Say Nothing Series-Finale Recap: Speak Up

Having survived over 200 days of a hunger strike and eight years of incarceration, a sentence the Prices finished serving at the Armagh women’s prison in Northern Ireland, all Dolours can ask herself is, What was it all for? In their release hearing, Dolours affirms that she will dedicate her life to nonviolence; she is done with the armed struggle. Marian matches her sister’s attitude in front of the board but makes her intentions clear when they get home: Like their father, Albert, and their late mother, Chrissie, Marian doesn’t believe in retirement. She seems almost disappointed that they didn’t commit “the ultimate sacrifice,” as Albert puts it: “Only dead people make the pantheon.”

Dolours seems eager to restart her life and leave the past behind. She falls in love with the actor Stephen Rea, who had starred in the theater production the sisters attended in London the night before the bombing. Dolours is happy to hang with the theater crowd until everyone starts asking intrusive questions about her guilt and her drinking. It’s true that Dolours starts drinking almost immediately after arriving home from Armagh — at breakfast, she spikes her coffee with whiskey. Stephen is sweet and caring, but the transition to civilian life is bumpy, even with the help of alcohol. “I did things, and I don’t even know what I think about them,” she cries. In their 30s, she muses, “people become respectable,” but it’s one thing to settle down with a partner after sleeping around in your 20s and another entirely to relearn the mores of “ordinary” life after having dedicated years to violent political liberation.

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.

After another decade of armed struggle, in the spring of 1994, the Good Friday Agreement was signed through a peace process negotiated by Gerry Adams himself. The agreement effectively ended the war and restored peace to Northern Ireland. For Dolours and Brendan, the mid-1990s are marked by regret about the years spent in the fight with and resentment toward Gerry. Dolours has married, had kids, and become something of a celebrity, but she is still haunted by the past; Joe Lynskey’s face often flashes in her mind. Not even in the confidential circles of church basements, where AA meetings are held, can she find some reprieve from the past. Silence used to be an imperative of the IRA’s code of ethics; now it’s just kosher.

It appears to be a theme for the church to dismiss congregants’ trauma: A soloist at Helen McConville’s church is one of her mother’s kidnappers, and when she tries to talk to the priest about it, he tells her she is being “obsessive,” which is not exactly surprising coming from the organization with history’s worst track record. But Helen is determined to find out what happened to her mother or, at the very least, where her body is. Laura Donnelly is phenomenal as the older Helen, who is moved by a hardened, ancient wrath. No matter how much he might deny it, she knows that Gerry was the Belfast Brigade’s highest authority in 1972 and, therefore, connected to her mother’s disappearance. The show itself suggests his responsibility in a subtle juxtaposition of moments: In episode four, after Jean is abducted, Pat calls Dolours with a job. We all know what that call means.

Gerry knows that for a lot of ex-paramilitaries, his “willingness to negotiate is tantamount to treason.” Perhaps hoping to avoid the disappointment and anger of the friends who until then believed Gerry wouldn’t surrender, he sends a spokesman to Belfast to announce the formal end of the war. The man’s hands tremble as he reads: The Good Friday Agreement determined that in exchange for the treatment of Sinn Féin as a legitimate political party and the decommissioning of IRA weapons, the British would “cut back” on military presence in Northern Ireland. The IRA’s goal, since the beginning of the Troubles, had been to unite Ireland and get rid of the British altogether; Gerry’s concession doesn’t make sense for the people who spent half their lives sacrificing themselves and others for that cause. “He sold us out,” Brendan laments to Dolours, his head hung in defeat, while Gerry, an illustrious guest at the White House, entertains the prospect of 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?”

An associate of Gerry’s named Frank comes by Dolours’s home to ask what she knows, and she becomes incredulous at what she sees as the price of peace: her sanity. Her experiences are being remade in the public eye, and she’s supposed to stay silent — as Frank reminds her by flashing her his gun. Does Gerry really mean to imply that he didn’t give out orders? That he didn’t help plan and execute the London job? “I did things for you because I thought they would mean something,” Dolours says to Gerry at one of his book signings. “But for what you accomplished, I wouldn’t trade a good breakfast.” Here was the man who “architected [her] trauma,” pretending he had nothing to do with it. While Dolours publicizes her rage, Marian recommits to the idea that “talking gets us nowhere.” She goes back to the armed struggle — for the first time without her sister.

Gerry’s public denial of his IRA past, in other words, makes Dolours feel crazy. She finds solace in Brendan, who feels the same anger. “Not one death was worth it,” he tells her when she goes to visit him at Divis Flats. He is angry at Gerry not because the war is over — it’s good that the war is over — but because of the way he has gone about ending it. Later, to Mackers, he will indelibly articulate his disappointment: “It’s like getting a hundred people to push out this big boat … And then it’s sailing off, leaving the people behind.” While Gerry can absolve himself of his wartime actions, Brendan, Dolours, and others like them are left to shoulder the responsibility for all the casualties. “All those deaths are on us,” Brendan laments.

