Every episode of Say Nothing, the FX/Hulu show based on the non-fiction book of the same name, ends with a disclaimer: “Gerry Adams has always denied being a member of the IRA or participating in any IRA-related violence.”
Disclaimers aren’t unusual in film and television (arguably even more shows should employ them) but the Adams disclaimer still stands out.
Say Nothing takes place across and beyond the 30-year period in late 20th-century Ireland known as “The Troubles.” Viewers experience this time and its fallout largely through the eyes of Catholic combatants in the Irish Republican Army (IRA), Dolours Price (played on the show by Lola Petticrew, and later Maxine Peake), and to a lesser extent Brendan “The Dark” Hughes (played by Anthony Boyle as a youth, Tom Vaughan-Lawlor as the elder Hughes), along with those affected by their actions. It was an era marked by bloodshed and fear, with political and psychological ramifications that can still be felt by many in the country today.
The problem? If this disclaimer is accurate, it would negate or at least undermine nearly everything the Say Nothing viewer has just witnessed. So what’s going on here? And what’s the real effect of this repeated legal language? Let’s break it down, piece by piece.
Officially, today, Gerry Adams is a retired Irish politician. He’s played in Say Nothing by Josh Finan as a young radical, and Michael Colgan as an older statesman.
In 1998, Adams was integral to and present for the signing of the Good Friday Agreement, a peace deal brokered by US President Bill Clinton that brought an end to the everyday violence in Northern Ireland. Adams did this in his capacity as the president of the Sinn Féin party, a position he held from 1983 to 2018.
Throughout The Troubles, Sinn Féin was widely understood to be the political wing of the IRA.
The IRA stands for the Irish Republican Army, a paramilitary association that was first founded under that name in 1919, although it grew out of a long history of Irish resistance to British rule. The purpose of the IRA was to reunite Ireland by reclaiming the whole of the island, specifically the area that became known after the partition of Ireland in 1921 as Northern Ireland.
The Irish Republican Army was known in particular for its use of guerrilla warfare tactics, from bank robberies to car bombs, as well as the practice of disappearing accused informers, known as “touts,” and turncoats. The US labeled the IRA a terrorist group in the 1980s.
What were the British doing in Ireland?
The British had been politically and militarily involved with their Irish neighbors to the west since the Anglo-Norman Invasion in 1169. That conquest kicked off 800 years of dispossession, bloodshed, and strife across the region and usually along religious lines — with the majority Catholics on one side, and the Protestant minority aligned with British forces.
This timeline is briefly mentioned at the very top of the TV series Say Nothing. What’s less explored on screen, but takes up a good chunk of the meticulously reported non-fiction book of the same name — written by journalist Patrick Radden Keefe, who also executive produced the show — is the history of the conflict. Let’s go back, if not quite to the beginning.
In 1914, after centuries of rebellion and retaliation, “Home Rule” — under which the Irish would be in charge of themselves — was set to become law. Shortly before it was to be enacted, however, the British made the change contingent on military conscription, right at the start of the first World War.
In 1916, Irish Republicans fought back, in a rebellion known as the Easter Rising. This operation was a resounding failure that would nonetheless endear the nascent IRA to the Irish public, after the resulting British occupation of Dublin saw the jailing of 1,400 Republicans and the execution of 16 of their leaders. Following the brutal War of Independence and the Anglo-Irish Treaty, the Partition of Ireland was established in 1921, dividing the country into two self-governing entities, and a year later the Irish Free State was established in the south.
By the late 1960s, things weren’t great for the Catholics of Northern Ireland. There was clear evidence of discrimination against Catholics in the north in hiring, housing, voting, and policing.
At this time, the IRA was by most accounts not engaged in armed struggle, but a bombing on the 50th anniversary of the Easter Rising helped inspire the formation of the “Ulster Volunteer Force” — another paramilitary group, but this time with British loyalties and, as per Say Nothing, occasionally government support, whose operations were largely marked by gun violence against Catholic civilians. This was the approximate start of what is known as The Troubles.
Say Nothing, both book and show, depicts the resumed violence among the IRA, British forces, and loyalist paramilitary groups, which lasted from around 1968 to the signing of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998, as well as the fallout for Irish families that, in many ways, persist today.
Okay, Gerry Adams is a politician with a group affiliated with the IRA. But does that mean he’s responsible for the violence?
That might be a complicated question, were it not for the fact 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. This is exactly what we see on screen throughout Say Nothing.
Radden Keefe’s book carefully details Adams’s history in the movement, including the conception and execution of robberies and bombings, such as the Old Bailey bombing in London that saw Dolours Price and her sister Marian arrested and jailed for eight years. Among other sources and interviews, that book used the first-person accounts collected for the Belfast Project, an oral history of The Troubles compiled by researchers at Boston College from 2000 to 2006.
