This article from NYTimes.com

'A Secret History of the IRA': An Unfinished Conflict

November 10, 2002
By MURRAY SAYLE

Can the hope of the green-white-orange Irish flag -- peace
between Catholic and Protestant -- ever be realized? When
Ed Moloney, a respected journalist born in England and
educated in Northern Ireland, finished ''A Secret History
of the IRA'' earlier this year, the omens looked good. The
agreement signed on Good Friday, 1998, with papal blessing
and low-key American support, continued a cease-fire by the
mainstream Irish Republican Army, and its political ally,
Sinn Fein, had joined the power-sharing assembly in Belfast
to which Britain had transferred day-to-day government. But
the I.R.A. is still holding huge stocks of arms, mostly
from Libya and the United States; then, last month, a
senior Sinn Fein official was charged with having
information likely to be of use to terrorists, reportedly
on possible targets for assassination. Britain suspended
the Northern Ireland assembly to forestall a walkout by
hard-line Protestants. In the worst case, the killing and
maiming of 35 years of guerrilla war and savage
counterinsurgency resumes and Ireland, north and south, is
back at tragic Square 1.

Moloney, a former Northern editor of The Irish Times and
The Sunday Tribune in Dublin, begins his account in the
1960's, when the bitter seeds of the current cycle of
Ireland's Troubles were planted and the leadership still
dominant on both sides emerged. In his version (which,
having covered the same events for The Sunday Times of
London, I commend), Northern Ireland's repressive stability
was shattered, like that of many another unjust regime, by
over-timid attempts at reform. In 1965, with a reasoning
that still holds good, the patrician Protestant Northern
Irish prime minister, Terence O'Neill, met his Dublin
counterpart, Sean Lemass, a veteran of the 1916 Easter
Rising, arguing that Catholic acceptance of Northern
Ireland was needed to revitalize its economy and that this
meant giving Catholics fairer access to jobs and houses. A
fiery Protestant fundamentalist, the Rev. Ian Paisley,
warned of a sellout to Rome. Seeing their privileges
threatened, working-class Protestants formed ''loyalist''
gangs. In the summer of 1966, loyalists shot a Catholic,
Peter Ward, 18, caught in a Protestant pub; a Catholic
pedestrian was shot on the street; and an elderly
Protestant woman died in a botched bar firebombing -- the
first deaths of the present round. Inspired by the American
civil rights movement, young students, mostly Catholic,
formed their own protest movement, People's Democracy; in
1969, loyalists attacked a movement march, setting off
escalating sectarian violence and a Northern Irish
government request for British troops.

Welcomed as peacemakers, they soon aroused ancestral
memories of long-ago English invasions. Moloney notes that
many of the regulars were veterans of counterinsurgency
operations in Malaya, Aden and Kenya and unthinkingly
brought with them colonial perceptions of native treachery.
On Aug. 9, 1971, police officers and soldiers arrested 342
people, mostly Catholics, who were interned without charge
or trial, many on the strength of outdated intelligence,
mistaken identity or village gossip. Some were tortured.
Riots broke out all over Northern Ireland. On Jan. 30,
1972, Bloody Sunday, in a bungled attempt to bring the
I.R.A. to battle, British paratroopers in Londonderry
fatally shot 14 unarmed Catholic civil rights
demonstrators, none connected with the I.R.A. The British
Embassy in Dublin was burned, and young Catholics flocked
to join the terrorists. In 1972, the most violent year of
the Troubles, 467 people died.

The internment of old-line I.R.A. fighters -- Moloney
estimates there were no more than 50 still active in
Belfast -- cleared the way for younger militants still
unknown to the police. The ablest of them, Gerry Adams, was
18 and working in a bar in 1966 when, according to Moloney,
he was sworn into Company D of the I.R.A.'s Belfast
Brigade, in which his father had been wounded in an action.
On both sides the Adamses have deep republican roots
(meaning, in Irish terms, they favored the reunification of
Ireland at gunpoint if necessary). Adams was brought up in
Ballymurphy, an isolated Catholic ghetto on the western
edge of Belfast in constant danger of loyalist violence.

