|
|
|
Hope against History - the Course of Conflict in Northern Ireland by Jack Holland
by Gary Kent________________
The Irish "Troubles" have produced a glacier of specific histories but Jack Holland provides the first overall history. It is a concise and readable narrative which necessarily entails a gory litany of atrocity - a father scraping his son's brains off the wall with a spoon, gruesome mutilations, the invention of the car bomb and more.
Holland's book contains some startling revelations. Left-wing Labour activists assisted republican penetration of Parliament to plant a bomb under Tory MP Airey Neave's car in 1979. Special Branch secured an agent within the IRA leadership. A senior British minister authorised illegal interrogation techniques.
The Troubles as a whole are divided into three phases: bloody eruption, a twilight war of covert action and the current perilous path to peace. The Provos emerge as an essentially sectarian ghetto force with reckless and inhumane military tactics. Holland highlights the Provos' self-serving incomprehension of the legitimate indigenous opposition to republicanism within Ulster. They couldn't understand that Protestants are not Irish people who falsely believe otherwise and who could be delivered by the British State.
Holland also outlines the ineptitude of the State which had long sidelined Northern Ireland. Internment in 1971 was a disaster in that it initially netted the uninvolved and the innocent. However, within 3 years it was responsible for a drastic drop in IRA activity in Belfast - the cockpit of the conflict.
The second phase lasted from about 1977 to 1990. Deaths dropped to around 100 a year - the term "only" should be strongly resisted. Two key and intertwined themes emerge - the rise of Sinn Féin politics and security successes against the IRA.
The precise dialectics of today's relationship between Sinn Féin and the IRA are unclear. Back then it was simple: the party was an anchor around the IRA's neck. But mass mobilisation around the Hunger Strikes energised the party and eventually demobilised the army because of the inevitable electoral tensions between the party's ballots and the army's bullets. This also blocked the road to political success in the South.
Holland argues that the security services - which were never penetrated by the IRA - managed to contain IRA actions. By the time of the first IRA ceasefire in 1994, 80% of Provo operations in Belfast were aborted or intercepted. The Provos were in desperate straits and wanted a graceful exit without being forced to admit defeat.
Flush with 150 tons of Libyan arms, however, the IRA decided in 1988 to give violence two more years to break their containment. Their massive bombs in London forced the pace but never succeeded in making the British Government impose Irish unity. A republican dissident says that the IRA failed to force a British withdrawal. Instead, the British State successfully adopted the neutral policy that it can only disengage with the consent of the majority. Holland's theme is that violent republicanism was defeated ideologically and militarily. But we are still in the thick of things. It is too soon to know whether to stock this book under history or current affairs.
Gary Kent is Westminster correspondent of the Belfast-based Fortnight magazine.
This review appears in the 15 October 1999 edition of the London left-wing weekly, Tribune.