Terror of ‘The Troubles’

On a cold winter’s night in December 1972, widow and mother of 10 Jean McConville was disturbed in her bath when a group of armed men knocked on the door of her Belfast estate flat and told her to come with them. Putting on her coat and telling her oldest children to look after their siblings, McConville followed the men out into the night and into the bleak and brutal pages of the knotted, complicated paranoid history of The Troubles, never to be seen again.

Her children would spend the better part of the next two decades trying to find out what had happened to their mother and why she'd been murdered by members of the Provisional IRA, which had ordered her death. The story of McConville would ultimately lead investigators to the door of Sinn Fein leader and popular Republican hero Gerry Adams, who has consistently denied that he was ever a member of the IRA and rejects any implication that he had anything to do with McConville’s death.

The McConville case offered a fatal microcosmic example of the ways in which the broader, intense ideological and political battles of The Troubles wrought havoc and brought tragedy to so many ordinary lives caught in the crossfire of the violence that raged in Belfast from the 1970s to the signing of the Good Friday Agreements in 1999. It caught the attention of award-winning American journalist Patrick Radden Keefe, who used his outsider status to knock on hundreds of doors in Belfast and over six years in an attempt to find answers to why McConville was killed and who was responsible for her death.

The story he told in his 2018 book Say Nothing, was a compelling one of rebellion, violent commitment to a political cause and a complicated history of protest and guerrilla warfare between the IRA, Ulster Union loyalists, the British Army, Catholics and Protestants over decades, with roots stretching back hundreds of years. The consequences seemed to play out all their long shadows on a few street blocks in Belfast and find fatal focus in the arrival of the IRA at Jean McConville’s door.

Writer Joshua Zetumer’s thrilling, dramatically engaging and politically provocative adaptation of Keefe’s book turns the solidly researched and historically wide-ranging source material into a tightly-wound, carefully observed, character-rich drama that uses McConville's murder and her children’s decades long quest for justice as the smaller part of the story. The larger focus is on the fabled anti-British, pro-IRA adventures of sisters Dolours and Marian Price. Raised by staunch, proudly Republican activist parents, the Price sisters began their political lives as believers in non-violent protest in the late 1960s, inspired by the civil rights movement and Martin Luther King Jr, only to become disillusioned and convinced that the path to Irish independence was by means of guns, bombs and attacks on the British army.

Their commitment to the cause made them folk legends and culminated with the 1973 car bombings of several targets in London, which lead to their arrest and saw them embark on a hunger strike that ultimately resulted in their transfer from the all-male Brixton Prison in England to a women’s prison in Ireland, where they served seven years before being released on humanitarian grounds in 1981.

Elder sister Dolours spent much of the remainder of her life struggling with addiction, trying to come to terms with the consequences of her actions and sought to offer assistance to the families of those she'd played a role in helping to kill. The Price sisters were also, like many former committed IRA fighters, furious with the way in which Adams had built his political career on denying his IRA past and abandoning the paramilitary members whose armed struggle had made his ascent possible.

Zetumer’s script weaves deftly between the late 1990s — when Dolours (an intensely excellent Maxine Peake) agrees to tell her story as part of the Belfast Project, a collection of oral histories by former IRA members on condition that they not be released until after their deaths — and the 1970s when young Dolours (a fiery, impish Lola Petticrew) and her sister Marian (Hazel Doupe) became deeply embroiled in the activities of the West Belfast IRA commanded by Gerry Adams (Josh Finan) and led on the ground by the daredevil Brendan Hughes (Anthony Boyle).

The third strand of the tale takes the audience into the McConville household and the fateful events of that December night in 1972 as, over nine episodes, the series works towards offering a version of events that will see the Price sisters, Adams, Hughes and the messy violent history of The Troubles converging with terrible finality. The questions the show asks last far longer than the answers it offers but its reflections on the journey from youthful idealism to later, sober and difficult reflection on violence as a means of struggle, and its costs to the psyches of both the participants and the society in which they fight their battles, are deeply resonant for any society that's experienced the tumult of a similar struggle for freedom.

Keep in mind that, as a disclaimer attached to the end credits of each episode reminds you, Gerry Adams was never a member of the IRA, had nothing to do with its violent actions and was never involved in anything to do with the disappearance and murder of Jean McConville.