Son of Jean McConville ‘sickened’ by TV series plans

The son of Disappeared victim Jean McConville has branded plans to make a TV series based on his mother’s murder “sickening”.

According to the Hollywood Reporter, the US production company behind dramas like The People Vs OJ Simpson and The Assassination Of Gianni Versace wants to adapt a book about the killing.

American writer Patrick Radden Keefe’s book Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland was published in the UK last year.

Color Force’s executive producers Brad Simpson and Nina Jacobson told the Hollywood Reporter: “We’re always on the lookout for a literary page-turner.

“And, when we started Patrick’s book, we couldn’t put it down – we’re very excited he’s partnering with us to tell this story on FX.”

However, Jean McConville’s son Michael says he and other family members are upset and disgusted to have learned about the plans from newspaper reports.

“Using what happened to our mother for entertainment is sickening,” Mr McConville said, in a statement released via the Wave Trauma Centre.

“To make money out of her murder and the pain that has been in our lives ever since is cruel and obscene.”

He added: “I doubt they even think of us as real people.

“We’re just characters in a story to be played with and forgotten about when they move onto the next money-maker.”

Jean McConville, a widowed mother-of-10 was seized by the IRA from her home in the Divis area of west Belfast in 1972 after being wrongly accused of being an informer.

After her abduction, she was shot dead and secretly buried.

Her body was only recovered from a beach in Co Louth in the Republic of Ireland in 2003.