Tragic tale of Jean McConville, brutally murdered by the IRA, brought back to life by Disney
My lovely and very talented lady friends Helena Handcart and Hermione Orliff contact me via an email registered to someone by the name of Roger Watkins (no, me neither) urging me to watch Say Nothing on the Disney Channel. So I invested £4.99 for the first month’s subscription and started viewing. And here I would like to offer my thanks to H & H for their advice.
It is a shockingly real and uncomfortable account of the abduction of Jean McConville, a newly widowed mother of 10 who in 1972 was snatched by a gang of local Provisional IRA men and women from her home in Belfast’s bleak Divis Flats complex. “We just need to talk to her,” her kids were assured, “she’ll be back later.” Indeed she was, 29 years later, from just over the Irish border in Co Louth. She had been driven straight there by Old Bailey bomber-to-be Dolours Price and shot by other Provos through the back of her head.
Her crime, which she had denied and which was never proven, was being an informant for the police and army. A Tout. The ultimate crime. And the order for her execution came from the wee fella who poured my daily pints in the Duke of York while I learned this trade of ours on Belfast’s morning, The News Letter. Gerry Adams, an affable teenager in my time there, denies to this day ever being a member of the IRA but is shown in the Disney series as a cold, ruthless commander who made others do his murderous work.
I believe the film makers’ version, not least because it is based on the remarkable book of the same name by US author and journalist, Patrick Radden Keefe, which in itself used the Boston College tapes as its main research source. The Boston tapes were conducted over five years from 2001 with former paramilitaries from both sides and when Keefe read the obituary of Dolours Price in 2013 he started work on the book, a history of the Troubles with the McConville atrocity as a central part.
As the product of many generations of Irish Protestants from the province of Ulster, I grew up spending all formative years there and, as I got to my teens, with all the privileges of a liberal family and great non-sectarian independent school, I developed an anger about the way that tiny outpost of Britain was run. The Catholic community was supressed, mostly through lack of jobs, housing and opportunity but if deemed necessary by authorised violence. The result was six decades of right-wing Unionist gerrymandered dominance until most decent people realised it was time to act.
And so in 1969 the Civil Rights March, modelled on Martin Luther King’s March on Washington, left Belfast’s grand City Hall for the 70 miles to Derry. The ranks were made up of people like the then 23-year-old me, intelligent, concerned and with no rabble-rousing element in sight. Protestant, Catholic, atheist, mostly middle class and educated. We knew that if sweeping changes did not come violence would surely follow. The demands seemed radical then, routine now: One Man. One Vote; an end to gerrymandering; freedom of speech and assembly; fair allocation of jobs and housing and the repeal of the vicious Special Powers Act which since 1929 made it legal to suppress any gathering by nationalist groups.
Inevitably I suppose, when the marchers reached Burntollet in Co Derry they were ambushed and attacked by so-called loyalist thugs armed with sticks, railings, stones and their secret weapon, the RUC B-Specials, an armed police unit made up of the sort of sort of uniformed morons who kept down the Blacks in Apartheid South Africa and the southern states of the USA.
And that, in a nutshell, is why all hell broke loose later that year with attacks that escalated over the years into atrocities, bomb after bomb, death after death. More than 3,500 in total which should, maybe would, never have happened if it hadn’t been for indifference to the suppression of nationalism in the six counties in the north-east part of Ireland by successive British governments, both Tory and Labour.
Without the Troubles Ireland would probably be united by now; Gerry Adams, a half decent writer and poet, might have made a go of it and Dolours Price, the bright grammar school pupil who shared a classroom with future Irish president Mary McAleese, might have gone on to follow her friend to great office.
And Jean McConville would never have been driven, terrified, the 60 miles in the dark to her lonely murder on Shillington Beach in Co Louth.
*****
What the hell is wrong with the BBC? It is capable of making and commissioning great TV and radio programmes but seemingly incapable of making the right decisions when it comes to a home-bred scandal. It made a complete Horlicks of all claims of indecency and sexual harassment, and worse, by Stuart Hall, Rolf Harris, the vile Russell Brand and of course Jimmy Savile. Those who knew either failed to act or did what seems to be ingrained into BBC culture — they ordered a bloody inquiry.
Exactly the same is happening in the case of the talentless chancer Gregg Wallace. Complaints have come in steadily for at least 10 years yet he is still there, though not for long I hope, getting £400,000 for knowing the square root of a blancmange on Masterchef.
But when it comes to keeping real talent, the sort that enhance programmes, there is no prevaricating. They are allowed to depart.
I have in mind the superbly smart, calm and well-balanced Mishal Hussain who is off to Bloomberg next year. She is good to wake up to so to speak, the very best of Today interviewers on Radio Four. Already the programme has lost Martha Kearney and gained the rather excitable Emma Barnett.
Bring back Naughtie and Humphreys...
*****
How good to see Joe Root and Harry Brook topping the world batting rankings. Two supreme talents and both the product of cricket scholarships that took them from the state system to their public schools and wonderful facilities and coaching. In the case of Root it was Worksop College and Brook to Sedbergh.
Long may that system last though, better still, let’s encourage our great summer game to feature in the comprehensives’ sports agendas.
*****
Top Tip: Do read Patrick Maguire’s review of Downfall, Nadine Dorries’ latest ‘book’. If you don’t subscribe to The Times you should but beg, borrow or steal to get hold of it. Go to your local library if such a thing still exists because as book reviews go it’s a cracker.
Mad Nad may disagree of course.
ALAN FRAME
11 December 2024
