A few weeks ago on Twitter, Colin Barrett, the fiction writer from Mayo, struck a nerve when he wrote: “Massive respect to everyone still experiencing time as a linear sequence.” Elsewhere on the social media platform, Northern Ireland’s past is made present on a daily, if not hourly, basis. Atrocities and trauma are remembered, often solemnly, but often to score digital points in the never-ending litigation of the conflict.
Just a decade ago it was harder to recover specific details of specific killings beyond the most notorious acts. Those acts where placenames are instantly associated with carnage – La Mon, Greysteel, Kingsmill, for example. But many individual killings, not least killings of individual members of the security services, tended to disappear into statistics to which we are desensitised. There is now a Twitter feed named “On this day the IRA” which recounts, with the aid of archive news images, the details of Provisional IRA activities on most days of the year.
Acts of remembering are both profoundly important and inevitably political: the reason for the aforementioned Twitter feed was a stated belief that republican narratives – including republican acts of remembrance – were being left unchallenged online. There is certainly much truth to that. But while social media allows for – indeed relies on – challenge and the assertion of a counter-narrative, it deliberately eschews nuance and actively discourages users from acknowledging complexity.
As these platforms have become dominant in the discourse, the absence of any agreed political approach to the legacy of the Troubles has made the problem ever more acute. The anaesthetic of goodwill created by the peace process has long since worn off.
If we are to dwell on the past, it is good that we are seeing rigorous writing about it. To Patrick Radden Keefe’s Say Nothing, which centres on the murder of Jean McConville, can be added Ian Cobain’s cool and careful Anatomy of a Killing, which documents the murder of a 36-year-old Royal Ulster Constabulary officer, Millar McAllister, in his home in Lisburn on April 22nd, 1978.
The book’s title is interesting, implying dissection and examination – both of which it does with care and research, piecing together the planning and carrying out of McAllister’s killing by a west Belfast active-service unit.
But Cobain takes more than half the book to get to the account of the killing. The narrative starts by introducing us to the victim and his assassin, Harry Murray, both working-class Protestant men born a few years apart. (Murray is notable for being one of very few active Protestant IRA members during the Troubles.) We find out details of their biography that will become relevant: Murray and his Catholic wife were harassed out of a loyalist area; McAllister’s greatest passion is pigeon racing.
Background
There the narrative pulls back and pans over the broader story of Northern Ireland in 1978 and the years leading up to it. Both the IRA and British military had by then evolved into entrenched positions after political initiatives and ceasefires collapsed earlier in the decade. A new, attritional “long-war” strategy, developed and advocated by Gerry Adams and his allies, emphasised attacks on security forces.
Almost simultaneously, Whitehall and military brass moved towards an approach that came to be known as “Ulsterisation”, where English and Scottish squaddies would be increasingly replaced by locally-recruited Ulster Defence Regiment soldiers, a regiment which had been created to supersede the gendarmerie functions of the RUC.
These two strategies had the consequence of increasing the volume of close-quarters assassinations on the usually young, frequently working-class Protestant men who filled the ranks of the security forces. That in turn created a specific and deep wound: the belief among some that IRA assassinations against off-duty police and security force members represented a de facto ethnic killing campaign against Protestants.
And that belief remains an open sore in our politics: Sinn Féin politicians have at times disclaimed or even condemned individual IRA bombs, often when it has proven politically essential in the Republic. But there have, as yet, been no moves by republicans to publicly re-evaluate murders such as that of McAllister, whose banal hobby of pigeon fancying brought about his death, after an IRA man recognised his face while inside the notorious Castlereagh police station. His face only registered because he had a regular column in an obscure pigeon magazine with his picture in a byline next to it.
After the killing, Murray travelled back to Lisburn later in the day to play a game of football. The female IRA operative who transported the gun went shopping to kill time before the operation.
These details are certainly shocking but Cobain is also careful to place them in a historical, political and social sweep. He carefully locates Lisburn in its place in Irish history and in the Northern Ireland of 1978: a garrison town, with a high proportion of security service residents, that had until that point been seen as a relatively safe haven for them and their families.
That too has a historic context: in 1920, in response to a previous IRA assassination in Lisburn (of Royal Irish Constabulary inspector Oswald Swanzy, blamed by Michael Collins for the killing of Tomás Mac Curtain) a large proportion of the town’s Catholic-owned businesses were attacked and the population fled. By the time Murray shot McAllister a few feet from the policeman’s four-year-old son, Lisburn was changing again, with new estates from republican west Belfast encroaching on the outskirts of the town.
The book does not spare in describing the brutality visited upon different groups – from targeted police officers to casually brutalised working-class nationalist men – nor in acknowledging the ambiguity of the uneasy settlement left behind. The author is careful not to let overt moral judgment intrude on his account – other than his inability to hide his contempt for the tub-thumping martinet Roy Mason, the then Labour Northern Ireland secretary.
Cobain’s restraint is not a failing. There is plenty of space for the reader to come to a decided moral response. Understanding the complexity of our past does not mean we ignore the obscenity of it.
Matthew O’Toole is an SDLP MLA for South Belfast
