FERGAL COCHRANE sees the Ulster unionists as provincial Muppets. His detailed and lively survey of much unionist reaction to the Anglo Irish Agreement emphasises the ineffective, incoherent and sectarian elements of the response. Cochrane sees the unionists as trapped in a time warp, espousing imperial values which have almost disappeared in Britain while proclaiming their loyalty through the threat of a revolt against the wishes of the sovereign state. This book is a relentless presentation of this case and the author is clearly not short of evidence to sustain it. But the book's argument would not have suffered from a more generous and empathetic acknowledgment of the scale of the onslaught - ranging from physical force to crude ideological pressure directed against Ulster unionism by Irish nationalists.
These are both confident first books by young scholars. Niall O Dochartaigh probably offers more in the way of now material. Fergal Cochrane - inevitably because the ground has been worked over rather more - is less exciting here but he does have a forceful and well rounded case. The weakness of the work lies in a lack of openness: this shows itself above all in a certain blindness to developments which contradict his thesis.
His account of the 1992 Brooke/ Mayhew talks process is thin and simply does not convey the flavour of the discussions, in particular, the scale of unionist efforts to reach a compromise. The analysis of the Anglo Irish Agreement of 1985 tells us less than some of the major architects on the British or Irish side, such as Sir David Goodall or Sean Donlon, have already told us in print, and Cochrane is not particularly incisive on the framework document. He sometimes gets Margaret Thatcher wrong, her 1979 interview, which talks of a possible imposed solution, is not evidence of a hint of the Anglo Irish Agreement of 1985, but rather of a certain hankering after rather more prounionist proposals. She never said that Northern Ireland was "as British as Finchley", rather that "Northern Ireland is part of the United Kingdom - as much as my constituency", a considerably less ideological statement.
Cochrane is unsystematic in his use of the London broadsheets. Most of all, he does not seem to have grasped the fact - well understood by "New labour"
that the Tories are likely to be more, not less, unionist in opposition: nor was there ever the golden age of unalloyed pro Union sentiment in British elite or public opinion that he seems to presume. One stylistic tic is worth noting - Thomas Begley is allowed his Christian name but Ray Smallwoods is not. A rather strange error has John Gorman, the Ulster Unionist chairman of the Forum, as a McCartneyite UKUP follower.
All these defects - plus a prose style which is at best workmanlike - will irritate his unionist readers. But it would be unfortunate if they missed the main point; Fergal Cochrane is right on the big issue: "If the Union is to survive into the 21st century, the ideology must divest itself.of sectarian baggage and facilitate the Irish national identity within the institutions of the state and culture itself."
Provincial Muppetry (defined as complete inability to make realistic if unpalatable political choices) abounds too in Niall O Dochartaigh's sensitive account of the self defeating right wing trend in unionist politics in Derry from 1967 to 1969. O Dochartaigh's thesis is straightforward and is backed up by considerable original research: "There were precious few active Republicans in Derry when the civil rights movement began." The subsequent genesis of a powerful republican culture in the city is, therefore, due above all to the mistakes of others, local unionists, the RUC and the British Army. The principal weakness is very heavy if inevitable reliance on predominantly nationalist sources for accounts of the key developments.
Like Cochrane's book it suffers from an inadequate sense of the prehistory, that is, pre "Troubles", interaction of the two main communal blocs. But more than any other single work it poses implicity the question: what would have happened if direct rule had come not in 1972, but in 1969 when British troops arrived? Dr O Dochartaigh's book illustrates painfully how the army appeared in Derry to be the tool of a ramshackle doomed regime.
Niall O Dochartaigh has moved the study of Derry's role in the "Troubles" decisively beyond Eamon McCann's interesting and suggestive memoir War and an Irish Town, and this is no mean achievement.