The Troubles: In this week of harmonious smiles from Ian Paisley and Martin McGuinness, it is perhaps more important than ever to recall the darkness which once prevailed over Northern Ireland politics.
The Telling Year: Belfast 1972 By Malachi O'Doherty Gill & Macmillan, 234pp.€16.99.
"Belfast was dangerous," Malachi O'Doherty observes in this compelling memoir of the early Northern Irish Troubles. Indeed it was, and more so in 1972 than in any other year of the conflict. In total, 497 people were killed in the Troubles in that disastrous year. Belfast itself, in O'Doherty's words, experienced then "the misery of a city saturated with murder".
It was the year of Bloody Sunday but of Bloody Friday too, and a year in which you couldn't just ignore the war that had erupted around you. Malachi O'Doherty lived in a part of Catholic Belfast in which the Provisional IRA relatively flourished. His own father was a long-time republican in his thinking. But his mother was not, and O'Doherty himself came to lean towards her scepticism rather than towards his father's republican answers to the North's problems.
O'Doherty was to become one of Northern Ireland's ablest journalists, and one of the Provisional IRA's prominent critics. In this memoir he makes resonantly clear that the Provos were unable to defend Catholic communities such as his own (and were far more likely, in practice, to endanger them). And he makes clear also his exasperation at the IRA for so long opting "to fight for the unattainable". He is critical, too, of loyalist and state violence, and few people emerge from his account with a glowing reference.
But this book is as much about one person's rather bewildered response to bloody carnage as it is about the politics of Northern Ireland itself in that period. O'Doherty opted for reporting as his reaction to the crisis ("journalism would be my place in the game"), and he worked as a young and callow reporter on the Sunday News. This paper in 1972 sold more than 110,000 copies a week, but its reportage was as lacking in insight as was that of most contemporary observers. In O'Doherty's candid reflection: "What I have learnt from looking back at the political and media climate of 1972 is that we were all naive and immature in the face of crisis."
The Telling Year, in fact, deals with more than just 1972 (its early sections looking at pre-1972 Belfast), but in concentrating on that worst of all years it does raise some haunting questions. Why was Northern Irish violence not maintained at such high levels after 1972? It is often and rightly asked why the conflict lasted so long and claimed so many lives. But an equally pertinent question is why the conflict did not descend lastingly into the depths of killing so tragically familiar in late 20th-century conflicts, such as those in Algeria and Rwanda.
O'Doherty's book does not set out to engage with such issues. It is anecdotal and personal rather than systematic or analytical, and it's no less engaging a read for that. But the book does valuably point towards such grand questions, and especially perhaps it directs us towards the difficult terrain of the morality of the Troubles. O'Doherty is typically honest here: "I had a deepening fear that there was no secure moral ground or right position to take in relation to the violence."
But it is also true that there were those, in 1972 and even earlier, who coldly pointed out realities that underlay the moral choices available to people at the time. As early as 1968, for example, that ablest of Irish civil servants, TK Whitaker, had been explicit that violence would be counter-productive in pursuit of a united Ireland: "Force will get us nowhere," he argued. It would only strengthen "fears, antagonisms and divisions".
For one of the abiding lessons of Northern Ireland in 1972 is that violence does have the appalling capacity to change the world, but rarely as its practitioners envisage. Neither republicans, loyalists nor the Parachute Regiment achieved what they thought their violence in 1972 would achieve. Malachi O'Doherty's fascinating memoir helps to show why.
Richard English is professor of politics at Queen's University Belfast. His book,Irish Freedom: The History of Nationalism in Ireland , won the Ewart-Biggs Memorial Prize for 2007.