Book publishers’ claims printed on back covers need to be treated with due caution, yet the claims made on the back of this book ring true: ‘The story of contemporary Ireland is inseparable from the story of the Official republican movement, a story never before told’. The Stalinoid style is reflected in the endless rooting out of heresy—‘ultra-leftists’, ‘instant revolutionaries’, ‘Trots’ and, inside RTÉ, the vilest of all deviants, ‘Trotskyite-Provos’—and in the ‘economistic’ strategy set out in The Irish Industrial Revolution, a manifesto to create full employment, and thereby strengthen the Irish proletariat, by attracting multinational corporate investment and expanding the public sector. These consisted of former combatants and many still identify each other with their respective former organisations. The headline read ‘Army of the People’, and the picture showed south Belfast Official IRA staff captain Joe McCann in action during one of the fierce gun-battles that followed the introduction of internment on 9 August that year. Local leaders representing the main groups – the Provisional IRA, the Irish National Liberation Army, the Ulster Defence Association and so on – were found to be meeting on a regular basis. So we’d have to go in and say ‘hang on you are not doing it on these people’s behalf’ or have a wee discussion why they shouldn’t be doing it. If both sides could agree that further violence was not the solution to a given problem, they would return to their respective communities to discourage retaliation. The IRA did not run away but, poorly armed, put up a creditable if inadequate defence of Catholic areas, and at the time Gerry Adams was ‘perturbed and perplexed’ by ‘the extreme criticism’ being levelled at the Belfast leadership. Lecturer in International Security, University of Leeds. You may kill the revolutionary, but never the revolution. In 1998 he was caged for a further three years for supplying the Class A drug. The Workers’ Party faded into what the English republican, John Milton, would have recognised as a ‘Godly remnant’—marginalised, stalwart and devout. Knowing that he was the subject of an IRA ‘Nutting Squad’ investigation led by the feared Freddie Scappaticci a terrified McGivern gave himself up to his RUC handlers. It was after the murder bid of Gill that republicans suspect McGivern started working as an informant for the RUC. HI Their decision to go public follows the launch of a fresh PSNI probe into the activities of British agent Scappaticci who has been linked to 50 murders carried out by the IRA’s ruthless internal security unit. There is a fair-minded argument that such transitional mechanisms are no longer required, although it is still important to see command structures as an opportunity for peace, and not just a risk to be removed. This is because loyalties build up between members during the conflict that are difficult to break and they have an incentive to stick together – a key strength of the Northern Irish peace process is it provided a route for these networks into peacebuilding. The word or saying is rejected and hated by protestants, police officers, orange men and British army personell. They do, however, in classic revisionist fashion, knock out the myth of what one Official called ‘all that crap about 1969’. What McGivern was careful not to admit to though was his role in the 1989 bomb attack that cost soldier Steven Gill his legs — an offence which would have landed him with a 20 year sentence. One former Provisional IRA member commented on such an occassion: What would have happened is the police would call and say ‘listen we are a bit stressed. Write an article and join a growing community of more than 115,700 academics and researchers from 3,762 institutions. That is a most revealing view, because if one thing sticks out from the dense thickets of detail in this book, it is how opposition to the Provo ‘other’ ultimately defined Official republicanism. McGivern was released in 2000 and headed south where he settled in Torquay. They would also have been repelled by the fact that during his time in the IRA his republican pals murdered Conservative MP Ian Gow in a car bomb attack along the south cost outside his East Sussex home. The front page of the September 1971 Official Republican paper The United Irishman displayed a photograph of a gunman crouched under a Starry Plough flag and silhouetted against a blazing truck. Gerry Adams is right, but too late.’ Better late than never. 26+6=1 (Refers to how the 26 provinces of Ireland, plus the 6 in the North, would equal one unified Ireland) Burn everything British but their coal. people both in Ireland and around the world. Here are some of them. It is hoped As much psychological condition as political conviction, the remorseless logic of being ‘not-Provo’ drove some Workers’ Party intellectuals into the counsels of Ulster Unionism and others into the not-unrelated and agreeably predictable ‘opinion’ pages of the Sunday Independent. One interviewee present at meetings of senior paramilitary figures in Belfast revealed how talks like these played a vital role in calming tensions between republicans and loyalists when the army barracks was attacked in 2009. In the South republican activists joined in or led industrial disputes, housing action committees, ‘fish-ins’ and campaigns against ground rents. In 1992 he was jailed for six years after pleading guilty to IRA membership, armed robbery, criminal damage and aggravated burglary. That cheeky piece of Provo journalistic piracy serves as a graphic reminder that at the time there were two, rival, IRAs, and that while the Provos by then outnumbered and outgunned their ‘Sticky’ competitors, the Official IRA remained a formidable force within the world of republican paramilitarism. Such inevitable internal tensions were brought to snapping-point by the Northern crisis that erupted onto the streets of Derry and Belfast in August 1969. This is the IRA bomber who became so popular at a Conservative Club in England that true blue members lowered the Union flag to half mast when he died. By that stage McGivern had been kicked out of the IRA for breaking into and ransacking an elderly woman’s house armed with a baseball bat. 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