Analysis: From Say Nothing to Kneecap and The Wolfe Tones, a huge range of current culture is making the memory of The Troubles ever more present
The Belfast Good Friday Agreement was signed more than a quarter of a century ago, drawing a line under decades of killing and conflict during the Troubles over the previous three decades. Now a generation later, from music to film, theatre, television, art, and literature, the lingering presence and memory of The Troubles is ever more present.
But how are the events of the past being depicted in the present? Based on the best-selling 2018 book by Patrick Radden Keefe, the TV series Say Nothing is a dramatisation of the book's focus on the lives of Dolours and Marian Price, Brendan Hughes, Gerry Adams and their rise within the ranks of the IRA on the city streets and backrooms of Belfast.
The book also had an intriguing tagline worthy of any thriller novel: 'A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland'. Both elements, murder and memory, underpin the remaining issues and lack of accountability for many families and communities affected by the Troubles still today. Arriving at or receiving truth is also still a far-off point for much of the actions and actors from those times, so much so that the end of every episode carries a disclaimer that Adams was never a member of the IRA or was involved in any of the events depicted.
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From RTÉ Radio 1's Brendan O'Connor Show in 2022, Patrick Radden Keefe discusses his book Say Nothing
Both book and series weave back and forward through the telling and re-telling of memory and oral history by Republican paramilitaries, based on the real events of the Boston College Project. This was a post-Good Friday Agreement oral history archive which saw leading Republican and Loyalist paramilitaries recount their experiences, memories, and confessions to an archive of recordings that was to remain sealed and secret until after they died.
While interviewer and convicted IRA murderer Anthony McIntyre (played by Seamus O'Hara), sets up a microphone to record Dolours Price (played by Maxine Peake), ‘Mackers’ tells her "Don’t be nervous. The stuff I’m going to be asking you about is ancient history". "Not to them", she pointedly replies. The ‘them’ she refers to – victims, the police, other paramilitaries she implicates, is left unsaid.
With excellent performances from the cast led by Lola Petticrew, Hazel Doupe, Anthony Boyle and Josh Finan, Say Nothing follows the gung-ho guerrilla action of the Belfast IRA, towards the formation of The Unknowns squad, and the abduction and killing of ‘The Disappeared’, including Jean McConville (played by Judith Roddy) and Joe Lynskey (Adam Best), among others.
From FX Networks, the official trailer for Say Nothing
For all the stylish production, the depiction of the harrowing realities of the human toll of 1970s Belfast is lost in the historical maelstrom on screen. Early in the series, Brendan Hughes (played by Anthony Boyle) is ambushed and gun shots fire down the street past a child and towards Hughes. Amidst the wild danger, the child barely looks up from his comic, as if the action surrounding him is less unusual than what he is reading. It’s a fitting image for the brutal absurdity of much of the action in Say Nothing.
Rory Kinnear plays General Frank Kitson, remembered for fighting colonial wars and counter-insurgency in Africa, including the Mau Mau in Kenya (a conflict where the deliberate destruction of archives by the British government has silenced the evidence of those atrocities). Kitson rides into Belfast in a cliched ‘no-nonsense sheriff’ style character who decries the standards of intelligence gathering on the Provisional IRA by all but saying ‘things are gonna change ‘round ‘ere’.
What results is an on-screen ‘whodunnit’. A visual page-turner that makes for gripping viewing until we switch off and remember that in reality generations of trauma sits unresolved within families and communities who have themselves been met with silence when seeking answers from police investigations, or from paramilitaries responsible for their loved-one’s disappearance and death.
From CNN, Say Nothing author Patrick Radden Keefe talks to Christiane Amanpour about the Gerry Adams disclaimer at the end of each episode
In a scene in a Belfast Catholic Church, the priest played by Lalor Roddy talks with Helen McConville, (played by Emily Healy) who believes a local man and member of the church choir was involved in the abduction and murder of her mother. The priest says to her: "No one is keeping anything from you. No one knows the answers."
