“Disney is acclaimed for its entertainment, my mother’s death is not entertainment for my family,” said Jean McConville’s son. The IRA thought the victim was a Protestant informant.
The son of Jean McConville, a Northern Irish woman who was kidnapped, murdered and secretly buried by the IRA, has called the depiction of his mother’s death in a new Disney+ series “cruel” and “terrible.”
The Say Series Nothing is based on a 2018 book by American journalist Patrick Radden Keefe with the same name that recounts not only the McConville case, but addresses the activity carried out by the IRA more broadly (irish republican army), during the conflicts in Northern Ireland, known as The Troubles and which pitted the Republican Catholic minority (close to Ireland) against the Protestant unionists (close to the London government).
The night the IRA almost killed Margaret Thatcher
As breaknews.ie tells it, Jean McConville is part of the Missing (the disappeared), a group of 17 people who were kidnapped, murdered and then secretly buried by the republican faction, during the conflict that began in the sixties and only ended with the Good Friday Agreement of 1998, in Belfast, after more than 3,500 fatalities.
In 1972, Michael McConville was still a child when his mother was kidnapped from the family home in the capital of Northern Ireland. “Disney is acclaimed for its entertainment, my mother’s death is not entertainment for me and my family,” he said about the new series that adapts the death of his mother to the screen, in statements cited by the same Irish media.
“This is our reality, every day for 52 years,” he said. Michael admitted to not having watched the television show and intending not to. “I don’t think people realize how painful this is,” he accuses.
The Jean McConville case has been followed publicly since 1972 and, over the years, there have been developments. In 2018, in the documentary I, painsIRA activist Dolours Price established a link between Gerry Adams, the former leader of the Irish Sinn Féin partyand the plot to assassinate McConville, in an interview that was not published after his death, according to The Guardian.
The IRA always denied responsibility for what happened until it acknowledged its involvement in the case in 1999, after the Good Friday Agreement and after an independent commission was created to locate the remains of the victims of the conflict. In 2003, McConville’s remains were found on a beach in the Louth region, south of the border with Northern Ireland, according to the English newspaper.
Gerry Adams to this day denies having ever been part of the IRA and, at the end of each episode of the Disney series, a disclaimer stating this information is shown. In 2014, Adams was briefly detained for the murder in question, but was never charged, according to the BBC.
Jean McConville would have been chosen by the IRA because she was identified as an informant for the Protestant faction of the conflict, an idea that an investigation by a Northern Ireland state institution rejected. The IRA never retracted the accusations leveled against Jean, even after a request to that effect from his son, The Irish Times reported.
The victim’s son continues to disagree with the appropriation made of the story of his mother’s death. “Everyone knows the story of Jean McConville. Even Hillary Clinton, who I met a few years ago, knew my mother’s story,” she says. “Even so, Here is another story that my family and I have to endure.“, laments Michael McConville.
Patrick Radden Keefe, author of the book that was adapted into nine episodes for television, claims to have had “several meetings” with relatives of the victims included in the film, including a sister of Michael McConville. During the production of the series, the journalist spoke with representatives of the families “about what they were going to do, what their intentions were and to listen to any questions or concerns.
“We wanted to make it clear that we were going to approach this story with a lot of sensitivity and compassion,” Keefe said. The American maintains that the series tells “a human story from the perspective of the lives of two very different women, one of them a victim and the other the author of the crime.”
For the son of the victim represented, the promised sensitivity will not be enough: “The portrait of the secret execution and burial of my mother it’s terrible and unless someone has been through it, they will never know how cruel it is.”
“In the end this series will be forgotten. and the people who did it will have moved on,” predicts Michael McConville. “They can, I can’t,” he concludes.
Source: Observadora
