#24: Say Nothings

a book and a series

Michael Colgan portraying the older Gerry Adams in Say Nothing

The name ‘Gerry Adams’ appears 27 times in a search of my WhatsApp messages, with 21 of those occurrences being from this year. A sample:

10th April 2020 [Friend 1]: who knew Gerry Adams was a hun?

10th April 2020 [Friend 2]: gerry adams is so fiat 500! x

18th February 2024 [me]: Sat on this bus laughing as Gerry Adams claims Sinn Fein was getting its money from cake sales and raffles

Rather than the proceeds of armed struggle

He's actually too funny and too good at this it's incredible he was round the table in '97

29th February 2024 [me]: ever since finishing that book I keep looking at Gerry Adams the same way Keisha from the Sugababes did meeting Prince Charles. "I don't trust you as far as I can throw ya"

19th November 2024 [me]: But yeah, Gerry Adams really played a blinder and I kind of can't believe it

He's literally just out here tweeting about stone island giveaways and his teddy bear

20th November 2024 [me]: Not to go back to Gerry Adams but honestly, it is incredible they can make that kind of work and just stick on a 'he denies it' statement at the end of each episode because he knows he did it*, we knows he did it, but he's not going to give up his pretence until his dying day

26th November 2024 [Friend 1]: *posts a twitter link to a news story about Pornhub planning to avoid Ofcom’s age verification checks by saying it does not regard itself as a pornography provider*

it’s giving Gerry Adams

Patrick Radden Keefe’s book, Say Nothing, was not my first encounter with The Troubles as a subject of inquiry. Across the two years of my GCSE History, I was taught by a Protestant woman from Dublin and we covered both the Suffragettes and The Troubles for our coursework. One of the girls in my class had moved to London from Belfast right before Year 9 and, as we learnt about Orange marches, gerrymandering and Bloody Sunday, she would sometimes chip in with stories about how her parents would get asked whether they were a Protestant Hindu or a Catholic Hindu when it came to selecting a school for their children. There was a small box in our textbook about The Old Firm, but sectarianism felt far away.

It felt far away, despite knowing it was the reason for years during my childhood, there were no bins on the underground. Despite remembering murals with men in balaclavas holding guns featuring on the news around the time of the Good Friday Agreement. But some knowledge lingered: one of the lines in both versions of Baby Reindeer that stuck out to me was Martha’s bitterly calling Richard Gadd a ‘Fenian.’

There’s a levity in the messages above that partially misrepresents both Radden Keefe’s book and the FX series, currently streaming on Disney+, which I get for free with my bank account. First of all, while he is obviously a dominant figure in The Troubles, it is not just about Gerry Adams. While the inciting incident of Say Nothing was the disappearance of Jean McConville, it is the Price sisters, Dolours and Mary, who are the central emotional heart of the show in particular.

We didn’t get into the hunger strikes all that much in my history class, which is interesting, particularly given the Prices imprisonment in a male facility in London for their involvement in the 1973 bombing of the Old Bailey. Playwright Clare Barron pens the episode that focuses on Mary and Dolours’ hunger strike and subsequent force-feeding, which puts in mind the similar actions when women fighting for suffrage were given custodial sentences. Bobby Sands and other male prisoners risked, and gave up their life for the cause, but the image of young women being held down to swallow via a literal apparatus of the state is a deeply troubling one, that works well on screen. (I have still yet to see Steve McQueen’s Hunger, for which I only have myself to blame.) Earlier on this month, I was slightly dismissive of the way I felt the stage adaptation of The Years collapsed women’s bodies with their political voice, but it’s not because I think the two things are entirely separate. Rather, it’s because I think the violence, repulsion and dismissive attitude society still has with regards to us, even after all our improvements (your body is my choice — a new and awful taunt) has to be looked dead in the eye.

The show, as with the book, is deeply layered. Obviously some things did not make it into the nine episodes. One of the car bombers from 1973 managed to evade arrest and has never been identified, while the twitchy redhead in the series got acquitted and witness protection in exchange for her evidence. There is nothing on Stakeknife, the superinformant whose presence in the book and the fears of tout infiltration put in mind both the Spiderman meme of multiple versions of the same superhero pointing at one another in accusation and suspicion, but also the ‘H’ storyline in Line of Duty that dominated the later series of the crime drama. BBC Sounds just released a series on it though, which I have been recommended. In addition, and I do think this could have been incorporated into the scripts, we never hear the word ‘provo’. The difference in approach between the ‘stickies’ and the upstart Provisionals paints a picture of the youthful early abandon a lot of these disaffected kids were dealing with, alongside centuries of British rule.

Rory Kinnear is perfectly cast as an officer of Empire, and portrays a shrewd general, Frank Kitson, whose strategy in suppressing the Mau Mau uprising saw him transferred to Northern Ireland. I don’t think it’s possible, or desirable, for the history curriculum of any imperial nation to provide a complete rundown on its global activities — France, Spain, Japan, Britain etc. However, I do think the destruction of records of what the British got up to in Kenya during this period informs the push for oral histories that we see now, and formed the basis of Radden Keefe’s entry to McConville, the Prices and The Troubles more broadly. What remains of those activities, I should say, is deeply troubling. Kitson died on 2nd January of this year, aged 97, in his home. Part of the difficulty the Belfast Project ran into was how early some of the participants ended up dying. Brendan Hughes, who led the 1980 hunger strike died 59; Dolours Price was 62 when she died.

