The new television series Say Nothing dramatizes one of the most contentious episodes in modern Irish history. In 1972, members of the Irish Republican Army (IRA) abducted Jean McConville, a mother of ten children in Belfast who they accused of working as an informer for the British Army. They killed McConville and buried her body in secret. McConville’s murder later became the subject of bitter controversy when IRA veterans Brendan Hughes and Dolours Price accused Sinn Féin leader Gerry Adams of having been involved in giving the order for her killing.

Hughes and Price both gave interviews to an oral history project under the auspices of Boston College that was coordinated by the journalist Ed Moloney. After the death of Hughes, Moloney published a book called Voices from the Graves based on his testimony and that of David Ervine, a loyalist paramilitary turned politician. The Boston College project collapsed when the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) filed a subpoena with the US authorities demanding access to the interviews so they could be used in criminal prosecutions.

Although the PSNI took Adams in for questioning, there were ultimately no charges filed against him in relation to McConville’s death. However, there was an attempt to prosecute Ivor Bell, another IRA veteran who had become bitterly hostile to Adams and gave an interview to the Boston College archive. Adams was called as a witness in the 2019 trial, which ended with Bell’s acquittal after the judge ruled that the material from his Boston College interview was inadmissible.