Various shades of green
Robert Kee
THE IRISH WAR: THE MILITARY HISTORY OF A DOMESTIC CONFLICT by Tony Geraghty HatperCollins, £19.99, pp. 404 Dashing journalists - and Tony Ger- aghty was a good one for the Sunday Times, with close experience of Northern Ireland - are not always very good at writing whole books. Their professional self-confi- dence has to adjust to a different time- space dimension and this does not always come easily, though they tend to proceed as if it did.
Geraghty has already succeeded in writ- ing books on the SAS, the Foreign Legion, and other matters. His latest title, which carries a double historical meaning, appears at a moment when what, stretching a journalistic point or two, may be called a 30-year war in Ireland seems over. The main body of the book was obviously writ- ten before the Good Friday Agreement, though publishing honour is saved by four or five token acknowledgments of its exis- tence. John Hume gets only one mention in passing and David Trimble none at all. But this is immaterial, for the focus of Ger- aghty's attention is on the past, not the future.
Indeed an early comment that the late troubles have their roots in 1691 sets alarm bells ringing. For the defeated Irish hero of that year, Sarsfield, had actually been fight- ing for the return to Ireland of an exiled English monarch. But we have to wait a long time before going back to sort out this connection with Adams and MacGuinness. The first two thirds of the book in fact deal with a past that started in the mid-1960s, and this usefully distracts from what threat- ens as a central 'message'. If 1969-98 was a war, it was one in which on one side was the British state and on the other a smallish group of Irish republicans whose warfare was disowned by an Irish Republic representing the great majority of the people of Ireland. Why, to ask the simplest question, was the British state not able to win sooner? Or did the other side win? And on whose side were those 'loyalists' who supported the British state but also defied it? In short,
whatever sort of war was this?
Geraghty, on the whole here more inter- ested in events than political analysis, gives an insider's impressionistic account from below the surface. If at times it becomes more a sporadic recital of nasty incidents and bizarre developments than a continu- ous narrative, it contains much vivid detail to surprise, bewilder, amaze and shock. Strange stories of `lookalike holidays', `freds', forensic detective work, IRA countermeasures, and an intelligence System whose mysteries multiply in a world of its own, abound. One of the best chap- ters is entitled, properly, 'A Darker Side of Red'.
The slightly haphazard approach is in many ways appropriate. There was an element of confusion and muddle in the attitudes of both sides to that conflict, Particularly on the part of the British where the balance between political and physical initiative fluctuated irresolutely over the Years. Total withdrawal seems to have been momentarily contemplated by a Labour government at one stage. 'Virtual warfare' and even 'virtual justice', as Geraghty Shows, became flickering state concepts. The IRA had their own less urgent prob- lem: an addiction to ideological self-indul- gence as Holy Grail republicans was occasionally troubled by thoughts of rewards temporarily short of the Holy Grail in political expediency.
In some of his initial analytic reporting Geraghty concerns himself with the way in Which what was then a virtually defunct IRA got into this stage of the conflict in the first place. He stresses the 'Officials" account of acceptance that violence had failed to bring about a united Ireland and always would, and how background under- cover support for the burgeoning Civil Rights Movement seemed the way to a Political future that would do so. Possibly he overrates the effectiveness of the Offi- cials' contribution to a movement which had a very genuine spontaneous power for Peaceful reform of its own. In any case, how this and the Officials' plan were swept away in an avalanche of events which brought British troops onto the streets to Protect those for whom civil rights were being sought, and how a new/old version of the IRA was able to take the opportunity of the troops' presence to turn the situation back 50 years, is now old history. Ger- aghty's account is sound.
His account of older history still, in the last third of his book, is another matter. To simplify it as the story of Ireland always wanting to be a nation once again is to mis- take myth for reality, and underrate the Fomplexity which has made Irish national- ism both a problem and so interesting. In any case why start with Sarsfield and not go back further to Hugh O'Neill? But of course he fought in his day for an English Monarch too. The whole of this last section of the book should be handled with extreme care.
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