“If you want to get on in this life, there are things you have to ignore.”
Eileen Furlong says this to her husband, Bill, in the film Small Things Like These. She knows what happens to people who challenge a powerful institution in a small town. She wants to protect their family. Her advice is understandable, which makes it all the more unsettling.
Based on Claire Keegan’s novella, the story follows Bill, a quiet coal merchant in Ireland in 1985. While making a delivery to a convent, he encounters a young woman who has been mistreated. He begins to understand what is happening behind its doors. The convent holds influence throughout the town, and Bill has a business, a wife and five daughters to consider. Speaking up could cost him dearly.
Bill cannot claim he knows nothing. That is the choice Keegan places before him, and before us: Once we see someone being harmed, how much are we willing to risk by taking action?
The question grows out of Bill’s own life. His unmarried mother could have faced the fate of the women at the convent. Instead, someone gave her and her son a place to live and treated them with kindness. He knows how much can depend on one person’s decision to help.
Still, he is afraid. Keegan gives that fear its due. Bill understands how quickly his family’s security could disappear. Moral courage sounds simple from a safe distance. It feels different when the people who depend on you might pay the price.
Yet Bill keeps returning to a question he cannot put aside: “Was there any point in being alive without helping one another?”
Why is this a Press Club column? Because the town’s silence is part of a story journalists see all time. The convent’s power rests, in part, on people who suspect what is happening but decide it is wiser to look away. Each person has a reason. Together, those decisions leave the women and girls inside with little hope that anyone will listen.
Journalists should never look away.
We face a different duty, but the pressure to keep quiet can sound familiar. A reporter may risk losing access by asking a question an official dislikes. An editor may face demands to soften a well-supported story. People with influence may insist that publishing the facts will cause trouble for the community. Sometimes they mean trouble for themselves.
Journalism requires verification, fairness and accountability. Courage does not excuse a weak story or an unfair one. It allows a journalist to publish a story that has met those standards even when the consequences are uncomfortable.
The public has a part in this, too. We cannot demand that reporters hold powerful people accountable and then fault them whenever the reporting disturbs a person or institution we admire. A free press depends on journalists willing to ask difficult questions and, on a community, willing to hear the answers.
Small Things Like These does not promise Bill that doing the right thing will protect his family from the consequences. Its ending leaves him facing them. That honesty is what gives his decision its weight.
Cillian Murphy’s portrayal of Bill Furlong is powerful, not so much what he says, but he sees. As Bill grows more troubled, he doesn’t become a loud voice or community activist. Instead, his quiet, unspoken actions are louder and more profound than any voice.
Most of us will never confront a choice as stark as Bill Furlong’s. We will, however, hear some version of Eileen’s advice. Ignore it. Keep your place. Think of what you could lose.
When the facts are sound and someone needs help, we should ask Bill’s question before we take that advice.
Then, do the work.