When You Should Just 'Say Nothing'

The hit Disney TV drama about the Troubles, based on Patrick Radden Keefe's book, has made a series of dangerous assumptions, argues Timothy O'Grady

The hit television series Say Nothing, currently streaming on Disney +, is informed by a sequence of sources that go back to a collection of secret tapes stored in a vault in an American college. They arrive to the television screen by way of Patrick Radden Keefe’s book of the same title.

Radden Keefe, a staff writer at the New Yorker, read an obituary of Dolours Price in the New York Times, which spoke of her bombing of London in 1973 on behalf of the IRA, her hunger strike and her participation in an oral history project nominally run by Boston College. It made him think about the psychological ramifications for individuals and communities of a long involvement in violent conflict, and wonder if there might be an article in it.

The article became book, became television series, with Radden Keefe as executive producer, all focusing on the intersecting lives of Price and her sister Marian, fellow IRA member Brendan Hughes, Sinn Féin Leader Gerry Adams and a widowed mother of ten named Jean McConville, who had been executed by the IRA on the grounds that she was an informer. Her children, who were left to fend for themselves, deny that she was an informer, as does the British state.