The political violence, sectarian animosity, and nationalist struggle that gripped Northern Ireland from the late 1960s to 1998 goes by a soft-sounding euphemism: “the Troubles.” But it’s a fittingly quiet term, given the code of silence practiced by the Irish Republican Army (IRA) and a broader regional silence that has allowed atrocities to remain covered up long after the end of the conflict.
Say Nothing, a recent FX limited series adapted from Patrick Radden Keefe’s book of the same name, reveals just how suffocating this silence can be. The abduction and murder of Jean McConville, a widowed mother of ten accused of spying for British intelligence, bookends the series. For McConville’s children, the trauma of their mother’s disappearance is compounded by the silence of their neighbors that shrouds her fate.
At the center of the narrative are sisters Dolours and Marian Price, who evolve from disciples of civil disobedience to IRA militants, and whose story is interwoven with those of their comrades-in-arms Brendan Hughes and military strategist Gerry Adams. For Dolours, the IRA’s exacting code of silence comes to carry the burden of guilt.
By showing how militants and innocents alike fracture the silence imposed upon them, Keefe, whom I talked with recently, reveals the enduring weight of secrecy and remorse in the aftermath of the Troubles. This interview has been condensed and edited.
Caroline Coffey: How did you enter the world of Say Nothing? What was the launch point?
Patrick Radden Keefe: As a staff writer at The New Yorker, I am always looking for stories. I started wanting to do this kind of work when I was in college. At that time, I began thinking about what it would be like to write for magazines. It took me many years to actually be able to do it, but that was when I started thinking about it.
One of the big mysteries for me was where do people find stories? Where do you find interesting stories that haven’t necessarily been written about, or that have been written about in one way but not another? One place where I sometimes look is the obituary page. You have these brief little stories of people’s lives, and often it’s a little snapshot of a life of somebody you’ve never heard of.
In 2013, I was randomly reading the obituary page of The New York Times, and I read an obituary for Dolours Price, who had died that year. I was immediately intrigued. I had never heard of her. I had thought of the Troubles as a very male story, and so I was interested that there was this woman who had been in the IRA and who’d gone on hunger strike. The big thing that really interested me about her was that in that obituary, it talked about how she had taken part in this oral history project at Boston College later in her life and that she had some misgivings about the things that she did early on. I became interested in the way in which a person can change from when they’re in their early twenties to when they’re in middle age, and how the way in which they’re thinking about something like political violence can change over time.
CC: I feel I got a good education on the Troubles through your narrow focus on the Price sisters and the McConville family. What motivated you to focus specifically on the story of the sisters, the McConville family, and the disappearance of Jean McConville as the entry point for exploring such a fraught period in Irish history?
PRK: It’s a great question. When I am reading, I’m always trying to have a bit of a conversation between the reading part of my brain and the writing part of my brain. I try to be attentive to the things that interest me as a reader, because that often tends to be a good rule of thumb. When I’m writing and I’m drawn to stories about people, I just naturally—and I think this is true for a lot of people—find it easier to become engaged in a story about a different time or place or complicated subject that I have no background in if I feel like I can latch on to some really interesting character or characters. That’s usually the approach that I take. I almost never write stories that are kind of top-down, thirty-thousand-feet, “Let me tell you the whole thing.”
I don’t think of myself as a historian writing history books or political science books. I wanted to focus very tightly on the Price sisters, Brendan Hughes, Gerry Adams, and the McConville family. I felt as though this is a story, almost the way a novel would be about a handful of characters. If you can learn about the Troubles along the way, then great. But it was important for me not to feel as though I needed to be writing some be-all and end-all history of the Troubles. I feel if you are intrigued by Say Nothing, and you find this period of history interesting, there are all kinds of books that I refer to in the end notes that are better, more comprehensive histories of that period, where you can kind of get the soup to nuts history. I’m very stubborn about wanting to just tell the specific stories that I’m telling.
