Say Nothing Series-Finale Recap: Speak Up

As a historian deeply invested in unraveling the complexities of Northern Ireland’s tumultuous past, I found “Say Nothing” to be a gripping and insightful exploration of the Troubles era. The series skillfully delved into the lives of its principal characters, offering glimpses into their motivations, struggles, and eventual downfalls.

After enduring more than 200 days of a hunger strike and spending eight years behind bars at the Armagh women’s prison in Northern Ireland, which she has now left, Dolours Prices can only wonder, “What was it all for?” During her release hearing, Dolours vows to dedicate her life to nonviolence; she is done with armed struggle. However, Marian echoes her sister’s sentiments in front of the board but makes her intentions explicit when they return home: Like their father, Albert, and their late mother, Chrissie, Marian doesn’t believe in retirement. She appears somewhat disheartened that they didn’t make “the ultimate sacrifice,” as Albert puts it: “Only those who are deceased achieve heroic status.

It appears that Dolours is keen on beginning anew and distancing herself from her past experiences. She develops affection for the actor Stephen Rea, who was featured in the play they attended in London, right before the bombing incident. Dolours finds comfort in the company of theater folks until people begin prying into her past actions and drinking habits. Indeed, upon returning home from Armagh, Dolours starts consuming alcohol heavily, even adding whiskey to her coffee at breakfast. Stephen is kind and supportive, but the shift to civilian life remains rocky, even with the aid of alcohol. “I’ve done things, and I can’t fathom my feelings about them,” she laments. As they reach their 30s, Dolours reflects, “people become respectable,” yet moving past a promiscuous past is very different from adapting to the norms of everyday life after devoting years to militant political activities.

One thing Dolours knows for sure is that she is done being an active member of the IRA. Marian considers going back to smuggling explosives, but she won’t do it without her sister — at least not at first — and neither of them wants to get involved with Gerry Adams’s pivot to politics. When he begins campaigning for a parliament seat with the Irish Republican party Sinn Féin, Brendan Hughes is still in jail. It’s there, watching his friend on the television, that Brendan discovers the tactic Gerry has devised to work around the “optics,” which, by his own admission, are “a wee bit of a hurdle.” When Kitson’s men caught him all those years ago, he insisted they had the wrong guy — he was not Gerry Adams but Joe McGuigan. Now, he insists the people have the wrong idea — he has never been a member of the Irish Republican Army.

In the spring of 1994, following a ten-year period of armed conflict, the Good Friday Agreement was inked as part of a peace accord facilitated by Gerry Adams. This agreement signified the end of the war and brought tranquility back to Northern Ireland. For Dolours and Brendan, however, the mid-1990s were characterized by remorse over their years devoted to the struggle, along with feelings of animosity towards Gerry. Despite finding success, marrying, having children, and even gaining notoriety, Dolours continues to grapple with her past, as the face of Joe Lynskey frequently resurfaces in her thoughts. Even within the private settings of church basements where Alcoholics Anonymous meetings take place, she finds no escape from her history. Once a mandatory rule in IRA’s ethical code, silence is now merely acceptable.

It seems like the church often brushes off congregants’ traumatic experiences as an issue: A choir member at Helen McConville’s church was one of her mother’s kidnappers, and when she tries to discuss this with the priest, he labels her as “obsessive.” Given the church’s past, this response is not unexpected. However, Helen is relentless in her pursuit for answers about what happened to her mother or, at a minimum, where her remains are located. Laura Donnelly delivers an outstanding performance as the older Helen, driven by a resilient, deeply rooted anger. Despite his denials, she is convinced that Gerry held significant power within the Belfast Brigade in 1972 and, consequently, is connected to her mother’s disappearance. The series subtly implies his involvement in a contrasting sequence of moments: In episode four, following Jean’s abduction, Pat calls Dolours with a task. We all understand what that call represents.

