SCOTT DETROW, HOST:
Can pursuing what you believe are righteous ends justify a violent and sometimes deadly means? That is the question at the heart of "Say Nothing," a new limited series that tells the story of The Troubles, the bloody sectarian conflict between Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland that went on for close to three decades. The show is based on Patrick Radden Keefe's best-selling book of the same name. "Say Nothing" considers the trauma and morality of political violence primarily through the true stories of Dolours Price and her sister, Marian, who both joined the IRA in the 1960s after being beaten during a peace march.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "SAY NOTHING")
LOLA PETTICREW: (As Dolours Price) But I would die for United Ireland. I would die if I thought it meant the Brits would hesitate going to the grocers or sending their wee kids off to school in the morning. I would. I would die. Listen, my whole family has suffered, and I just want that fear to live in their hearts, too.
DETROW: Patrick Radden Keefe serves as an executive producer on the new series and joins us now to talk about it. Welcome to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED.
PATRICK RADDEN KEEFE: It's great to be with you.
DETROW: Before we talk about the show, I want to go back to the book. What was the thing that initially drew you to the Price sisters?
KEEFE: So Dolours Price, whose voice - you just heard the voice of the actor playing Dolours. Dolours died in 2013, and I read her obituary in The New York Times. And there were a few things that jumped out to me about it. One was that it said that she was the first woman to have joined the IRA as a real frontline soldier. And I guess I had always thought of The Troubles and the IRA as sort of a male story. It was just interesting to me that there was a woman who I hadn't heard of.
And then it also mentioned that later in life, after The Troubles ended in 1998 with the Good Friday Agreement, she looked back with some misgivings about the things she'd done in her youth. And I was very interested in the contrast between the way in which you perceive radical politics when you're out there at the vanguard in your early 20s in the heat of the moment, and then how you feel about it from the vantage point of middle age, looking back, you know, as events have changed and you've gotten older, and your perspective has changed.
DETROW: Right. Whether you're on the extreme end in the IRA or just a normal person in their 20s, you have this very black-and-white, clear-cut view of the world at that point, and it gets a lot more gray the older you get and the more experience you have.
KEEFE: Absolutely. And I've always been personally very drawn to stories of moral ambiguity and kind of moral complexity. And so that was an aspect of this just thematically that was interesting to me.
DETROW: So you write the book. It comes out in 2018, and I think what the book does so well is it tells a sprawling story through these lens of these characters that you really get invested in. But you also, at different points in the book, give the context that somebody needs to understand who these key figures are, what that backstory is, and it's a very delicate balance. So I'm wondering how you began the process of upending that balance to take it and turn it into a TV show 'cause you got it right in book form, and it's a big task to get it right in TV form as well.
KEEFE: Yeah, you might ask. I mean, it's a funny thing. I think increasingly the more I do this, that - it may sound a little paradoxical, but when I'm writing, I'm not really thinking about adding in the sense of accumulating words on the page. I'm often thinking about subtracting or that I accumulate a huge amount of research, and then it's this quiz. It's the block of marble. It's like, how do I carve this down into a story that will be approachable and compelling and digestible for people who may know nothing about The Troubles? You know, they may not be able to find Ireland on the map. And so I did that with the book. But the book is a long book, even so.
And it's interesting that a series is like a further distillation of that. You need to continue to shrink. You need to make all these choices about - which stories are we going to tell? And what stories are we not going to tell? And I was quite involved in this process. It's taken us five years to make the show. I've been involved as an executive producer all the way along, and I had to make peace really early on with the idea that what we were making was not a carbon copy of the book. It wasn't a documentary. It had to have its own kind of freestanding dramatic life and exist on its own terms.
DETROW: Let's talk about Dolours Price, the main character, such an interesting character. And you see early on, just driven by the ideology of the cause, thinking this is a righteous cause, is - as the show progresses, you see her wrestle with the dark sides of being in a group like the IRA. Here's a clip of her being asked to do something incredibly unpleasant, which is drive a friend of hers to his execution, to his death.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "SAY NOTHING")
HAZEL DOUPE: (As Marian Price) What are you calling me for?
