Late to this party but have just rewatched this series after first watching it when it came out on Disney+. I have also read the book and read it after watching this peerless BBC documentary.
I'm English with no Irish heritage of note so have no skin in the game- Protestant English (and a bit of Scottish) on one side and Middle Eastern Jewish with a smattering of Welsh Presbyterian on the other- but I came away from that documentary incredulous that the history I had been taught and the news I’d absorbed as a child and adolescent in the 80s and 90s living in England was that the IRA were the bad ones.
I know that they were killing people. I know that there were bombs and guns. But the British were killing people and using some pretty shitty tactics too- it’s not like we were innocent victims… that was their Ireland and from the 16th century onwards we made it our business to be where we had no business being! The “Troubles” weren’t trouble… it was a fucking war! A fucking war that we wouldn’t call a war because it would have given the other side some legitimacy!
And that’s another thing- language. Our language around this war was fucked, but that’s hardly a shock is it, we’ve had a problem with language over there for hundreds of years. See Trespasses by Louise Kennedy or Translations by Brian Friel.
That BBC documentary got me started reading about it all and I thought that Say Nothing was an amazing book and amazing TV series. I don’t think it glamourised anything. I also don’t think it is the last word in anything- I’ve since becoming interested in all of this read and watched a lot of stuff from the POV of both sides and always come out thinking that the English kind of had what was coming to them, but really no one won… it’s all been bad. And then Brexit has made things harder again, why? Because the English learnt nothing from that 30-odd year war and thought we could run roughshod over that border.