Gerry understands that many former paramilitaries view his approach as betrayal. To avoid upsetting his friends who thought he wouldn’t give up, he sends a representative to Belfast to announce the end of the conflict. The man, visibly nervous, reads out: The Good Friday Agreement stipulated that in return for recognizing Sinn Féin as a legitimate political party and disarming IRA weapons, the British would reduce their military presence in Northern Ireland. The IRA’s objective since the Troubles began was to unite Ireland and expel the British entirely; Gerry’s compromise seems out of place for those who dedicated half their lives to that cause. “He let us down,” Brendan mourns to Dolours, his head hanging in sorrow, while Gerry, a prominent figure at the White House, considers the possibility of receiving a Nobel Peace Prize.

Gerry’s new commitment to peace is more than Helen can bear, and she resolves to go public. At first, her brother Michael worries that speaking against the IRA might get them killed, but the families of other disappeared victims are emboldened by Helen’s courage, and soon she becomes something of an ambassador for the group. On television, she addresses Gerry directly and doesn’t relent when he visits her home. She wants him to contend with the force of her trauma, the depth of her experience. But Gerry has become a bona fide politician. He meets Helen’s emotions with coolheaded generalizations: He talks about the fragility of the peace process, his efforts to find out what had happened, and how he “understands” what she’s going through. When he tells his team they need to start an investigation on the disappeared’s bodies as soon as possible, an aide retorts, “A real one?”

In a visit to Dolours’s home, Gerry’s acquaintance Frank inquires about what she knows, and she is taken aback by the cost of peace: her mental well-being. Her personal experiences are being reinterpreted in the public sphere, yet she’s expected to remain silent – a fact emphasized by Frank as he brandishes his gun. However, Gerry seems to suggest that he didn’t issue orders or play a role in the London operation? “I did things for you because I believed they would matter,” Dolours tells Gerry during one of his book signings. “But for what you achieved, I wouldn’t give up a decent breakfast.” Here was the man who shaped her pain and suffering, yet he denies any involvement. Meanwhile, Dolours expresses her anger, while Marian reaffirms that discussions lead nowhere. She returns to armed conflict – the first time without her sister.

“It’s like getting a hundred people to push a big ship out… And then it sails off, leaving the people behind.” While Gerry can clear himself of his wartime actions, individuals such as Brendan, Dolours, and others are left bearing the burden of all the casualties. “All those deaths are our responsibility,” Brendan mourns.

For Brendan, chatting with Mackers offered a respite from his burdens, much like confessing in church but with the added bonus of drinking. It didn’t require much persuasion for Dolours to join the Belfast Project; she was already seeking chances to express the unspoken. She had even dialed Helen, only to hang up immediately. The first corpse discovered by the Independent Commission was Eamon Molloy’s, followed by a dog’s remains where they had hoped to find Jean. Initially disheartening, the excavation offered the McConville siblings, who never fully healed from the childhood separation, a chance to reunite and reminisce. These moments were particularly poignant in the series. They embraced one another, recalling their mother, they joked and waited, just as they did when they were young. Ironically, it was a living dog that unearthed Jean’s remains, buried on the beach. The nappy pin she always wore, blue and distinctive, confirmed it was her.

As I delved into “Say Nothing“, I found myself questioning its categorization as a true-crime book; to my mind, it read more like an engaging historical account, albeit one with crime interwoven. However, as I neared the end, the rationale for this classification became apparent: Patrick Radden Keefe, in typical fashion, strongly implies – supported by evidence and conviction, yet careful not to make accusations without proof – that he knows who was responsible for Jean McConville’s death. Although it had always been understood that the IRA played a role in her disappearance, the identity of the actual killer remained unknown until then.

Dolours never speaks about the McConville case on her Belfast Project tape: She asks Mackers to turn the recorder off when they get to that part of the story. The incentive to speak, for her, was to get at Gerry Adams, as she tells Marian when she goes to visit her in prison. After aiding an operation that killed two British soldiers and one pizza-delivery man, Marian had managed to land herself back in jail. It horrifies Marian to learn about the Belfast Project, even if Dolours is sure that going public is a better way to get back at Gerry than rejoining the armed struggle.

