I HAVE problems with drama which is ‘based on’ a true story. Others reassure me that audiences can tell the difference between fact and fiction, but I am not so sure.
This subject came up in a Radio Ulster discussion I took part in last week about the new Disney Plus series, Say Nothing, based on a book of the same name by the New Yorker reporter Patrick Radden Keefe.
Of course, there is no such thing as objective history. How could there be?
There is no objective validating authority. Yes, the universities will give doctorates to researchers but even they will disagree on, say, the IRA ceasefire of 1972.
Radden Keefe in his book and in the drama series represents it as a joyful time when hope was alive that the violence might end.
Actually more people were killed during that ceasefire than in the two weeks before it.
But it was called to enable talks between the IRA and the British government so it was conceivable that, once they were facing each other across a table, some creative moves towards a settlement might have emerged.
Say Nothing is a remarkable story. It tells of the sisters Dolours and Marian Price and their careers inside the IRA, as bombers of London in 1973 and prison hunger strikers after that.
It connects them to the murder of Jean McConville, a mother of ten who was secretly buried on a County Louth beach.
And it explores the evolution of Gerry Adams from a young man with a precocious and sacerdotal manner who ran the Belfast IRA (though he denies that) into a political compromiser and peacemaker.
The story takes the perspective of those in the IRA who now wonder what it was all for.
The result of their revolutionary ardour and their compromises with conscience and decency is not the independent united Irish republic they wanted but a continuation of partition.
Sinn Féin is in government in Northern Ireland but only to exercise limited powers devolved by the old enemy Britain.
So the story here is an important one.
It is essentially a comment on the brutality of the IRA campaign, the high hopes of those who conducted it and the difficulties many in that organisation had with the compromises needed for peace; compromises which made hypocrites of their leaders.
But there are big gaps and bigger gaps.
The focus on the Price sisters on hunger strike neglects to mention that two others, convicted alongside them also refused food and were subjected to force feeding, Gerry Kelly and Hugh Feeney.
There is no mention of the 1981 hunger strikes in which ten men died.
The story of the IRA campaign essentially leaves loyalist paramilitaries out of the story, though they did a lot of killing for the Union with Britain while the IRA was killing for Ireland.
Gerry Adams did, alongside several IRA leaders, meet with the Northern Ireland secretary of state William Whitelaw during a ceasefire in 1972 which he had helped to negotiate.
Then you hit a snag because, in the drama, the first item on the agenda is the status of prisoners.
The old journalist in me wants to stop the action right there and proclaim that that is wrong. That matter had been settled as a precondition of the ceasefire itself.
But, of course, there has to be elision and the skipping over of important events for the sake of making the story work, keeping the pace right, keeping the focus on what is important for the narrative.
History doesn’t break up into neat narrative packages but drama must.
And we are trusted to not mind when the detail is wrong but also to be wholly engrossed and even persuaded at important turns that what we are seeing represents real past events.
Say Nothing is not just entertainment. It is a powerful and radical intervention in our political discourse that will change how people see the IRA and Sinn Féin.
One distinct impression I get from the public and social media reaction is that the version of Gerry Adams created here is one that will stick, even that his credibility as a peacemaker is now irreparably tainted.
But what are you saying if you are criticising him for his machinations? That you would rather he hadn’t steered the IRA away from the direction the ideological purists wanted to take?
That the whole peace process is a con because it doesn’t actually fit the vision of that minority of enraged young men who, fifty years ago, thought they could fashion a new Ireland out of murder and sabotage?
I don’t mind that, as one critic said, it ‘humanises the IRA’ because they were human, and they were as brutal and fanatical as humans can be.
This is perhaps the best drama we have had yet on the IRA campaign.
People around the world will watch it as entertainment and they will learn more than they were ever otherwise likely to about those ghastly years.