The Irish War by Tony Geraghty, HarperCollins, 404pp, £19.99 in UK
Despite dreadful organisation, a flawed sense of history, and a confused viewpoint, Tony Geraghty has journalistic talents such that, somehow, this curate's egg of a book qualifies for entry in that portmanteau category, an Interesting Read - even a significant one, because of one interview, with Michael Mates, in particular.
But he and his publishers have made entry unnecessarily difficult. Up to page 244 he gives us his own view of how the Provisional IRA emerged in the Sixties (incidentally, seriously misquoting me en route). He judges that "the troubles that began in l968 were a classic of Republican political deception and Irish self-deception". He explains how Edward Heath, MI5, the SAS, their buddy Margaret Thatcher, and all the rest of them, proceeded to make a bad situation worse for the next few decades. Then he does a fast rewind back to Patrick Sarsfield, on through 1798, to Michael Collins, the Provos again and thus, via some detailed chronologies, arrives at page 375 and the bibliography. Whew.
Being a biographer of Michael Collins, I was not exactly taken by surprise by Geraghty's discovery that, not having a standing army of their own, the Irish made use of guerrilla war tactics. But I was surprised to learn from the book's accompanying press release that the Northern Ireland Troubles had "ended with the IRA's defeat". Nevertheless, when writing out of his own experience, Geraghty is good. He was caught in the "rape of the Falls" in l970 and he describes its brutality honestly. By contrast, Conor Cruise O'Brien told us, in States of Ireland, that he saw little or no damage when he visited the area after the curfew. In fact, it was the violence and deaths of this destructive British Army search-and-ransack operation that turned on the recruiting faucet for the Provos.
The Provos have now turned off that faucet themselves. But what about their opponents? Geraghty is rightly concerned at what the huge military machine - created "out of sight of the British public" - is capable of: surveillance and counter-surveillance, blackmail, interrogation, chemical analysis and electronic eavesdropping, burglary and assassination beyond the dreams, or nightmares, of Clausewitz or Orwell, or for that matter, the East German Stasi. His descriptions of how MI5 operates (at great expense, and often with even greater inefficiency, it seems to me) and links in, or doesn't, with the RUC, the British Army, MI6, and so on, will be meat and drink to John Le Carre and Freddie Forsyth fans. Decoded, however, the real message of Geraghty's researches is that these groupings depended on one essential weapon for success - Conservative Party support. Geraghty's SAS background probably induced the Conservative ex-Northern Ireland Minister, Colonel Michael Mates, to give him an important interview, which will be of particular interest to readers of Sean McPhilemy's controversial book about loyalist assassination squads, The Com- mittee. Some critics have cast doubts on the Committee's existence. However, Mates makes reference to a group of loyalists who, he says, came out of jail saying: "There must be a better way than filling a bar with bullets. We need to knock off major players." Mates says that "amongst those who were assassinated" by the Committee between the December 1993 Downing Street Declaration and the IRA ceasefire of the following August were "fifteen top people". What Mates does not say is that the loyalists always had the idea of hitting the "top people". The important question is, how were they suddenly enabled to put the idea into practice? Who provided them with intelligence on when, and where, to find their targets, and enabled them to escape police and army patrols afterwards? Where was the mighty MI5? Would there be a clue in the fact that it has been established that most of the weaponry used was supplied from a cache of arms smuggled to the loyalists from South Africa with the aid of British intelligence?
Mates summed up his term in office in the North by saying: "I never had to go looking for power. This is where Northern Ireland is different. You had more than you could use. If I thought the Security Forces needed an extra £10 millions, I could give it to them. That's power . . . There's no bloody democracy there. That's why it works so well. I've never been happier. I had power. But one keeps very quiet about it." There's certainly a lot for the Conservatives to keep quiet about. Thank God for Mo Mowlam and Tony Blair.
On the contemporary Republican scene, Geraghty could have done with more insight than that provided by the informer Sean O'Callaghan. However, he also had the benefit of his own wife's researches. She, it seems, is "a successful fiction writer these days". But she did interview IRA leaders "at the Derry Gasworks". So that's all right - even if the gasworks are long gone. Geraghty is a talented journalist, a former Chief Reporter with the Sunday Times, now nothing like what it was when he shared in the great days of the Insight team and Harold Evans. However, like many an Irishman reared under England's high parapets, he is troubled by the idea of Irish nationality.
He proclaims himself a "British subject and an Irish citzen", as befits a Catholic "blitz kid" reared in wartime London by an Irish mother. But he quotes various historians to show that the Irish don't know what they're talking about when they speak of nationality or of Irish unity: "The `unity' of Ireland may well be its greatest myth." Secondly, his analysis of the IRA's growth and motivation is largely a combination of conspiracy theory and a skewed vision of Irish history. He says: "The precise nature of Irish identity is the true source of trouble . . . The reason Irish Republicans enjoy the indulgence of more moderate people is that they have been able, with great ingenuity, to hijack Celtic culture and graft on to it bogus mythologies . . ." Gerry Adams, come back here with Riverdance!
Surely the practicalities of demography and economics were making "unity" seem increasingly less mythological even before that well-known United Irishman, Conor Cruise O'Brien, pulled the rug from underneath both the UK Unionists and the revisionists with equal impartiality? Reading Geraghty's animadversions on identity, I was reminded of a visit I paid to a cell in Long Kesh containing two young IRA prisoners who were "on the blanket" during the dirty protest of l980. They were learning Irish. Words were tapped out from other cells on the heating pipes. They then memorised them - by cutting them into their own excrement, smeared on the walls, with the crucifixes on their rosary beads. Whatever the causes of their troubles, lack of a sense of the "precise identity" of their Irish and Catholic roots was not amongst them. To be fair, the vision of that cell would be as incomprehensible to Dublin Four as to either MI5 or Tony Geraghty. But it is what enabled the Republicans, despite all the justifiable opprobrium which their many atrocities elicited, to withstand the Orwellian nightmare of modern counter-insurgency and get from l980 to l998 and the international stage.
Tim Pat Coogan is the author of biographies of Michael Collins and de Valera, of the The IRA and The Troubles