Armed Struggle: a history of the IRA, Richard English

Between the Armalite and the ballot bo

The IRA has been probably the most gruesomely skillful guerrilla army of modern times. It is also perhaps the most intensely studied. Quite likely, the number of books published about the movement outstrips the number of fighters it could command at any time.

Richard English's study is the most probing and thorough analysis of the "Provies" ever. He ranges wider and uses a broader variety of sources than any previous writer. He seems to have read almost everything relevant, and has interviewed many key participants.

Armed Struggle deals succinctly with the movement's early history: the "Old IRA" who battled the British after 1918, fought bitterly among themselves, then lapsed into decades of irrelevance punctuated by bursts of pointless violence. By the late 1960s, as Northern Ireland groped towards reform and the Republic began to experience a new prosperity, the IRA's inherited certainties seemed redundant. Its leaders looked to a future of non-violent politics, and helped to create the Civil Rights movement.

As English shows, they unintentionally helped to unleash a new sectarian rage, which produced a split. The leaders who urged a political direction were elbowed aside by younger militants. More than 30 years later, the same men have followed, with agonising slowness, those they replaced down the road to "normal" politics. One of the old leaders, Cathal Goulding, lamented that in the Sixties, he'd been right too soon. Gerry Adams was right too late. In the meantime over 3,600 people had died, more than half killed by the IRA and its offshoots.

The most remarkable thing about Armed Struggle is the degree of objectivity English attains. His political views are strongly Unionist. His first book, on Irish Republican socialism, could not resist the temptation to portray the ideas of its subjects as silly and irrational. Here, he works hard to understand rather than condemn. He avoids loaded terms like "terrorist". Yet he also reminds readers of the dreadful suffering the IRA inflicted.

English cannot deny a measure of intellectual respect to his subjects. He looks at the remarkable prison library IRA inmates built up in the Maze. Its range demonstrates how seriously they took self-education and, in the mass of books about Marxism, anti-colonialism and Third World struggles, how passionately they saw themselves as part of a global fight.

The identifications may have been far-fetched; if Irish Republicans had been facing the South African or Israeli armies, there'd have been a hundred Bloody Sundays. Yet IRA activists' sense of internationalism helped make theirs more than just a sectarian war, and maybe helped some to envisage its end.

English says little on the cultural history of the IRA – how the movement celebrated itself in songs, murals, poems and prison literature. Little sense emerges of the day-to-day life of an IRA man. He might also have said more about the place of women. Still, Armed Struggle is an impressive achievement. Now we need a book as thoughtful and thorough on the Loyalist paramilitaries.