This book is an excellent and very well-researched account of the relationship between the different governments of the Republic and the security forces of the state, especially the Garda Síochána, during roughly the 1970s, as well as the relationship of those security forces with their counterparts in Northern Ireland, the RUC and the British Army. The author, Patrick Mulroe, has consulted the sources and makes it clear that during the early 1970s, there was discreet cooperation along the border between northern and southern security forces, effectively on condition that, officially, at any rate, it never happened, or was simply a coincidence. The author puts it very well: “The difficulty for the Irish state was not so much in co-operating with the British but being seen to co-operate.” As well as being a catalogue of IRA and British Army and RUC casualties fighting against each other, it is an even more depressing account of the tit-for-tat sectarian killings experienced during that time along the border. Hopefully, we live and learn.
