Violence or Non-Violence?

“Say Nothing” dramatizes the period in Irish history generally known as “the Troubles” (from the late 1960s to 1998). The series is based on the U.S.’s Patrick Radden Keefe’s 2019 book Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland. Judging from the parts of the book I’ve read, the series is pretty faithful to it.

The TV adaption (each episode in the 40-49 minute range) revolves around three loci: Dolours Price and her family, especially her younger sister, Mariane; Jean McConville and her many children; and Gerry Adams, a leader among the IRA members in Belfast.

But before dealing with those three loci, a little background is necessary. The island of Ireland was under British control for many centuries before Irish nationalism and World War I helped give birth to a 1919-21 rebellion that led to the recognition of Ireland as a self-governing dominion comprising most of the island. Excluded, however, was the northern part (called Ulster), where Protestants were the majority and Belfast was the capital. It is in that northern city that most of the series’s actions occur.

Regarding the centuries of British rule, many of the Irish had bitter memories, especially about a 1846-1851 famine, which caused the death of approximately 1 million people (about 12 percent of the pre-famine population) and the emigration (often to the USA) of about twice that number (from 1845 to 1855). As one source noted, “Ship after ship sailed down the river Shannon laden with rich food, carrying it from starving Ireland to well-fed England, which had greater purchasing power.” The British government refused to allow Irish peasants to feed themselves with food they had grown, partly because it was the private property of absentee English landlords.

Following the 1921 settlement, an Irish Civil War ensued and lasted until 1923. It occurred because the Irish Republican Army (IRA) and other Irish nationalists were dissatisfied with only a self-governing treaty and one that only allotted part of the island to their self-rule.

From 1923 until the 1960s, the IRA and other Irish nationalists engaged in sporadic attacks on continuing British rule in Ulster. In “Say Nothing,” both the book and series, we learn (as the book details) that “when Dolours [Price] was little, she would sit on [her dad] Albert’s lap and he would tell her stories about joining the Irish Republican Army when he was still a boy, in the 1930s, and about how he had gone off to England as a teenager to carry out a bombing raid.” Episode 1 of the TV series reveals that for his actions, her “father had spent eight years in prison.” (Series quotes are taken from the filmscripts, links to which are available here.)

At first, however, as both versions of the story reveal, Dolours had believed in non-violent tactics. In the series’ Episode 1, she says to her dad, “What does violence get you? Uh, you...You charge the police. They attack with batons. Everybody goes home with bruises and nothing changes.” She also refers to Gandhi’s Salt March (1930) and Martin Luther King’s protests in Alabama. After her aunt, points out both leaders were assassinated, her dad insists “the armed struggle, that's the way.”

But after a non-violent march to the city of Derry in 1969 (the year after MLK’s assassination), in which both Dolours and sister Mariane are injured by Protestant-thrown rocks, Dolours seems to change her mind about violent tactics. As the book describes it, after “word of the clash in Derry reached Belfast, the riot spread like an airborne virus. Gangs of Protestant youths tore through Catholic neighborhoods, breaking windows and torching homes. Catholics fought back, throwing stones and bottles and Molotov cocktails.” (See here for more on Belfast in 1969.)

In 1971, at about age 21, Dolours and the younger Mariane join the IRA--actions that under the British could earn them prison sentences. Although up until this point, women had been assigned secondary roles, Dolours insists on more important tasks. Many of her early assignments, sometimes shared with her sister Mariane, was arms and bomb-materials smuggling into Ulster from the by now fully-independent Republic of Ireland.

Accompanied by Mariane, Dolours also sometimes drove from Ulster to its border with the Republic of Ireland in order to turn over “touts” (informants), or at least suspected ones, to Irishmen tasked with killing them. One such suspected tout was Jean McConville, and the first and last episodes of the series deal with her “delivery” by the sisters. Only in the last segment do we learn the full story of their exact role--but I won’t reveal this “spoiler.”

In 1973, Dolours and Mariane were jailed for leading a London bombing that, according to one source in Episode 5, injured and maimed 200 people. Part of the time, while in jail for eight years, the sisters went on a long hunger strike, and had to be forced fed to keep them alive.

Meanwhile, through various episodes, we encounter many of the McConville children, especially the oldest daughter Helen, who from Episode 1 forward are left with wondering exactly what ever happened to their mother, who was seized, taken away, and never came back.

From Episode 1, Gerry Adams is also woven into the story, first as one of the IRA leaders in Belfast, and from 1983 as President of Sinn Féin (the political wing of the IRA) and also as an elected member--though refusing to participate--in the British parliament. All episodes, however, end with the words, “Gerry Adams has always denied being a member of the IRA or participating in any IRA-related violence.”

In the final episodes, we often see Dolours, and sometimes another Belfast IRA leader, Brendan Hughes, verbally abuse Adams for such a denial. They often do so as part of first-person accounts of the Belfast Project, which was compiled and stored at Boston College from 2000 to 2006. Keefe starts out his book with an account of how two Belfast detectives flew to Boston in 2013 to obtain these materials, and in the TV version we often see Dolours--and less frequently Hughes--providing their testimony to the project.

It is difficult to discern Adams’ main reason for such denial. Political opportunism? Fear of imprisonment if he admitted to IRA leadership? (He had earlier been jailed for a while in the early 1970s.) Desire to further the peace process? Although Keefe certainly cast doubts on Adams’ denial and a Vox essay states “that pretty much everyone agrees that Adams not only participated in the Irish Republican Army and violent attacks the group carried out, but personally orchestrated much of it,” the reader or viewer is not left with 100 percent certainty.

The TV series is well acted and makes for riveting viewing. But one question nags at the viewer: Did Dolours make the right decision to give up on non-violence and resort to bombs and bullets? By the end of the series, she has her doubts, which trouble her greatly, and we are left with the impression that her death in 2013 might have been a suicide.

The amount of grief and suffering caused by wars and “terrorism” is incalculable. But so too is the misery caused by what is sometimes called “structural violence,” that is the harm that comes “from exploitive and unjust social, political and economic systems.” At one point in the TV series, as Dolours is being hauled off to prison, a reporter asks her if she regrets her “actions,” which include her recent London bombings. She fires back, “Does your government regret 800 years of colonialist terror?”

Violent or non-violent tactics to fight evil? There are no easy answers. One of the women I most admire in the 20^th century was Dorothy Day. And she was a complete pacifist, not even willing to take up arms against the Nazis in WW2. On the other hand, one of the 20^th-century men I most admire is South Africa’s Nelson Mandela. He was imprisoned for 27 years--finally released in 1990--and four years later became president of his country. He started out his rebelling opposition by hoping to employ Gandhian nonviolence but, as he makes clear in his autobiography (Long Walk to Freedom), he eventually concluded that the racist apartheid system in South Africa left his political group “no alternative to armed and violent resistance.” The Gandhian regard for life remained, however, and Mandela consistently attempted to avoid or minimize the taking of human lives.

Perhaps in this violent world of ours, we can do no better than carefully weigh the violent or non-violent choices--including all the consequences likely to ensue. We can hope that non-violent tactics may suffice. But maybe, like Mandela, we may eventually conclude that only counter-violence will succeed. Either way, watching the Say Nothing series will stimulate our thinking.