Speaking with Mackers, for Brendan, was a way to relieve some of that burden. “It’s like going to confession,” he says to Dolours, “except you can drink.” It doesn’t take much to convince Dolours to participate in the Belfast Project — she was already searching for opportunities to say the unsayable. She’d even gone so far as calling (and quickly hanging up on) Helen. The first body that the Independent Commission finds is Eamon Molloy’s; then, in the place where they were all hoping to find Jean, they discover a dog’s remains. While frustrating at first, the digging provides an opportunity for the McConville siblings — who were never quite able to mend the separation that was imposed on them as children — to get together and reminisce. These are some of the most moving moments of the show. They put their arms around one another and remember their mother; they banter and wait, like they did when they were kids. Ironically, it’s a living dog who sniffs out Jean’s remains, buried on the beach. They can tell it’s her because her signature blue nappy pin was still secured on her lapel.

When I was reading Say Nothing, I wondered about its reputation as a true-crime book; to me, it read as a riveting historical narrative that happened to involve crime. But as I reached the final pages, the reason why the story was regarded that way became clear: Patrick Radden Keefe suggests — with evidence and conviction but also with characteristic care — he knows who killed Jean McConville. It was always clear that the IRA had been behind her disappearance, but the question of who pulled the trigger was still at large.

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 tapes first begin having an impact after Brendan dies from a heart attack. At his funeral, Dolours is antsy for his testimony to come out, though Mackers explains it’s not an immediate process. But Dolours is impatient, and the sight of Gerry pushing his way into Brendan’s funeral procession only makes things worse. Drunk one night, she leaves a message for a reporter at the Irish News saying she wants to speak about Jean McConville. The next day, hung-over but still determined, she tells everything. To corroborate Dolours’s story, all the reporter has to do is cross-reference it against Brendan’s Belfast Project tape.

Marian is ballistic once she learns what her sister has done. “You need to get sober,” she scolds. Gerry doesn’t seem as worried about Dolours’s interview as he is about the Belfast Project in general. To the Irish News, Dolours discloses that Jean was believed to be a British informant. The same Divis Flats neighbor who saw her put a pillow under a wounded British soldier’s head spotted Jean at Hastings Street Barracks, identifying IRA members. At least she thinks she spotted her — Kitson was then using a method he’d developed in Kenya, according to which he would place informants behind a white sheet with two holes cut out for the eyes as they identified paramilitaries. The red slippers the neighbor saw poking out of the sheet supposedly matched Jean’s own, though, as the reporter points out, it’s impossible to know for sure — any number of women in Belfast might wear red slippers. Dolours dies not long after the interview, but before she does, she has a vision of Pat coming to her with one final job.

With both Brendan’s and Dolours’s tapes unclassified, Gerry gets arrested. Two detectives interrogate him about his involvement in the McConville case, but by this point in history, there is no man or woman more formidable than Gerry Adams at the art of denial. The defense he mounts against the tapes is maddening but hard to argue with because the Belfast Project had to be conducted in secret with no scholarly credentials — and because there is no evidence of his part in anything, the tapes don’t hold up as more than hearsay or, as he puts it, “gossip.” This, even though he was not really in internment when Jean was taken, as he told Helen, even though Brendan and Dolours told the same story on separate occasions without knowing what the other had said. Unable to keep his ego in check, Gerry additionally justifies that he “could not have given” the orders for Jean’s murder because he has “never been a member of the IRA.” It makes you want to pull your hair out.

Although it’s about real people, some of whom are still alive, it’s important to emphasize that the show takes creative license to reconstruct events according to narrative logic. In this case, it suggests that part of the reason why Marian was so upset at Dolours’s participation in the Belfast Project was that she was worried about being implicated in criminal activity. Although they had come to disagree on how to deal with the past — to ruminate on it or relive it by taking up the gun — the sisters could always count on each other. Nothing could shatter their bond. At Dolours’s wake, Mackers reassures Marian that Dolours would never have implicated her sister on the record.

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

• I enjoyed Say Nothing’s fast pace, but I found myself wishing we’d gotten an episode on Gerry Adams and his political development. I wanted to get deeper into the motivations of his selfishness, the license he gave himself to turn on Brendan and the IRA. Similarly, I would have welcomed a deeper examination of Dolours’s renouncement of the armed struggle after Armagh. She had been, after all, ready to die for the cause. Unlike Brendan, whose own departure had to do with the Good Friday Agreement and Gerry’s political turn, Dolours had already started to “reconsider the efficacy of violence” as early as 1978, according to Keefe, the same year she resigned from the IRA.