PETTICREW: (As Dolours Price) I don't know that I can do this.
DOUPE: (As Marian Price) Dotes, stop it.
PETTICREW: (As Dolours Price) Mar...
DOUPE: (As Marian Price) Where are you right now?
PETTICREW: (As Dolours Price) In a cafe.
DOUPE: (As Marian Price) And where is he?
PETTICREW: (As Dolours Price) He's in the car.
DOUPE: (As Marian Price) You left him on his own?
PETTICREW: (As Dolours Price) Ach (ph), I know. I'm [expletive] it up.
DOUPE: (As Marian Price) Dolours, I swear to God. Just drive, OK? All you have to do is drive.
DETROW: You said before that you're drawn to moral ambiguity. How do you see people like Price and these main players in the IRA that the book and the show have focused on? How do you think about the choices that they make?
KEEFE: Well, part of it for me is that I think that often when we hear the story of The Troubles - I think this is true - honestly, it's true in our present political moment in the United States. It's true when you look at events in the Middle East. In some ways, our discourse gets really calcified. You get these two different positions that are both extremely absolute, and people kind of fail to see the humanity on either side. The interesting question for me is - how do flawed normal people end up joining a paramilitary organization and taking up arms against the state? In the case of the Price sisters, it was a situation in which they were young. They actually went on a peace march and were beaten up. They felt that there was systemic injustice in their society, and they were trying to find a way to change it. So it actually is kind of born of a sort of idealism.
The question then becomes - how far do you go, you know, in pursuit of whatever that end is? And the irony, the ultimate dramatic irony here, is that these young women joined the IRA. They did awful things. They drove friends to their deaths. They planted bombs in the center of London. They went on a bruising hunger strike. And they did so because they believed that it was a means to an end, and the end was a united Ireland. The end was that the British would no longer control the six counties of Northern Ireland. Finally, you get a peace agreement, and I, in addition to many people around the world, celebrate that peace agreement, rightly so.
But what was interesting for the foot soldiers was that some of them, like Dolours Price, look back - when you get the peace agreement, it's not a United Ireland. It's still British, and she says, well, wait a second. If I had known that this was the destination, then I would never have done those things back in the '70s. How can I justify now those terrible things that I did? And that to me, the kind of sense of moral injury that they felt, was really intriguing, which is, again, it's not that the story is told from any one side or another, any one perspective or another. My hope is that as you're reading the book or watching the series, you feel like you come to know these people really intimately, and how you feel about them should actually evolve over time. It shouldn't be a consistent thing.
DETROW: And her life takes a sad turn. I mean, she's such this charismatic, energetic, younger person, and later in life, as she is talking to these researchers and telling her story and and being so bitter about the way things have turned out, it's really - she lives a hard life.
KEEFE: She does. Yeah. You know, in genre terms when we talked about making the series, what we talked about was the idea that this is a story that starts as a thriller and ends as a tragedy. And I think it was very important for us to capture - in a way that you often don't see - the fact that part of the reason young people would join a paramilitary organization is that it's romantic, and it's glamorous, and it's even fun. But if you're going to tell that side of the story, how do you show the glamor without glamorizing it? And the answer to me is you have to show the hangover, the long hangover. You have to show the wreckage that comes of the kinds of decisions she made. And so yes, Dolours Price's life ends very sadly. And I think there is a sense, you know, that she took the wrong road - she could have had a different sort of life - and that worst of all, she's never able to quite reconcile herself, her own humanity to the things she did in the zeal of her youth.
DETROW: That is author and journalist Patrick Radden Keefe. He is the executive producer of "Say Nothing" based on his best-selling book. It's out now on Hulu. Thanks so much for joining us.
KEEFE: Thanks for having me.
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