FX’S SAY NOTHING, which is now available to stream in full on Hulu, packs decades of ruthless true crime history into its nine episodes. The critically-acclaimed series, based on the 2018 bestselling book of the same name by journalist Patrick Radden Keefe, covers murder and mystery involving Northern Ireland’s The Troubles.
A quick summary of The Troubles—in case you’re not familiar from various movies over the years that depict their events like The Crying Game, Bloody Sunday, and Hunger: They refer to almost three decades of conflict in the region between the late 1960s and 1998’s signing of the Good Friday Agreement that brought the vicious violence to an end. It was a guerilla war between largely Catholic Irish nationalists in the region and Protestant loyalists.
The infamous paramilitary group known as the IRA, representing the Catholic nationalists who sought independence from the British by any means necessary during these years, engaged in car bombings and other attacks aimed at rebelling against British rule. But it also left in its wake a number of civilians who were killed or who simply disappeared without answers. Some of those cases, including the one that is central to Say Nothing, have only been solved in recent years (and even then, many still remain in question and contentious).
Say Nothing tells a gripping—if sometimes hard-to-watch—story about those allegedly involved in one murder, and the larger, drawn-out terror that affected both sides of The Troubles conflict, which still affects sentiments in Ireland to this day. Here’s a breakdown of what you need to know about the real case behind Say Nothing.
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How did The Troubles start?
Well, it’s a long story going back to the original Irish Republican Army (aka the IRA) that fought in the Irish War of Independence from 1919 to 1921 to free itself from the British. That war resulted in the UK-led partition of Ireland into two self-governing countries: Northern Island (largely populated with Catholics who were sympathetic to the fight for independence) and Southern Ireland. (Ireland is still divided, though the two parts are now known as the Republic of Ireland, which is sovereign, and Northern Island, which is ruled by the UK.)
Fast-forward to the late ‘60s: By 1969, the original IRA was largely defunct, as Time reports, and even then mostly advocating for “peaceful resistance through politics.” That caused some chafing from the Catholics in Northern Ireland, and led to the formation of the Provisional IRA (also known as just the IRA, or the “Provos”) in the same year. The new IRA sought to end British rule in Northern Island and reunify the country, but with tactics that were anything but nonviolent. While this IRA often insisted that attacks like car bombings were not aimed at civilians, indeed many civilians did die during The Troubles, and the IRA was designated a terrorist group in the UK and the U.S. by the mid-1970s.
So what is Say Nothing about?
Both the book Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland and the FX show center on a particular case: the 1972 disappearance (later confirmed as a murder) of Jean McConville, a widow and mother of 10 who had been accused of being a traitor, or “tout,” by IRA members.
Doubleday Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland
The 38-year-old McConville was taken from her Belfast home in December 1972 by a group of four women and eight men, according to the book Say Nothing. Some of the abductors were masked, and at least one was armed with a gun. But the widow’s brood recognized them as neighbors at the Divis Flats public housing complex in West Belfast that was populated almost entirely with Catholics and “a stronghold for armed resistance,” Keefe writes in Say Nothing.
These abductors were also reportedly members of the Belfast Brigade, the local chapter of the IRA. McConville’s children have long denied that their mother was an informant for the British; rather, in their words, she was “a Protestant widow in a nationalist Catholic neighborhood at the apex of sectarian tension,” as well as a “victim of bigoted animus.” (The IRA has never conceded that she was not an informant.)
So what happened to Jean McConville? How was her murder solved?
McConville’s kids, left with questions about what exactly happened to her in 1972, only got some answers over three decades later. And those answers came from an unlikely source: a well-known former IRA member named Dolours Price.
Price, who had come from a family with ties to the fight for Irish independence for generations, became one of the very first proper female IRA members in 1971, and proved crucial to the cause. She and her sister carried money and guns across the border to the north and graduated to robbing banks with guns in tow and dressed as nuns (which provides one of the more memorable images in FX’s series). The IRA had ramped up its tactics following Bloody Sunday, the 1972 shooting by British soldiers of 26 unarmed civilians during a protest. In that year alone, nearly 500 people died as a result of the conflict, and about half were civilians.
Price, in her testimony later provided to the Belfast Project oral history project created by Boston College in 2001, said that Gerry Adams, a “key strategist” for the Belfast Brigade in the ‘70s, recruited her for the “Unknowns,” an alleged black-ops squad within the IRA known to be responsible for some of the more extreme violence during these years. Here it needs to be said that Adams, who would become a politician in the ‘80s and even helped usher in peace in Northern Island, has adamantly denied having participated in any IRA-related violence, even saying in a statement through his lawyers to the Irish Times on November 13 that he “had no involvement in the killing or burial of any of those secretly buried by the IRA.”
Take that for what it’s worth, but the testimonies of Price and others offer a strikingly different version of events. Price, who died in 2013 at the age of 61, came forward with information to help find the remains of those who had disappeared and was given immunity as part of the 1998 Good Friday agreement. This included information pertaining to McConville. Price claimed that she had driven McConville to her certain death as part of her work for the Unknowns. McConville’s body was finally recovered in Ireland’s Shelling Hill Beach on August 27, 2003, and identified by her kids based on the blue safety pin on her coat that she had always fastened to her clothes.
Others came forward with allegations about what had happened to McConville, including Brendan Hughes, who had served as a commanding officer for the IRA. In his testimony, Hughes alleged that Adams was the leader of the Unknowns, a group of “head hunters.” He further claimed that McConville had admitted to being an informant for the British, and that Adams had ordered her murder. “There was only one man who gave the order for that woman to be executed,” Hughes said.
What’s more, in 2019, former Belfast Brigade leader Ivor Bell was tried for his alleged role in McConville’s long-ago murder. He claimed, through the Belfast Project, that he, Adams, and Unknowns member Pat McClure decided to kill McConville. But the judge ruled that the interviews with Bell were inadmissible because of “clear bias” against Adams (who, again, has denied these claims outright), and Bell was ultimately found not guilty.
What actually happened? Well, you can watch Say Nothing to get a fictionalized treatment of what may have occurred. But what we do know for certain is that McConville was murdered, even if the perpetrators are in doubt. We also know, per Time, that the police ombudsman for Northern Ireland never found any evidence showing that McConville was an informant. Her son, Michael, is still waiting for an apology.
“We as a family want an apology for all the accusations of our mother of having been an informer,” he told the Irish Times in 2022. “I’ll look for that apology until the day I die.”
