I will admit that when I heard there was to be a TV adaptation of Say Nothing, based on Patrick Radden Keefe’s book of the same name, released on Disney , I thought: “Oh no.” I had images of Florence Pugh or whoever got up in a red wig and painted-on freckles, prancing about the Ormeau Road with a petrol bomb in one hand and an Irish tricolour in the other. I pictured plummy English or haughty southern Irish accents with a few mangled Belfast “nowwws” thrown in for colour.
On reflection this wasn’t really to do with the book, a sober and well-researched account of a brutal murder. But more because there can tend to be a slightly goofy way of depicting, and interacting with, the complexity of the history in the place where I am from. Perhaps especially of late.
Say Nothing couldn’t really be arriving at a more advantageous time. Since Brexit (when many in England and indeed down south seemed to discover the existence of the DUP for the first time) there has been a wave of interest in the Troubles and the north that feels like it is building to a crescendo. The huge success of Anna Burns’s Booker-prize winning Milkman – as well as, to be fair, Say Nothing the book and now Kneecap-mania – speaks to this. The interest is particularly pronounced among people around my millennial generation, both in England and the south of Ireland, who see the Troubles as a blind spot in their education.
Declarations of an affinity with Irish culture are everywhere. Many an Essex lad can these days be heard in pub gardens chanting “Split the G” (take the exact swig of Guinness to make the liquid level........