Horrors but no heroes
Dean Godson
Are the Provisionals serious about peace? And is the IRA becoming an appendage of Sinn Fein, rather than the other way round? Such questions loom large as republicans enter all-party talks on the future of Northern Ireland. Yet few studies of modern republicanism focus on the internal tensions caused by such attempts to reconcile secretive militarism with conventional politics. Instead, most accounts of the IRA are gun- obsessed romps, which lay stress upon the 'heroism' and the horror of the longest ter- rorist campaign in Anglo-Irish history.
The limitations of such 'armalite' histo- ries are epitomised by Peter Taylor's Provos, the book which accompanies the BBC TV series. It is characterised by a reverential tone towards the self-admiring, Goodfellas culture of republicanism — from its technical proficiency as a murder machine through to the physical appear- ance of its leading lights. Thus, Gerry Kelly is described as an 'unlikely looking former "terrorist"' (Taylor's quotation marks) who had set 'myriad female hearts a-flutter with his devastating good looks and charm'. Typical of the creepy aesthetic are the arty, black-and-white photographs of ageing republicans; the Protestants, by contrast, only make visual appearances as thugs who intimidate Taylor.
Like the Monty Python sketch of East Enders talking about local gangsters ("E was an 'arsh man, but a fair man. 'E only nailed me 'ead to the wail once') Taylor tends to take the Provisionals at their own estimation — be it the split with the Offi- cial IRA, or the ending of the last cease- fire. Certainly, there is a place for the 'In Their Own Words' genre of oral history; but this ground has already been extensive- ly covered in much better written works, such as Kevin Toolis's Rebel Hearts and Jonathan Stevenson's 'We Wrecked the Place'. Far from having been hitherto inaccessible, some of the interviewees would have a nervous breakdown if they were not rung at least twice a day by jour- nalists.
There is, however, an even more serious objection to this book: on the basis of his supposedly unparalleled access to leading Provisionals, Taylor purports to supply some fairly authoritative insights into the future direction of 'the movement'. This would be more credible if his book were not riddled with factual errors, which alter- nate between the sloppy, the outrageous and the hilarious. Thus, he claims that the Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1985 had marginalised republicans. This, he says, explains the SDLP's defeat of Gerry Adams for the Westminster seat of West Belfast in 1987 — an original inter- pretation, since Adams actually won that year.
Taylor's grasp of the events of recent months is little better. Martin McGuinness was the successful Sinn Fein candidate for Mid-Ulster, not West Tyrone, in 1997; Wolfe Tone was a Dublin, not a Belfast, Protestant; Patrick Pearse most certainly did not die for a socialist republic; it is a wicked slur to say that Sir Edward Carson 'reluctantly' handed the original UVF to Lord Kitchener; and the 1986 IRA Army Convention, which ended the policy of abstentionism from the Dail, cannot have been held in 'County Navan', for one simple reason: no such county exists. The caption beneath the photograph of Father Alec Reid kneeling over a lynched British soldier even proclaims that the noted Redemptorist was 'giving last rights' (sic). Bloomsbury can surely do better than this.
Following this performance, how can anyone take seriously Taylor's claim that 'after decades of rejecting the notion, the IRA and Sinn Fein of today finally recog- nise that their fellow Irishmen and women of unionist persuasion have to be accom- modated in any new political structure and not forced into it . . . [this] represents a major departure of thinking'? In his new political history of republicanism, a leading academic authority, Henry Patterson, demonstrates that such optimism is ludi- crously misplaced. He is one of the very few authors to have trawled his way through turgid republican tracts going back to the 1920s. According to Patterson, republicans have recalibrated their tactics — that is, the appropriate mix of politics and violence — but have forsworn neither their ultimate goals nor coercion. Patterson contends that to tip the balance of power within the republican movement away from the more 'apolitical militarists' towards Sinn Fein's 'political class' would require far more concessions than any government could morally or democratically offer.
So what changes have republicans made? Any revised definition of 'accommodation' of Unionists is largely window-dressing, to be done entirely on Sinn Fein/IRA's terms. Essentially, they are telling a million British subjects that 'you must accept a united Ireland, and then we can discuss matters of concern to you, such as contraception'. But the most important shift of all, as Patterson sees it, is the growing sophistica- tion of republican perceptions of the British state. Far from viewing 'the Estab- lishment' as uniformly malevolent, republi- cans now see it as containing many diverse elements.
Some of these are pro-Unionist, others far less so — as illustrated in Taylor's book by those emollient British intelligence offi- cers 'tasked' with sending out 'feelers' to the IRA. Recognising that they are not strong enough to defeat the Unionists on their own, republicans are now prepared to try and enlist portions of the 'Establish- ment' to act as 'persuaders' of the Protes- tants. To that end, some republicans, says Patterson, are willing to concede a pres- ence for the United Kingdom governmeht for a few more years, in order to contain the Unionist backlash which would .be stim- ulated by the traditional republican goal of immediate British withdrawal. It must be added that Patterson's book — which is excellently produced by Serif, a small, left- wing publishing house with a fraction of Bloomsbury's resources — also boasts a first-rate chronology.
The policy of the British state forms the subject of Between War and Peace: The Political Future of Northern Ireland. Co-authored by Patterson and two of the foremost scholars of contemporary Ireland, Paul Bew and Paul Teague, it delves in painstaking detail into the issues which will arise during the all-party talks. Especially impressive are the sections on the limits of north-south economic harmonisation and the uneven effects of the Province's fair employment legislation. But the abiding theme is the ambiguity and complexity of the British approach to the Ulster crisis. The authors emphasise the underrated role of guilt, notably Sir Robert Armstrong's desire to 'expiate' England's historic wrongs in Ireland by pushing the Anglo- Irish Agreement. Like the 'spooks' inter- viewed in Taylor's book, many such officials came of age during postwar decolonisation, and applied that model almost reflexively to Northern Ireland: for them, the skill with which a retreat is conducted is the acme of political achievement. This mindset does much to explain why the Provisionals, with relatively scant means at their disposal, have success- fully fought the British state to a score draw.
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