The reality of this situation tragically still plays true. No one does know, or at least is admitting to, the answers. While the body of Jean McConville was eventually recovered in 2003, it was by accident. Storm damage revealed her final resting place at a Co. Louth beach, rather than by admission by those who murdered her. No one has yet been charged with her murder. Speaking about the show’s depiction of his mother, Michael McConville stated "here is another telling of it that I and my family have to endure."
The situation the Boston College project presented was that senior IRA operatives were now incriminating themselves after decades of silence. Rather than saying nothing, they were saying everything. There are limits to what archives and archiving can achieve in such cases, by recording traumatic recent pasts that are very much unresolved in the present, and in crossing even thinner lines between historical information and criminal evidence.
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From RTÉ News at One in 2019, Jean McConville's Michael on his upset at plans for TV drama series Say Nothing
However, Say Nothing is not the only depiction of the Troubles currently on screens and stages. The recent revival of The Wolfe Tones amongst a largely Gen Z audience could scarcely have been predicted, when aided by scenes of the Irish women's football team celebrating a win by singing Celtic Symphony. On Boys In the Better Land from their 2019 debut album Dogrel, Fontaines DC speak of the idle anti-British sentiment which lead-singer Grian Chatten encountered from a Dublin taxi-driver, the sort who, as the song describes "spits out ‘Brits Out’/only smokes Carrolls".
Belfast rap trio Kneecap have drawn criticism from official and political entities owing to their political lyrics, Republican attire and use of Troubles-era imagery and symbols. A poster for the group’s 2020 Farewell to the Union UK tour drew particular ire from Conservative and Loyalist political circles. It depicted Boris Johnson and Arlene Foster tied to a rocket that was blasting off from a base of burning timber pallets while the caricatures of the band members held up a Molotov cocktail.
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From RTÉ Radio 1's Today with Claire Byrne, RTÉ Northern Correspondent Conor Macauley reports on Kneecap's court case win over UK government funding ban
Current Conservative Party leader and then Secretary of State for the Department for Business and Trade Kemi Badenoch objected to the grant of £14,250 awarded to Kneecap on the grounds that the group were anti the United Kingdom. Kneecap launched a legal objection on grounds of discrimination owing to their political beliefs. The UK government conceded that the decision to block the funding was 'unlawful' and didn't contest the case.
On stage, in Cyprus Avenue by David Ireland, Stephen Rea played a Loyalist man who believes his infant grandchild has been possessed by Gerry Adams, complete with trademark beard and glasses. Jez Butterworth's The Ferryman explored the residual memory of place and violence as the Carney family in Co. Armagh prepare for a harvest while the hunger strikes in the Maze Prison unfolds and bodies are recovered from bogs. The violence of these plays is both physical and emotional.
From RTÉ Radio 1's Arena, David Ireland talks about his play Cyprus Avenue
Baltimore, a recent film of the life of British heiress turned-IRA member Rose Dugdale, starred Imogen Poots and Tom Vaughan-Lawlor. The pacey thriller again remains a close historical re-telling, but is guilty of cliched 'right on' speeches and Marxist soundbites in the ‘sexy ‘70s’ that frames paramilitary activity as being about excitement as anything else.
Derry Girls, written by Lisa McGee, focused on the innocence and every-day normality of a group of teenage girls and their families rather than sensationalised violence. It employed a nuanced and empathetic form of memory that did still have shades of nostalgia for youth and teenage days of the 1990s, with a soundtrack from The Cranberries to the Spice Girls, but focused on the future not the past and on the hope for growing up in peace.
Trailer for series 3 of Derry Girls
The greatest barrier to memory and truth may lie in the Northern Ireland Troubles (Legacy and Reconciliation) Act 2023, which has shut down all open and pending criminal investigations into Troubles era killings and created a new legacy body known as the Independent Commission for Reconciliation and Information Recovery (ICRIR). This has been roundly rejected by advocacy and community groups, victim’s families and political parties. The range of efforts to negotiate the unresolved memory and trauma of the Troubles in contemporary culture and politics continues to be a complex and emotive subject, and one unlikely to go away anytime soon.
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The views expressed here are those of the author and do not represent or reflect the views of RTÉ
