Breaking Northern Ireland’s Omerta/ Sunday times

It seems extraordinary that in 1988 Margaret Thatcher’s government banned Gerry Adams’s voice from the airwaves, forcing broadcasters to use an actor instead. It is even more extraordinary, perhaps, that in the subsequent three decades the former Sinn Fein leader has never been portrayed by an actor in a central role in a big film or TV series.

That is about to change. This week Disney+ launches a nine-part dramatisation of Say Nothing, Patrick Radden Keefe’s award-winning bestseller about the Troubles, with an actor from the Wirral, Josh Finan, playing Adams. And at a time when the 76-year-old Irish republican is still seeking to soften his and his party’s image, it is not a portrayal he will welcome.

The series — and the book — explicitly identifies Adams as the cold, pitiless Belfast commander of the Provisional IRA who ordered the execution of alleged British informants during the 1970s and 1980s and approved the London bombings of 1973. The ritual disclaimers at the end of each episode (“Gerry Adams has always denied being a member of the IRA or participating in any IRA-related violence”) are, in Keefe’s view, “laughable”.

Keefe wants to demolish the caricature of Adams — that he’s either Nelson Mandela and should get the Nobel prize, or the Antichrist, a fire-breathing, silver-tongued terrorist — and capture the messy truth. “He’s somewhere in between. He’s both; he’s neither. Part of what’s so interesting about him is that he’s hard to relate to, and clearly betrays his friends and lies. Yet politically Adams saw around the corner in a way that others could not.”

Adams refused to talk to Keefe, but the American was not easily deterred. He is one of his country’s leading investigative journalists. Writing for The New Yorkermagazine, he has exposed conmen, drug barons, people traffickers and, most memorably, the Sackler family, who built a fortune selling opioids and became the subject of his book Empire of Pain and last year’s harrowing Netflix series Painkiller.

Keefe regards evasion as provocation. “I’m counter-suggestible in a way a child would be. If you tell me you have a secret, I want to know what it is,” he tells me from his suburban New York home (he won’t say exactly where he lives because he has antagonised too many dangerous people).

Keefe grew up in an Irish-American family in Boston, Massachusetts. He studied at the University of Cambridge and the London School of Economics in the heady days after the 1998 Good Friday agreement (GFA). But he never considered focusing his formidable investigative powers on Northern Ireland until he read an obituary of Dolours Price in The New York Timesin 2013.

Price’s story was dramatic. She and her sister, Marian, were raised in a militant republican family in west Belfast. They championed peaceful protest until they were beaten by loyalist thugs on a civil rights march, joined the IRA, robbed banks, snatched a wounded colleague from his heavily guarded hospital bed, drove alleged informants to their executions and carried the war to Britain by bombing the Old Bailey in 1973.

The sisters then staged a 203-day hunger strike in Brixton prison, forcing Thatcher’s government to repatriate them. Released on humanitarian grounds, Price married the actor Stephen Rea (who, coincidentally, was regularly hired to voice Gerry Adams’s words on the news), but increasingly suffered from depression, drug and alcohol abuse and qualms about her past. Appalled by the GFA, a compromise that seemed to undercut the moral justification for her violence, she rounded on Adams, publicly accusing him of ordering the bombings and executions that she helped to carry out.

There was, moreover, a compelling story to be told of a second woman caught up in the very male world of the Troubles. One of those Price helped to execute was Jean McConville, a Protestant widow with ten children who lived in west Belfast’s fiercely republican Divis Flats and made the mistake of comforting a wounded British soldier on the balcony outside her door in 1972.

Soon afterwards she was seized by hooded thugs. Price was ordered to drive her across the border to be killed. Keefe discovered that McConville’s designated executioners had backed out, so the Price sisters killed her themselves, with Marian firing the fatal shot on a remote beach in Co Louth.

Among all the horrors of the Troubles, the stories of the so-called Disappeared are arguably the most harrowing. Sixteen people were abducted and murdered by republican paramilitaries over accusations ranging from informing to theft. For decades their families lived in purgatory, not knowing what had happened to them, unable to grieve, ask questions, speak out or go to the police. Worse, they would see their loved ones’ abductors on the streets, in shops or at Mass, but could say nothing.

McConville’s children were no exception. Days after her abduction a stranger handed them her three rings and purse. They were treated as outcasts and left to fend for themselves. Three decades passed before a walker found McConville’s remains protruding from the beach, her skull pierced by a single bullet.

