A curious treatment of the Troubles

NORTHERN IRELAND: The Northern Ireland Conflict: A Beginner's Guide, by Aaron Edwards and Cillian McGrattan

THE CONCEPT of a beginner’s guide to the Northern Ireland tragedy is somewhat startling at first, but there is a new generation for whom the Troubles are virtually a closed book. In that sense, surely a guide like this, which is part of a series that also covers the Middle East, anarchism, racism and feminism, should be useful. Indeed it should, but despite the laudable concept behind it, one must have doubts about whether this is the most helpful introductory volume to place in the hands of a student or a curious visitor.

There are some basic factual errors. We are told that the Official IRA bombing of the Parachute Regiment’s Aldershot headquarters on February 22nd, 1972, “killed seven soldiers” when, in fact, the list of the dead was made up of five civilian cleaners as well as a gardener and a Catholic chaplain to the British army.

Perhaps more serious in an analytical work is the statement attributed to Peter Brooke, as Northern Ireland secretary in November 1990, that Britain had “no strategic or economic interest in Northern Ireland”. In fact, he used the word “selfish” before “strategic or economic interest”, which gives quite a different meaning to this key statement, described by Prime Minister John Major in his memoirs as “a cornerstone of future policy”.

Elsewhere, the book tells us that “the Republican Senator for upstate New York George Mitchell was appointed by Clinton as Multi-Party Talks Chairman”. In fact, Mitchell was a Democratic senator for the proud state of Maine. President Clinton appointed him as a special advisor/envoy on Northern Ireland in 1995, but it was the British and Irish governments that invited him to chair the peace talks a year later; he is now President Obama’s special envoy to the Middle East.

The authors are a senior lecturer at Sandhurst military academy and a postdoctoral research fellow at University College Dublin. They arrive at surprising conclusions on a number of issues, such as the implications of the Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1985. A longtime Northern Ireland hand in Dublin officialdom characterised the agreement, in Irish, as “gunna chun cleamhnais” (“the gun in a shotgun wedding”), as it was intended to spur the unionists into making a power-sharing deal with their nationalist neighbours.

The authors of this book contend that the agreement actually “provided a barrier against engagement with unionism”, because, when Dublin was given a special role in the North, the nationalists became less enthusiastic about a power-sharing deal. Indeed, the agreement “could actually be seen to have contributed to the perpetuation of violence”.

They have a generally sceptical approach to the peace process, which, the book states, “should not be seen as a model to be followed”. There are several disparaging references to “the peace process industry”, which they say to be characterised by “intellectual and moral vacuity” and based on “platitudes” and “conceits”.

The authors claim there has been “a gradual worsening of inter-communal relations” since the IRA ceasefire of 1994, and they complain that the new political structures “have perpetuated a political culture based on division and confrontation”.

They contradict their own argument when they note that the number of killings by paramilitaries fell by more than two-thirds in the 11 years after the ceasefire, compared with the period 1983-93. Bombings and shootings halved in roughly the same period. Peace comes dropping slow, but it does come, gentlemen.

Those who rely on this curious book as an introduction to the Troubles and their culmination in the peace process will find themselves down some strange byways and more than one cul de sac.

Deaglan de Bréadún is an Irish TimesPolitical Correspondent, former Northern editor of The Irish Timesand author of The Far Side of Revenge: Making Peace in Northern Ireland(Collins Press).