peace walls that divide Catholic and Protestants neighborhoods—walls that, to this day, are occasionally scorched by Molotov cocktails. But the remarkable thing about Belfast today is how normal it feels, in large parts entirely indistinguishable from any other large postindustrial city in Britain or Ireland. The biggest tourist site in Belfast is a museum about the building of the Titanic.

Even after 1998, the Price sisters and Brendan Hughes struggled to leave the conflict behind. Marian returns to the IRA, and eventually to prison, but Dolours and Hughes struggle to adapt to a Belfast at peace, and to make peace with their own demons. They ultimately recount their roles in the IRA on audiotapes that serve as the framing device for the series. In this way, Say Nothing is a mirror of another very different show depicting the Troubles—Derry Girls (2018–22). Derry Girls, a Northern Irish production unlike the American-made Say Nothing, is a comedy starring four high school girls and their male friend, set toward the end of the conflict. If Say Nothing argues that we can never escape the past, Derry Girls makes exactly the opposite case. The girls are living at the center of the cycle of violence, getting stopped at military checkpoints or having to change their commute due to bomb scares, but they want nothing more than to escape it and make romantic crushes and exams the most important things in their lives. In the haunting finale of season one, the girls dance to Madonna’s “Like a Prayer” at a school talent show while, elsewhere in Derry, a bombing kills 12 people. But in the end, those who wanted to break the cycle won. When Erin (Saoirse-Monica Jackson), the main character, is expressing her worries that the peace process could be futile and “all for nothing,” her grandfather replies, “And what if it does [work]? What if no one else has to die?”

Twenty-five years later, peace in Northern Ireland can feel inevitable when, as with many conflicts from Gaza to Ukraine, conflict had earlier seemed intractable. Yet it ended, and the peace has held. Neither peace nor conflict are ever inevitable. But addressing how Northern Ireland ultimately reached peace is where Say Nothing struggles, as it carries over the book’s limited perspective. Say Nothing is not a history of the Troubles but, rather, the story of five people: the Prices, Hughes, Adams, and Jean McConville (Judith Roddy), a Protestant mother of 10 whom the IRA abducted and murdered in December 1972. These five cannot capture the whole history of the conflict, and Keefe, to adjust for this, occasionally focuses on peripheral characters to provide insight into a side of the conflict they never saw, as when he uses army officer Frank Kitson (Rory Kinnear) to explore the British counterinsurgency operations or Belfast priest Alec Reid (Ian McElhinney) to explore the back channels that led to the peace process. The series does not fully embrace this tool—though Kinnear’s portrayal of Kitson, who remains affable as he brings increasingly brutal counterinsurgency tactics to Belfast, is a highlight of the series.

The series is highly accurate both to the book and to history when it focuses on the five central characters. I never thought I would see a major TV series depicting IRA chief of staff Seán Mac Stíofáin (Ian Beattie), a major figure in my own research, monologizing at the British Secretary of State for Northern Ireland during secret talks in June 1972, but Adams’s attendance ensures that the scene features in the series. McConville’s abduction, which opens the first episode, is even more terrifying on-screen. But other key aspects of the Troubles get dropped entirely. It is actually somewhat refreshing to see a depiction of the period that does not center on Bloody Sunday, the massacre of 13 unarmed Catholic civilians by British paratroopers in Derry in 1972, because all of Keefe’s characters were Belfast-based. More troublingly omitted are the Protestants in Northern Ireland, the majority of the population, who had their own agenda and militant groups. When they do appear in the series, they are two-dimensional figures—for example, the sectarian mob attacking the Prices in episode one, their eyes described as “glazed over with hate.” Say Nothing instead chooses to focus almost exclusively on the conflict between the IRA and the British Army.

Keefe is relatively uninterested in the history of the Northern Irish conflict before the 1960s, commenting that “it almost didn’t matter where you started the story: it was always there.” The series echoes this conclusion with a voice-over in episode one that takes less than 40 seconds to explain the conflict. This choice makes sense for the show since it would be a mistake to get bogged down in details of Wolfe Tone’s rebellion or the fall of the Fenian Brotherhood. Yet Keefe, in the book, is detailed and unambiguous on how the Troubles broke out: how a series of nonviolent civil rights marches led by Catholics in 1968 were met with violence, which was met by further violence that revitalized the dormant IRA. While the series does not have the time to examine the international influences of the civil rights movement, it is nonetheless very cool to hear the marchers accurately singing the anthem “We Shall Overcome,” which they learned from Martin Luther King Jr.

The series, however, leans too far into the “conflict was always there” idea. It gives the impression that the warfare was a constant, already ongoing in episode one when the Price sisters were children in the 1950s. The voice-over states that the conflict has been going “ever since” the partition of the 1920s. This vague allusion to a long history overlooks the fact that the IRA campaign in the 1950s had a tiny death toll. Northern Ireland was relatively at peace until the late 1960s, when the conflict exploded—from just over a dozen deaths in 1969 to nearly 500 in 1972.

The character-focused storytelling of Say Nothing also fails to capture how, after 1972, violence decreased and the IRA lost ground. This is why the Price sisters bomb London in episode five: the IRA had gone from believing they were on the brink of victory to needing to try something new when faced with a stalemate. The sisters fail and, along with Hughes, spend the rest of the 1970s and early ’80s in prison. Since point-of-view characters are thus off the field, the changing nature of the conflict is not addressed. The series also omits the 1981 hunger strikes, which saw imprisoned IRA member Bobby Sands elected to Parliament before dying (despite the fact that Hughes was imprisoned alongside Sands).

