This book is a valuable contribution to the literature of the Troubles period and the history of the IRA.
Jonathan Trigg has secured interviews with several former British soldiers and IRA members, many under pseudonyms. This is new material.
The weaknesses in the book are that it is not strong on political analysis and that it accepts simplistic versions of key events such as the Battle of the Bogside and the Falls Road rioting of August 1969.
He says, for instance, that the 1971 internment raids were not extended to loyalists because of unionist pressure. Actually, this was on legal advice that such a measure could not be used against a force that did not threaten the state – the same logic by which the Irish government refused to intern IRA members at the same time.
Trigg is happy to describe the period of violence as a war, accepting terminology favoured by the IRA themselves. He writes of IRA activists in a tone bordering on admiration, apparently as one soldier respecting others.
That will grate with some who will prefer a more moralistic approach and will not like to read of murders being described as “successes”.
Trigg is a military historian. His strengths are in understanding military culture and warfare. It is almost endearing how he admits to occasional failings in his research.
One IRA man refuses to tell him what he was jailed for and he leaves it at that, when another researcher might have gone into the newspaper archives and found out.
He misses some important nuances. In a chapter about the south Derry IRA centred around Bellaghy, he attributes the reduced level of republican militancy in the area to the presence of the literary centre Seamus Heaney HomePlace, and the “thousands of tourists wandering around with their camera phones”.
Clearly he hasn’t been to Bellaghy lately.
However, he has secured the candour of several former Provos and soldiers, and this factor provides an understanding of their actions and their thinking that earns the book a place on the shelves of any serious future researchers or writers on the period.
One amusing detail is that the British army developed a remote control camera system for monitoring suspects but had to scrap it because those suspects would hear the click and the whirr of the film winder.
That wouldn’t be a problem with the technology of today.
