Say Nothing: The IRA, Silence, and a War Britain Wanted to Forget

2 comments

Source

Before watching this series I thought I knew enough about the conflict in Northern Ireland, the headlines about bombings, soldiers in the streets, and the shadow of the IRA that lingered for decades. Yet Say Nothing on Hulu took that vague outline and pressed it directly against my skin. It builds from the disappearance of Jean McConville, a widowed mother of ten who vanished in 1972, and from there unfolds a story that is both deeply personal and brutally political. The title itself is the key, because silence was not only a survival mechanism during those years but also the most corrosive burden carried by families and entire communities. This miniseries insists that history is not just about leaders and armies but about the ordinary people swallowed by secrecy.

Because the show is rooted in Patrick Radden Keefe’s book, it moves with the discipline of investigative journalism but also with the pulse of a thriller. We follow Dolours and Marian Price, young women who joined the IRA convinced they were fighting for justice, and we see Brendan Hughes and Gerry Adams maneuvering through layers of strategy and denial. None of them are painted in black and white, and that is what keeps the narrative alive. The series refuses to let ideology flatten its characters. Instead, it shows how loyalty can mutate into guilt, how conviction can blur into cruelty, and how the very act of keeping quiet can destroy relationships from the inside. For someone new to this history, it is not a lecture but a human portrait, tense and unflinching.

Source

Clarity comes from the way the production handles detail. The streets, the pubs, the cramped apartments feel lived in, not staged. The camera avoids glamour and instead lingers on gestures, half spoken sentences, and the fear behind a closed door. It never sensationalizes violence, but it also does not sanitize it. When the bombs and arrests appear, they land as inevitable echoes of choices already made in private rooms. The sound design reinforces this suffocation, with radios murmuring news bulletins and footsteps that sound like warnings. It creates an atmosphere where the past does not sit politely in archives but seeps into every corner of daily life. Watching it, I felt the kind of dread that is usually reserved for psychological thrillers, except here the threat was drawn straight from history.

Doubts about whether a show like this can hold attention without dragons or superheroes vanish quickly. Say Nothing thrives because it respects complexity. It lets us sit with confusion, with betrayals that cannot be neatly resolved, with the cost of resistance and the compromises of survival. Even the pacing, which at times slows to allow conversations to breathe, feels intentional. Those pauses mirror the silence at the heart of the story, the knowledge that speaking too much or too little could shape a life forever. Critics have praised the cast for their restraint, and rightly so. Performances by Lola Petticrew, Hazel Doupe, Maxine Peake and others capture not only the fire of youthful conviction but also the shadows of remorse that follow. These faces stay with you long after the screen goes dark.

Every society has its own silences, its own unspeakable histories, and that is why Say Nothing resonates far beyond Northern Ireland. It is not just a recounting of two decades of struggle between the IRA and British forces, but a meditation on memory and truth. The show does not demand that we take sides; it demands that we acknowledge the human cost of choosing sides at all. For me it felt less like watching television and more like opening a wound that had been carefully hidden, one that still bleeds beneath the surface. In a landscape of disposable series, this one stands as a masterpiece because it does not chase hype. It whispers, and that whisper burns louder than any spectacle.