In other words, many, many IRA members are on the record saying that Gerry Adams was among them. Dolours Price has said he was her “commander.” Brendan Hughes has said he never did anything without Adams’s say-so. (Additionally, historians and contemporaneous media accounts link Adams to IRA violence.)
If all that’s true, how did Gerry Adams get elected to political office?
Adams’s status as an IRA leader didn’t hurt his political life; if anything, it helped! Adams’s political persona has always been, knowingly, built on his Republican bona fides. In the book, Keefe details the way Adams would deny membership in the IRA out of one side of his mouth, and raise the specter of violence out of the other, but you don’t need to decode his speeches to see the connections.
In 1972, Adams was released from prison — where he was being held without charge, although he claims only as a political activist — to participate in ceasefire talks at the request of the IRA. He was 24. Nine years later, he played a “key role,” as per the BBC, in encouraging IRA hunger strikes, which saw 27-year-old IRA leader Bobby Sands starve himself to death in prison, just one month after Sands was elected MP.
Adams was himself elected as a Belfast West MP two years later, but refused to sit in the House of Commons, a Sinn Féin policy. That same year, 1983, he became the head of the party. A decade later, secret peace talks well underway, he carried the coffin of Thomas Begley, an IRA bomber who died in the Shankill bombing, after a premature explosion.
During the approximately five-year talks, Adams was meeting with more moderate Irish political parties, representing the promise of bringing the IRA to the table. His status as IRA leadership was key to his stewardship of Sinn Féin — not just at the outset, but throughout his entire career.
So if this is all such an open secret, why is the disclaimer included?
In an interview with Town & Country, author and executive producer Keefe explained, “It was ultimately FX legal that determined that we needed that disclaimer.” The reason why is simple: Adams himself. As Keefe told T&C, “It’s not that he will take issue with little bits and pieces of what we show. He takes issue with the whole premise of the series, which is that he was in the IRA.”
While the show’s disclaimer seems to be more corporate necessity than rhetorical flourish, it ends up being a bit of a gift to the Say Nothing producers. It would be hard to find a more succinct way to communicate the doublethink necessary for life during The Troubles. It puts a darkly comic, increasingly absurd stinger on each episode of a show that sees only occasional lightness and crackles of Irish wit, while also giving a sense of the unspeakability of what you’re watching unfold.
It’s what Irish poet Seamus Heaney calls “the tight gag of place and times” in “Whatever you say, say nothing,” the poem from which the book and show take their name. This is the omertà that comes with the existence of the IRA. It’s a policy that, in this setting, makes intuitive if not entirely practical sense. Of course an insurgent political group can’t go shouting in the streets, and your friends and neighbors had better stay quiet, too.
In the book and show, we see Gerry Adams employing his own baroque version of it early on: denying to arresting officers not just his role in the IRA but himself. He’s not Gerry Adams, he claims, but a man named John.
Price, on the other hand, doesn’t deny her name nor that she supports the goals of the IRA. She declares herself not guilty for the London bombing simply because she doesn’t recognize English authority.
Later in the show, as in real life, Price and Hughes definitively break this code of silence, speaking to the Belfast Project — and in Price’s case, some notable others — about the things they did and the little good they felt it accomplished. The Boston College tapes weren’t intended to be distributed until after the participants’ deaths, but some were later subpoenaed in the renewed investigation into the death of Jean McConville, the IRA disappearance that frames Say Nothing.
Adams never cracks, though, in the show or reality. But Adams isn’t saying nothing. His persistent denial works as an admission that the methods of the Irish Republican Army violate some part of the collective moral consciousness (not to mention the law), while hinting that obscuring the facts doesn’t violate Adams’s own. It’s worth noting that Adams had real-life political colleagues, including eventual deputy first minister Martin McGuinness, who did not disavow their time in the IRA.
For some of Adams’s former compatriots, Price and Hughes among them, his public ascent was not about peacemaking, but little more than the fulfillment of his political aspirations. For those IRA members, even the signing of the Good Friday agreement was not something to be heralded; it leaves Northern Ireland as part of the United Kingdom — for as long as its majority Protestant citizenry chooses.
The episode disclaimers, along with this tension, effectively make Gerry Adams the show’s villain — willing to ask others for the ultimate sacrifice; not even loyal to the cause. You watch Adams, along with Price and Hughes, plan and execute acts that wound their enemies, their neighbors, their cities, and eventually themselves; you’re shown his rise, their fall; and over and over, you see his denial. But the only people who truly say nothing are the dead.
