Fourth Generation Warfare

How “Say Nothing” Captured the Contradictions of the Troubles,

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November 21, 2024
Say Nothing, the 2018 nonfiction book by Patrick Radden Keefe, executes a staggering balancing act: providing a comprehensive, clear-sighted account of the Troubles without taking sides. The four-decade-plus violent struggle between Northern Irish rebels and their British colonizers felt like a topic “people disagreed very strongly on and where both sides seemed to be very convinced of their point of view,” Keefe tells Vulture’s Nicholas Quah. “Whereas what I felt was this intense ambivalence.” Keefe and screenwriter Josh Zetumer knew the key to their miniseries adaptation of Say Nothing, now airing on FX on Hulu, was preserving that sensibility. They divided their story, which focuses on four Provisional IRA members and a family torn apart by the conflict, into the “night out” and the “hangover.” “All these young radicals in the IRA in the ’70s, they had pictures of Che Guevara on the wall,” says Keefe. “The question was: What happens if you don’t die young? How do you make sense of it all as you get older?”
—Julie Kosin, senior editor, Vulture
ADAPTIVE BEHAVIOR

‘Your Nose Is Pressed Up Against the Ambiguity of It’ How Patrick Radden Keefe and Joshua Zetumer captured the contradictions of Say Nothing onscreen.
By Nicholas Quah
Photo: FX
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Categories: Fourth Generation Warfare, Geopolitics, History and Historiography

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