Accurately depicting the changing shape of the conflict throughout the 1970s is critical because of the key role the struggles played in the evolution of Say Nothing’s final protagonist—Gerry Adams. A former bartender with a thick beard and deep voice, Adams is one of the most important and impenetrable figures of the Troubles. Every episode of Say Nothing ends with a disclaimer that Gerry Adams has always denied membership in the IRA, but historians of Northern Ireland overwhelmingly believe he was a key leadership figure throughout the conflict.

By the early 1980s, Adams was faced with a military stalemate, and Sands showed a way forward. The British could not be defeated militarily, but Sinn Féin, the political party Adams led, could win power through elections. Keefe writes that Adams also realized “that the ballot and the bullet were not mutually reinforcing but were actually at cross-purposes,” as the IRA’s war was holding Sinn Féin back from winning elections. The conflict was not a never-changing constant; it was evolving, shifting, and Adams soon saw an opportunity. He reinvented himself as a politician who became one of the critical negotiators in the peace process—denying all involvement in the IRA and enraging some of those, like Dolours Price and Brendan Hughes, who had fought alongside him.

This denial of his IRA past is at the heart of Say Nothing’s criticism of Gerry Adams. In the book, Keefe describes Adams as possessing a “sociopathic instinct for self-preservation” and characterizes the way he left his IRA comrades behind as “chilling.” Hughes, struggling with guilt for his own role in organizing IRA bombings, is quoted in the book as saying, “[P]eople like myself … have to carry the responsibility of all those deaths,” while Adams absolves himself. Yet Keefe does genuinely explore how these traits that he found so distasteful about Adams proved key to the peace process, writing that “the very ambiguity that he had cultivated around his own persona may have been what made it possible for the various negotiators to deal with him.” Keefe even explores some sympathetic personal history, such as revelations of sexual abuse in Adams’s family that provide a “window into how Adams became the cipher that he did: here was a man who had grown up in a penumbral world of secrets.” Even in Keefe’s descriptions of Adams’s refusal to meet the eye of Jean McConville’s daughter as he apologizes “for what the republican movement did to [her] mother,” an underlying humanity comes through.

The series, by contrast, does not give Adams his due. Omitting the military stalemate and the 1981 hunger strikes means missing the critical context for Adams’s transformation. As a result, he is depicted solely as a liar in pursuit of power. When meeting with McConville’s daughter in episode eight, he assures her that a Sinn Féin investigation into the IRA role in her mother’s disappearance is already underway, and then tells his aide, as they drive away, that they need to start such an investigation. Josh Finan is brilliant as Adams, depicting his evolution from an awkward young man to a senior IRA leader who, when arrested by the British while in bed with his wife, adopts a dead-eyed stare as he denies being in the IRA—or even being Gerry Adams. As the soldiers beat him, the stare and denials only grow stronger. Michael Colgan carries that stare through as the older Adams, who led the peace process to cynically ensure (as he says in episode eight) that the IRA stopped “killing [his] voters.” Adams asks Hughes, after he is released from prison, to trust that Adams is “doing this for [him]” before abandoning Hughes. The only justification the series allows him is the offhand comment to Hughes: “What we accomplished had its limits. How many bombs? And nobody’s listening, nothing’s changed.”

After Hughes dies in episode nine, Adams awkwardly attends the funeral of his former associate, pushing himself forward to become a pallbearer—an act Dolours Price sees solely as a politician’s pursuit of a photo-op. Adams fell out with Hughes and Dolours over the peace process, with both ultimately believing that Adams sold them out by making a peace that kept Northern Ireland in the United Kingdom. Yet, unlike them, Adams recognized that Northern Ireland was stuck in an endless cycle of violence, and he sought a new way out. And Adams’s theory ultimately proved correct: the success of the peace process has been a miracle, and Sinn Féin has indeed had electoral breakthroughs in both the Republic of Ireland (though they slipped in the most recent election) and in Northern Ireland (where, in February 2024, Michelle O’Neill became the first Sinn Féin First Minister).

Yet despite Adams’s work to bring the conflict to a close, even he has never been able to escape the Troubles. Hughes and Price make sure of that: on the tapes they make before their deaths, they state that it was Adams who gave the order for Jean McConville’s murder (Adams denies all involvement in McConville’s murder and was never charged). Indeed, even Keefe’s book—which one reviewer described as an “indictment of Gerry Adams”—helps to guarantee that Adams will never be able to truly move beyond his IRA legacy. Sinn Féin’s electoral victories in recent years only happened after Adams retired in 2018 and handed over the leadership to a pair of women a generation younger than him—women without any ties to the IRA or the “whiff of cordite” Adams still gives off.

This is the double-edged sword of Gerry Adams’s legacy: he ended a war, but only because he waged it. If Adams’s legacy includes the countless victims of the IRA, then the thousands of lives saved by the Good Friday Agreement are his accomplishment too. In episode nine of Say Nothing, Adams is arrested and interrogated about McConville’s murder after the discovery of the Price and Hughes tapes. Three of them sit together in the police station: Gerry Adams, the former bartender and guerrilla leader who is now a respected and powerful politician, and the two detectives, one Catholic and one Protestant. Northern Ireland has changed, with Catholics now holding positions of power in politics and the police, in large part due to Adams—yet that does not spare him. Adams may have broken the cycle of violence, but even he cannot escape it.