Keefe spent four years researching the two women’s stories and wove them together in Say Nothing. He took the title from Seamus Heaney’s poem about the Troubles, Whatever You Say Say Nothing, and it refers specifically to the omerta that still surrounds McConville’s killing. “It may seem strange that events from nearly half a century ago could still provoke such fear and anguish,” he says. But “in Belfast history is still alive and dangerous”.

The title also refers to what he calls the “code of silence” that still shrouds so many of the terrible events of the Troubles.

Keefe calls the GFA a “miracle”, but notes that it provided for no truth and reconciliation process, no reckoning, no accountability for the crimes committed. It instead created a “cold peace” that suits the main players — republicans, loyalists and the British — because all have atrocities to hide.

For decades, for example, the British army and successive governments sought to conceal the truth about Bloody Sunday. One of the last acts of the outgoing Conservative government this year was to pass a “legacy bill” that effectively protects British soldiers from prosecution for Troubles-related offences but denies victims any prospect of justice.

When Keefe sought to persuade Adams to talk to him about the McConville case, he made the mistake of promising Sinn Fein that “no one will work harder than I will (to) get to the bottom of this”. That, he now realises, was exactly “what they didn’t want to hear”.

Throughout Northern Ireland there is a “reflex to stifle any kind of discussion about that period of time”, he says. The result is that 26 years after the GFA, the province remains deeply divided and traumatised by what he calls “the sulphurous intrigue of the past”.

Keefe hopes the TV drama will start to change that by seeking to explain, not vilify. “I don’t think it’s a story that’s easily reducible to straightforward heroes and villains,” he says. “I’ve written about some awful people. My job is to try and understand them and their motivations. I don’t think most people are born evil. I don’t think there’s much use in me slamming my fist on the lectern and saying, ‘Look at these evil maniacs!’”

Thus the Price sisters (played by Lola Petticrew and Hazel Doupe) are portrayed as bold, bright and beautiful — glamorous even. Their eagerness to join the IRA, “drunk on their own conviction”, is fully explained. Watching them on hunger strike in Brixton, you find yourself rooting for them, only to be reminded that they had just maimed and injured 200 innocent civilians. Then Dolours, disgusted by the GFA, recants. “All my life I thought that joining the IRA was the noblest thing a person could do . . . I think people should know it’s all lies,” she says.

Thus Brendan Hughes, the daring, charismatic young commander of the IRA’s infamous D Company in west Belfast, is also treated empathetically. He frequently runs rings around the British Army, wiretaps its headquarters and leads a hunger strike in the Maze before he too feels betrayed by the “Got F*** All” agreement and denounces Adams.

“You’re right there with him and caught up in the drama of the moment, then you turn the page and he plants 18 bombs in Belfast [“Bloody Friday”, on July 21, 1972] and rescue workers are scraping entrails off the sidewalk and it’s like your stomach falls,” Keefe says.

And thus Adams is accused of heinous crimes, but also becomes the person who — unlike Price and Hughes — “saw round corners” and realised there could be no military solution to the conflict, and negotiated peace. “I personally commend him for that,” Keefe stresses. “I would somewhat resist the idea that Adams is in any straightforward way the villain of the book.”

Keefe accepts that striking a balance between explaining and excusing is “exceptionally difficult”, and fully expects critics to say the series’ nuanced portrayal of convicted terrorists is outrageous.

But he insists he did not simply sell his book to the highest Hollywood bidder; instead he entrusted it to two producers, Brad Simpson and Nina Jacobson, who had impressed him with their sensitive handling of race and violence in another TV series, The People v OJ Simpson.

Striking a balance between informing and entertaining is also hard. McConville’s children were dismayed when they learnt the book was being dramatised. “The thought that what happened to our mother is to be used for entertainment is sickening,” Michael McConville said.

Keefe sees it differently. “Narrative and drama is a wonderful Trojan horse in which you can impart all kinds of history and politics and complexity if you’re attuned to the fact that you need to tell a compelling story,” he says. He was a “voice in the room” in the making of this series, and believes the result is “really commendable”.

He considers himself an objective outsider when it comes to the Troubles. He also believes the moment is right for a more balanced look at that period. “Enough time has passed that there’s an opportunity for a reconsideration of this history and a frank conversation about what happened that doesn’t either ignore the tragedy or ambiguity or kind of flatten it again in partisan terms.”

That is a bold assertion in a province where the past remains so toxic and pervasive, and one that is about to be severely tested.