The influence of the tapes becomes noticeable following Brendan’s death due to a heart attack. At his funeral, Dolours grows restless, eager for his testimony to be revealed, despite Makers explaining that it won’t happen right away. However, Dolours is impulsive, and Gerry forcing his way into Brendan’s funeral procession further aggravates her. One drunken night, she leaves a message with a reporter from the Irish News, expressing her desire to discuss Jean McConville. The following day, still hungover but resolute, she confides everything. To verify Dolours’s story, the reporter only needs to compare it with Brendan’s Belfast Project recording.

Marian becomes quite upset upon discovering what her sister has done. She sternly advises Gerry to sober up. It appears that Dolours’s interview isn’t causing as much concern for Gerry as the Belfast Project itself. To the Irish News, Dolours reveals that Jean was suspected of being a British spy. The same neighbor from Divis Flats who witnessed her placing a pillow under a wounded British soldier’s head later recognized Jean at Hastings Street Barracks, identifying IRA members. However, Dolours only thinks she saw Jean there — Kitson was using a technique he’d developed in Kenya, where informants were hidden behind a white sheet with eyeholes, as they identified paramilitaries. The red slippers the neighbor claimed to have seen poking out from the sheet supposedly belonged to Jean, though it’s impossible to confirm this for certain — many women in Belfast might wear red slippers. Unfortunately, Dolours passes away shortly after the interview, but before she does, she experiences a vision of Pat offering her one last task.

Since Brendan’s and Dolours’ tapes remained unclassified, Gerry was arrested and interrogated about his role in the McConville case. However, by this time in history, no one was more adept at denial than Gerry Adams. His defense against the tapes was frustrating yet difficult to refute. The Belfast Project required secrecy and lacked scholarly credentials, and there was no concrete evidence linking him to any wrongdoing. As a result, the tapes were essentially hearsay or, as he described them, “gossip.

The show, based on real individuals, some of whom are still living, uses creative freedom to reorganize events in a manner that makes narrative sense. This implies that one reason behind Marian’s anger towards Dolours’s involvement in the Belfast Project might have stemmed from concerns about being implicated in criminal wrongdoings. Despite their differences in dealing with the past – either reflecting on it or reenacting it through violence – the sisters maintained an unbreakable bond. Their relationship was so strong that nothing could ever weaken it. At Dolours’s funeral, Mackers comforted Marian by asserting that Dolours would never have incriminated her sister in any records.

What Dolours leaves off the record — and what Keefe put together — is that, as we see in the finale’s opening sequence, Marian had been in the car with Dolours when they drove Jean McConville across the border. But then Dolours got a call: The men couldn’t go through with the execution. Dolours went back with her sister and Pat, and they agreed to each shoot once so that the death wouldn’t rest entirely on one person’s conscience. Dolours missed on purpose; Marian shot the lethal bullet. The show ends on a plea: Four out of the 17 people disappeared during the Troubles have yet to be found, including Joe Lynskey, whose memory and friendship haunted Dolours. “You can call me a difficult woman,” Dolours said, “but I couldn’t live with the silence.”

Wee Thoughts

• In “Say Nothing,” I appreciated its swift narrative, but I yearned for an installment delving into Gerry Adams’ political evolution and self-serving actions, particularly his shift against Brendan and the IRA. Additionally, I desired a more in-depth analysis of Dolours’s abandonment of armed struggle following Armagh. Given her readiness to die for the cause, it seemed intriguing to explore further why she renounced violence. Unlike Brendan, whose departure was due to the Good Friday Agreement and Gerry’s political change, Dolours had already begun questioning the effectiveness of violence as early as 1978, a point at which she resigned from the IRA, according to Keefe.

2024-11-15 01:54

Say Nothing Series-Finale Recap: Speak Up

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