Brits: The War Against the IRA
Peter Taylor
436pp, Bloomsbury, £20
"Slow to Reach an Understanding" would be as apt a subtitle for this book, a companion to Peter Taylor's Provos and Loyalists and the print version of last year's TV documentaries. More than 30 years on, the impression given by Taylor's clear account of a muddled history - much of it still invisible - is of a large cast, almost entirely male and white (the only black faces are those in night camouflage), a long list of the dead, more martyrs than heroes, a sense of intractability throughout, and snail-like progress. As long ago as 1989, the IRA was apparently starting to worry that it was going to be the last unsolved problem, given the catalogue of rapid change elsewhere (Beirut, eastern Europe, South Africa, Britain even). By the mid-1990s, Northern Ireland had the feeling of a country in aspic.
Taylor covers the broad spectrum of British involvement, from political manoeuvring and the uneasy role of the army down to undercover work and enforcement, some of it illegal. He shows why the process towards peace has taken so long, and why Northern Ireland has played itself out as a series of political and military stalemates.
From the start, it had the air of a problem that the British would rather have forgotten about; ancient history that sat awkwardly with the mainland's increasingly short-term memory and its progression towards a non-political, consumer-oriented, boom and recession, quick-fix culture. For most Brits, bar the gung-ho, Northern Ireland remained an awkward posting. Taylor captures that sense of people passing through and of desks being bagged while their IRA opponents, particularly Martin McGuinness and Gerry Adams, were there for the long haul, their purpose ideological and vocational.
Taylor identifies language as one victim of the conflict, with an emphasis on ambiguity and prevarication on the part of the British, whose political and bureaucratic speech is countered by the intractable propaganda clichés of Adams. Personal accounts of undercover work, some of it dirty, favour football and cowboy metaphors, and have an "as told to" flatness that prefers recitation to interpretation. Common sense is occasionally displayed and shown to be almost entirely useless in the context of Northern Ireland. More typical are pig-headedness and the crassness of a British army commanding officer who announced that the problem with the Irish was that they were genetically inferior.
Taylor identifies the political faultlines that led to the 1968 Troubles, and emphasises the general lack of comprehension on the part of the British, for whom Northern Ireland remained off the political map long after the present conflict began, prior to which it had taken up less than two hours of parliament's time a year. A large and at first badly briefed bureaucracy, rivalries between the different branches of the security forces, lack of penetrative intelligence on the IRA and an army often more tactless than tactical, which treated Belfast as one more colonial war - all these compounded local grievances and the frustration of the British authorities, which bemoaned the lack of a clear-cut role.
Neither could the British decide how to formally identify the nature of the enemy: was it political, terrorist or criminal? Should it be negotiated with or squashed? This confusion led to off-the- record political talks taking place at the same time as interrogation techniques were being used that were later condemned by the Court of Human Rights. The security forces had to be seen to operate according to the sometimes troublesome strictures of a liberal democracy, while also trying to steal the initiative. In the tit-for-tat that followed, the argument always came down to who fired first. Bloody Sunday and the "shoot to kill" incidents, particularly in Gibraltar, were the most controversial: all are well covered by Taylor. Mrs Thatcher clarified the conflict by insisting on criminalising the IRA; although, in a move not fully explained by Taylor, she also signed the Anglo-Irish agreement, which helped usher in the later phase of negotiations.
Taylor, with nearly 30 years' experience reporting on Northern Ireland, guides the reader through the maze of acronyms, factions, rivalries, propaganda and disinformation. He keeps his eye on the larger picture (Northern Ireland is full of blind alleys) and follows the conflict's various fronts, showing how the success of the security services in tying up Belfast and locking up the IRA leadership led to a switch to mainland bombings, with several miscarriages of justice as the result. He also makes it plain that the biggest winner was technology, particularly advanced- surveillance security systems that left the IRA increasingly little room for manoeuvre.
Perhaps the most dispiriting aspect of this thorough book is the impression that if it were to happen all over again it would happen in the same way and take just as long, and that history doesn't learn from its mistakes.
