Once upon a time identifying someone as a leading member of the IRA might cost you your kneecaps. Today singling out such a figure on the screen may bring you an Oscar.
Even so, more than 25 years after the terrorists gave up their murderous campaign, naming names is still a risky business.
For the most part, the kingpins behind the worst horrors of Ulster’s cycle of violence and mayhem have been enveloped in an uneasy code of bloody silence.
This week a gripping adaptation of American writer Patrick Radden Keefe’s best-selling book about the Irish Troubles, Say Nothing, launched as a nine part dramatisation by Disney+, threatens to strip all that away.
It is no misty-eyed romantic version of the 30 years of sectarian killing and bombing that wrecked so many lives not just in Ireland but in Britain too, but an unflinching one.
What makes it such an extraordinary drama, however, is the portrayal of the one person who has dominated the Northern Ireland story for decades, Gerry Adams.
Those who have been brought up to see Adams as a peaceful, pipe-smoking cross between Nelson Mandela and Father Christmas might be in for a shock.
The Gerry Adams presented so boldly here is a cold, merciless IRA commander.
Those who have been brought up to see Gerry Adams, pictured, as a peaceful, pipe-smoking cross between Nelson Mandela and Father Christmas might be in for a shock, writes Richard Kay
The scene outside the Old Bailey in London after an IRA car bomb exploded, killing one person and injuring many, 8th March 1973, approved by Gerry Adams, according to the show
Indeed, it explicitly identifies him as man with blood on his hands who ordered the execution of alleged British informants – ‘touts’ in IRA parlance – including a widowed mother of ten whose only apparent ‘crime’ was to comfort a soldier by putting a pillow under his head as he lay in a pool of blood outside her front door.
It also maintains he approved the sickening attacks on London in 1973 in which car bombs exploded outside the Old Bailey and on Whitehall, secretly planted by a terrorist unit led by the notorious Price sisters, Dolours and Marian who were both jailed for their part in the outrage. Their victims were innocent passers-by.
This was the Provisional IRA’s first major blitz on the British mainland since the Troubles began in the late 1960s. Their bombs maimed more than 200 people and killed one, who suffered a heart attack attributed to the explosions.
So this is perhaps the most devastating – and courageous – screen portrait ever of the former Sinn Fein leader, and comes at a time when he is still trying to soften his public persona.
It is also deeply troubling for his party which is facing a crucial general election in the Irish Republic later this month amid cratering support, according to polls. Of all the crimes committed by the Provisionals – and the list is a long and bloody one – the fate of what has become known as ‘The Disappeared’: people abducted, murdered and secretly buried, remains to this day the most savage and chilling of episodes.
These were souls who simply vanished into thin air, their absence unaccountable, their whereabouts unknown. As well as so-called ‘touts’ they included victims of internal IRA feuds. What was certain, however, was their fate – all were murdered, usually by a bullet to the back of the head.
Of the 17 men and one woman who are officially listed as having been missing, the remains of 13 have been recovered. Among the four still unaccounted for is Grenadier Guards officer, Captain Robert Nairac, who was abducted from a pub in South Armagh while on an undercover mission.
The son of an eye surgeon, he was 29. Little wonder, then, that Mr Adams was going public this week to deny any involvement ‘in the killing or burial of any of those secretly buried by the IRA’.
He said he had not seen the drama but citing media reports, his solicitors said that the claims came from ‘anti-peace process republicans’, in other words political opponents.
They added: ‘It is a matter of public record that Gerry Adams has worked closely with the Independent Commission for the Location of Victims’ Remains to identify the location of those buried by the IRA.’ There is also a disclaimer with which every episode of Say Nothing ends: ‘Gerry Adams has always denied being a member of the IRA or participating in any IRA-related violence.’
Gerry Adams (centre) in Belfast, acting as a member of the IRA guard of honour at the funeral of a member who was killed whilst planting a bomb
Say Nothing chronicles the alleged brutality that marked Adams’ early years before he turned into the self-styled man of peace. Picture: Martin McGuiness and Gerry Adams (right)
In response, Radden Keefe, whose brilliant expose, Empire of Pain, of the pharmaceutical billionaire Sackler family – and the fortune they made selling opioids – was turned into the Netflix hit Painkiller, has suggested the disclaimers are ‘laughable.’
Of Adams, who refused to talk to him, he said: ‘Part of what’s so interesting about him is that he’s hard to relate to, and clearly betrays his friends and lies.’
He certainly paints a much darker picture than the usual glowing praise heaped on Adams, whose fans still believe he should be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
One recent documentary, A Ballymurphy Man, described him as ‘one of the most important political leaders and visionaries of our time [who] led the people of the North of Ireland from conflict to peace’.
Say Nothing chronicles the alleged brutality that marked Adams’ early years before he turned into the self-styled man of peace. It’s story is of the consequence of violence and the moral price paid by its perpetrators.
The key moment in the enthralling narrative is 1972 when Ulster seemed to be in flames day and night – it was the deadliest year for casualties with 480 people killed across the Province including 130 British soldiers.
It was then, according to the film, that Adams, the IRA’s Belfast commander set up a special squad of volunteers called simply ‘the Unknowns’ whose task was to get the Provisionals ‘house in order’.
The Army had begun to penetrate IRA ‘cells’ and the unit’s job was to deal with the traitors in their midst.
One of these accused informers was Jean McConville, a Protestant widow with ten children, who lived in the republican enclave of the Divis Flats in west Belfast.