CC: Throughout the television version of your book, we get a sense of the culture of silence that members in the IRA practice. In one of the final episodes of the show, we re-encounter Helen McConville, at an older age, continuing to grapple with the disappearance of her mother. There is this one scene in church where she sees a man who assisted with the abduction of her mother, and then she proceeds to ask the priest of the church if the man has ever confessed to him his complicity. In your research, did you ever find that the Catholic Church helped to contribute to that culture of silence?
PRK: It’s interesting that you focus on that scene, because that never happened. That scene is not in the book. It’s kind of a good example of how, when you translate a four-hundred-page book into a drama nine episodes long, you need to make certain creative choices. Sometimes, what you’re doing is you’re taking five or six different things that happened, and you’re trying to find the deeper dramatic truth in that and create one scene. If you showed everything that happened, it’s going to feel like a documentary. It’s going to be overwhelming. People will be bored.
There are a few things that are happening in that scene, all of which are kind of based on the truth. One thing is that when the McConville children grew up, they would see the abductors of their mother. In the book, I describe a scene where Helen is out at McDonald’s, and she sees one of them. There’s a very chilling scene where Michael McConville gets into the back seat of a taxi, and then he sees in the mirror that the driver is one of the guys who abducted his mother. That would happen, they would see people.
It’s also true that the Church was very indifferent to the suffering of the McConvilles. I found these early records from shortly after the abduction that showed that the Church didn’t want to intervene, they didn’t want to help. They weren’t particularly sympathetic with the family.
It’s an interesting situation where those different things were true, but the writers of the show needed to kind of invent a single scene that could incorporate those truths. But the scene itself is fictional.
I always understood that when you make a series, when you sit down to watch a series, and at the beginning it says “Based on a true story,” I think most people know it’s not going to be a documentary. There’s some degree of dramatic license, so you have scenes like that. It’s an invented scene, but it’s an invented scene that’s drawing on all these things that did happen, and they’re compressing them together into a fictional scene.
CC: Since the outbreak of the Troubles, a culture of silence has reigned in Ireland. What role has this silence played in the ongoing inability to achieve full reconciliation?
PRK: It’s a complicated question. In Northern Ireland, there’s always been a kind of code of silence about this stuff. There’s been a sense that you didn’t want to talk about these events because they were unpleasant, because there was an awkwardness there, because, in peacetime, you need to live really close to your neighbors who may feel very differently than you do. Some of this is probably not so different from the way it is in the United States right now. We live in an ideologically divided society. Take Thanksgiving dinner across America. One way that you deal with division is to make nice and not talk about the things that are dividing you. Some of it is that.
The English love to talk about the Irish as if they have this tribal code of silence, that it’s this very indigenously Irish thing. But of course, the English don’t talk about it either. I have talked about this book a lot in England, and what I hear from young people, people in their twenties and thirties, is they say, “We never learned this stuff in school.” There’s a kind of code of silence in England too about this history, and I would actually say about the broader history of the British Empire. They just don’t call it that.
The last thing I would say is that when the peace process happened in 1998, the whole thing ended in a compromise. In order to get to a deal that everybody could agree on, to get all these different parties to the table—not just the IRA, but the British, the Irish government, and the Unionists—the deal was to take some of the hardest issues and say, “Well, we’re not even going to talk about those.” The deal was totally forward-looking. There was no “Here’s how we deal with the past. Who should be prosecuted? Should there be truce and a reconciliation? Who should get amnesty?” All those kinds of questions were off the table, and so you get this kind of weird peace. It’s peaceful, and that’s a miracle, and we should celebrate it. But there’s another aspect of that peace, which is that you never address all of the stuff before the peace.
CC: How has the reception of the book and the show taken shape in Ireland and England?
PRK: I was very surprised at the reception to the book. It’s not that I thought it would be like a bestseller or anything, but I thought that people would really read the book in Ireland and England because it’s their history, and there was new stuff in it. I thought they’d be really interested. And I thought that nobody in America was going to read the book, because for most people the Troubles, Northern Ireland, it all seems kind of remote.