Adams, president of Sinn Fein since 1983, has never
admitted involvement with the I.R.A., but with his family
history this is hard to believe. More surprising, Moloney
reports that Adams has never personally ''fired a shot in
anger against the British or their local allies.'' Still,
he was briefly interned without trial in 1972, again in
1973, and then served three years for trying to escape. In
periods of freedom, according to Moloney, Adams rose to
command the Belfast Brigade and is credited with
introducing Armalite rifles bought with contributions by
Irish-Americans to the cause of ''Northern Aid.''

Adams shared his time in prison, Moloney reports, with a
group of internees devising a new strategy for the I.R.A.
Force was still favored to drive the British out but, to
achieve something ''during our lifetimes,'' Adams called
for a long war that, to retain the essential support of
Catholics, meant open political activity as well. In this,
Moloney says, lay the germ of the I.R.A.'s acceptance of a
cease-fire 20 years later. Most of Moloney's book is
devoted to the gradual evolution of this policy: years of
nonstop bloodshed, some 3,600 deaths to date, a slow-motion
World Trade Center in an area scarcely bigger than
Connecticut; of tragicomedy, like the racehorse held by the
I.R.A. for ransom, shot while trying to escape; and of
stomach-turning cruelty on both sides (the ''Shankill
Butchers,'' a Protestant gang who sliced their Catholic
victims with cleavers, and the ''human bombs,'' beginning
with a Catholic working for the army who was forced by the
I.R.A. to drive a car bomb into a base and was then blown
up). Moloney names a self-effacing hero, the Rev. Alec
Reid, a Redemptorist priest who acted as a tireless
go-between, and fills out the roles of other men of peace:
the Northern-descended Irish prime minister, Charles
Haughey, and the Nobel laureate John Hume, who risked his
Catholic support to meet Adams and convey plans for an end
to I.R.A. terrorism.

Through the many and devious policy shifts that led to the
1997 I.R.A. cease-fire, Moloney traces what he calls the
''golden thread'' of consent implicit in the principles of
nonviolence laid down by the mediator, and former United
States senator, George J. Mitchell: there are two
traditions in Ireland, as the flag acknowledges, and
peaceful reunification can be achieved only by negotiation
between them, meaning that a majority in Northern Ireland,
as well as a majority in the Irish Republic, must first
democratically agree. But Ireland also has two traditions
of lawless violence, not one; and the terrorists of the
loyalist side have not disarmed either, any more than the
I.R.A. has -- and neither is likely to give up its weapons
while the other side keeps its. A return to the sectarian
battles of 1972 onward is still a possibility --
pessimistically, until the current generation of die-hards
passes on.

It takes two to make peace; one side cannot unilaterally
cancel the hatreds of 30 violent years. Freelance,
unauthorized terrorism by unreconciled I.R.A. and loyalist
splinter groups goes on, and while most Catholics support
an all-party government in Belfast, the Democratic Unionist
Party of Ian Paisley, with his uncompromising watchword
''No Surrender!,'' emphatically does not. Paisley's
Unionist Party is attracting more and more Protestant
votes, forcing the moderate Ulster Unionist Party to harden
its stance against Sinn Fein. On a recent visit to Northern
Ireland, I saw heartening economic progress that gives
working-class Catholics and Protestants alike a stake in
reconciliation; mortgages and machine guns seldom go
together. In a telling aside, Moloney reports that Gerry
Adams, usually clad these days in politician's suit and
tie, dresses down to jeans and T-shirt to meet his old
working-class I.R.A. comrades. Moloney throws much new
light, though of necessity on only one side, on a far from
finished conflict. He's made an important contribution to
our understanding just the same.

Murray Sayle, an Australian journalist, gave evidence to
the new Bloody Sunday inquiry in Londonderry, Northern
Ireland, in June.

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/10/books/review/10SAYLET.html?ex=1038117238&ei=1&en=0c2f540748cf7ca7