Adams, the IRA’s Belfast commander set up a special squad of volunteers called simply ‘the Unknowns’ whose task was to get the Provisionals ‘house in order’, writes Richard Kay
Her abduction and disappearance lays bare the wickedness of what Adams labelled the ‘armed struggle’ and goes to the dark heart of the Troubles. It is the harrowing thread that runs through the story.
The housewife’s ‘offence’ was to go to the aid of a soldier who had been shot and wounded in a gun battle outside her flat.
She was denounced as a tout and soon afterwards in December 1972 was dragged out of her home by hooded thugs in front of her terrified children, bundled into a van and never seen alive again.
An investigation by the ombudsman for Northern Ireland has found no evidence that she was an informer. According to Keefe, Mrs McConville was framed over a pair of red slippers she owned. It was claimed these were the slippers allegedly worn by a masked spy the Army used to parade IRA suspects in front of.
To compound the cruelty of her disappearance her orphaned children, who were treated as outcasts and left to fend for themselves, received a postcard from Blackpool which they clung to in desperation that their mother might still be alive.
By then she was already dead, driven across the border by the Price sisters, who had risen in IRA ranks and whose folk-hero status was assured for masterminding an armed robbery on a bank in which they dressed as nuns and also dramatically freeing a fellow terrorist being held under guard in a local hospital.
Their job was to drive informants to their executions and then leave. However Keefe revealed that when Mrs McConville’s designated killers backed out it was the Price sisters who murdered her themselves.
The testimony for this comes from interviews Dolours Price gave before her death from a drugs overdose in 2013. She was one of several former IRA figures who took part in an oral history of the Troubles. Known as the Boston Tapes they are secret recordings in which ex-paramilitaries talk about their role during the decades of Ulster’s trauma.
To Adams, those who have denounced him are on the wrong side of history. He has survived murder attempts and is the friend of presidents (Clinton) and prime ministers (Blair)
Adams has shaken hands with the King, whose great uncle Lord Mountbatten was assassinated by the IRA, writes Richard Kay
Some like Price did so because they were disenchanted by the Good Friday Agreement which she said had obliterated the moral justification for her violence.
The recordings were made on behalf of the US university
Boston College but the project was highly controversial and police in Northern Ireland gained access to the tapes for use as evidence in continuing murder inquiries – one of which was that of Jean McConville.
Adams’ lawyers, however, claim that the Boston tapes have been ‘discredited’.
In the climax to the series Keefe has Dolours Price, who was divorced from the actor Stephen Rea, claiming that it was her sister Marian who fired the fatal shot on a remote beach in Co Louth. And that the order to kill was issued by Adams.
‘The man running the unit, the one giving the orders,’ she says. ‘That would be Gerry Adams.’
Three decades passed before a walker came across Mrs McConville’s remains in 2003. A post mortem revealed that her skull had been pierced by a single shot.
In 2014, Adams was arrested by police in connection with the murder and her disappearance but after questioning was released without charge. Northern Ireland’s public prosecution service later stated there was insufficient evidence for any charges.
Adams and Marian Price ‘categorically denied’ any involvement in the death.
In Keefe’s brilliant telling, the Province is gagged by a reflex to stifle discussion about that troubling time and remains divided by what he refers to as ‘the sulphurous intrigue of the past’.
Then US President Bill Clinton greeting then Sinn Fein President Gerry Adams
It is a story without a happy ending for it illustrates with a brutal clarity the nightmare of the families of those whose loved ones vanished. Unable to properly grieve, to speak out or go to the police, their lives were put on hold.
What made things worse was seeing the abductors openly on the streets and in church.
Keefe took the title for his account from Seamus Heaney’s poem about the Troubles, Whatever You Say, Say Nothing and it refers directly to the silence that still surrounds the McConville killing.
‘It may seem strange that events from nearly half a century ago could still provoke such fear and anguish,’ he said but added: ‘In Belfast, history is still alive and dangerous.’
Into this narrative he attempts to pin the elusive Adams.
He is the so-called ‘big man’ and we are introduced to him at a barricade during a riot where he is urging protesters to bring brick, kerb stones and bottles for petrol bombs.
It was under his alleged watch that the IRA struck on Bloody Friday in July 1972 when 19 bombs exploded in the space of half an hour in Belfast indiscriminately killing nine and injuring scores more.
Images of police officers shovelling the mutilated bodies of the victims into bags are some of the most enduring of the Troubles.
To Adams, loyalty was everything. ‘By now Gerry was running all of west Belfast,’ Price relates in her recording.
Viewers of Say Nothing have been offered a different version of his life’s story, it is sinister, violent and disturbing, writes Richard Kay
‘It meant he was the most wanted man in Ireland and he had look outs on every corner. He never slept in the same house twice, except when he was visiting his wife.’
In the series it is implied that Adams orders the abduction of two IRA men who had been recruited by the Army only to turn double agent and expose a British undercover unit running a fake laundry service.
Past crimes, he says, ‘cannot go unpunished.’
To Adams, those who have denounced him are on the wrong side of history. He has survived murder attempts and is the friend of presidents (Clinton) and prime ministers (Blair). He has shaken hands with the King, whose great uncle Lord Mountbatten was assassinated by the IRA.
So to some he will forever be a charming ideologue.
Viewers of Say Nothing have been offered a different version of his life’s story, it is sinister, violent and disturbing.
Say Nothing is streaming now on Disney+.
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