I was exactly wrong. When the book came out, immediately it got a lot of attention here. In the U.K. and Ireland, for a long time, people just didn’t read the book. They didn’t talk about the book. It wasn’t reviewed anywhere. I think it was just awkward, and on some level, they were like, “Who’s this American coming in and telling us about our history?” Strangely enough, only after the book kind of took off here in the U.S. did people in the U.K. and Ireland slowly, kind of grudgingly, start to read it.
With the series, it’s been very different. I didn’t know how it was going to go over at all, and I was really worried about it. But the reaction has been incredible. And it’s been incredible in England, in Ireland, in Northern Ireland, and in the Irish Republican community. You’ve got politicians talking about it over there. I’ve gotten so many notes from people whose families are represented in the story. I’ve gotten notes from people who were in the IRA. I’ve gotten notes from people whose family members were killed by the IRA.
It’s an interesting lesson in drama and how people who watch a show can find ways to relate to it. That might be harder with nonfiction, but that people come to it with an open mind has been very encouraging.
I’m very stubborn about wanting to just tell the specific stories that I’m telling.
CC: Many Irish people see similarities between the Israel-Hamas conflict and their experience of British occupation and sectarian conflict. In “Where the Bodies are Buried,” for The New Yorker, as you surveyed Belfast after the Troubles and just after “marching season,” you recalled noticing how the city “remains informally designated Catholic or Protestant.” You described how Union Jacks still stood outside Protestant homes, while Catholic areas flew the Irish tricolor alongside Palestinian flags. Ireland has been a vocal critic of Israel throughout its war on Gaza. Was the timing of the series production motivated by the Israel-Hamas conflict at all?
PRK: No, it wasn’t. At the same time the show was released, there were also elections in Ireland in which Sinn Féin, the political party associated with the IRA, was up for election.
I will say that while we were telling a specific story about the IRA in the 1970s in Northern Ireland, there were all kinds of contemporary resonances. For instance, when our writers’ room was writing the script, it was during COVID, and Black Lives Matter was happening. You had protests on the streets of American cities, and you had militarized cops coming out. You had tear gas. All these scenes that felt like they were coming right out of our show were actually happening outside the window in the U.S.
I don’t want to draw any easy analogies. It’s a different situation, with its own history and context. I will tell you though, I heard from a young woman who had watched the show, and she said, “I binged Say Nothing with my mom. After watching the whole series, we had the first productive conversation about Gaza that we’ve had since October 7.”
Even though this is different, if there are ways in which the show can create an opportunity, through looking at a different story, to talk in a way in which we really hear each other about what’s happening in Gaza and Israel-Palestine, I feel really good about that.
CC: There have been many accounts documented and produced on the Troubles. Was there an angle or perspective in your writing that you wanted to penetrate that was different or missing in the other publications and productions?
PRK: When I wrote Say Nothing, I wanted it to be different from all the other books on the Troubles. I had read some of them, and I felt like I wanted to do something different. When we made the series, it was the same way. There have been some great movies made about the Troubles. We wanted to do something that just felt fresh and contemporary. We wanted really young cast members. We didn’t want stars. We didn’t want well-known actors who you would recognize. Heaven forbid, we didn’t want American actors putting on bad Belfast accents.
I think a lot of the stories that have been made about the Troubles often feel very black and white. They feel like you’re looking at this kind of distant history. I think that’s partially because when you do research into that period of time, a lot of what you’re looking at is black-and-white newsreel footage.
The truth is that Belfast is really colorful. It was the seventies. We worked very closely with our production designer and our costume designer. We wanted pops of color. We wanted it to have a very distinctive look and feel. We wanted those early scenes with the young cast to make you feel what it’s like to be a young radical and the excitement of that and the romance of that. But then we have the later scenes that show you the long hangover of all that.
CC: Last question. You mentioned Sinn Féin earlier. I have to ask about Gerry Adams. He is an important part of the show. At the end of every episode, the viewer encounters a black title card that says, “Gerry Adams has always denied being a member of the IRA or participating in any IRA-related violence.” What has his response been to the publication of the book and the release of the show?
PRK: Gerry Adams has said nothing.