Lucy Mangan’s review of the series was muted, not because of the quality of the production, but because of what she described as ‘troubling aspects’:

[Dolours Price’s account of being in The Unknowns, the group tasked with ‘dealing with’ suspected touts] a terrible story – many terrible stories – of a terrible time that is barely over. And it is a beautifully acted interrogation of the power of silence, the loyalty it proves and the burden it brings. However, it feels overly sympathetic to its main characters – the sisters, Hughes and Adams.

The series darkens as it progresses, but the opening episodes – during which, for example, the girls’ induction into the IRA is presented as a feminist triumph – do not focus sharply enough on the suffering inflicted by the central characters. Bar a few flashes of conscience from Dolours towards the end of her life, there is no reckoning with what they have done. And so, as the number of deaths and orphans created by their actions mounts, Say Nothing comes to feel as though it has left too much unsaid.

I read the events quite differently. That the early episodes capture the beginners’ luck the girls in particular had, dressing up as nuns to commit an armed robbery. And also that Dolours and her sister Marian, who is taking legal action with respect to her portrayal in the series, belonged to an active Republican family. Both their parents had gone to prison, and they lived with and looked after their aunt, who had lost her sight and hands while handling explosives. Neither Mangan nor I know what we would do if we had grown up under occupation, much less in a paramilitary family; one of the great sadnesses of a political situation like it is that generates more violence and horror. Neighbour against neighbour. Kids getting used to shuffle ammo and growing accustomed to police detention. Rage. Resentment. In both versions of Say Nothing, it is clear that Dolours Price and Brendan Hughes have such resentment for the peace process because they knew what devastating impacts their actions had caused, including to their own community. For all of that to have happened and there not to be a United Ireland and a decidedly rocky Northern Ireland Assembly, with multiple years-long suspensions since 1998…one might feel both remorseful and embarrassed at how things turned out.

But I also am not so interested in critique against work because it ‘should not exist’ rather than because it wasn’t particularly effective. Take The Apprentice, for instance, this year’s film starring Sebastian Stan and Jeremy Strong as Donald Trump and Roy Cohn, respectively. Some critics didn’t think the film was appropriate in this moment. I appreciate that this was an election year, but the New York of the 1970s and 80s is an interesting topic of exploration, and so too is Roy Cohn. The film, rather abruptly and crassly, depicts Trump raping his first wife, Ivana; it is not an overall sympathetic portrayal. But a movie not that many people saw neither won people over nor changed minds in any material sense. I guess for Mangan, the danger is that this would soften the IRA’s crimes to a new audience. I think that, in a British context at least, younger people seem broadly less aggrieved by the IRA’s actions than older generations. Partly as a result of not living through the attacks on British soil, but also, I suspect, in the same way that public opinion has shifted more in favour of the Palestinian cause of late. It’s both a demographic and attitudinal shift, some of which, I will grant, is down to cultural portrayal. Put simply, the prods don’t have their version of Derry Girls now, do they.

How to wrap this up? I have a mince pie bun to collect and get in line for which puts a time limit on my meanderings. The reason I wanted to end this round of Critmas on this note, and on these works in particular, is because they are expansive and good and knotty. Knotty as in the morally complex way we exist, rather than as the platitude ‘radical empathy’ has become. Radden Keefe is a skilled writer — I recently bought the physical book of Say Nothing as I’m sure I will want to return to it in non-audio format. It’s not the definitive text on The Troubles, and I don’t think it was intending to be. In my case, it’s reminded me I do have to watch Once Upon A Time in Belfast on BBC iPlayer, as well as listen to this new series on Stakeknife. It’s been a big year for Northern Ireland on screen, given the rightful success of Kneecap, which depicts the establishment and rise of the musical group of the same name who hail from West Belfast. Both works show a nation in the shadow of peace process that is in many ways is astounding, with people living alongside those who abducted and killed their family members, but also insufficient. And of course, both of them are funny, alongside everything else, because that’s as much a part of the fabric as the tragedy: but are you a Protestant Hindu or a Catholic Hindu?

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Thank you for reading! And commenting and sharing. I hope you have a good end of your year. If you are looking for some food prep company, Samin Nosrat and Hrishikesh Hirway have returned for an episode of Home Cooking; it’s nice to hear Nosrat’s laugh and Hirway’s dad puns as they answer listener questions on culinary conundrums.

In the new year, the last episode of FT’s Life and Arts podcast will air on 17th January. Give it a listen as I suspect it’ll be bumper and good.

À bientôt!

Salome

*Gerry Adams has always denied involvement of participation in the Provisional IRA, and in the disappearance of Jean McConville. I have no evidence or special insight into his interior workings or what his sincere beliefs are on the matter. I present these excerpts of conversations as evidence only of the fact I have been a dog with a bone on the topic of Say Nothing all year.