A new series is stepping into the fraught territory of Northern Ireland in the 70s by telling the real-life story of a woman abducted by the IRA. Its creators talk about truth, reconciliation and trying to depict both sides of the conflict

“To be honest, I’d always thought of the Troubles as a male story,” says the US author and journalist Patrick Radden Keefe, when asked what first attracted him to the events covered in his 2018 bestselling nonfiction book Say Nothing. “So, part of it for me was the novelty of the idea that there was this woman in the IRA and she had gone on hunger strike with her sister in 1973.”

Now an executive producer on the TV adaptation of his book, Keefe first heard about its subjects in 2013, when he read a New York Times obituary of the IRA volunteer Dolours Price, which mentioned the abduction and disappearance of widowed mother of 10 Jean McConville. “Right there, in this little article, were the seeds for the whole thing: the idea that there were these two very different women, and how they were connected by these acts of violence.”