No I have not. To tell the truth I am not so interested about the IRA itself so I never read the book. Why not when I have time.
The substance of my point is somewhere else. It is that what ever one knows/thinks of the IRA or comparable organisations in other conflict situations (ETA etc. ) it is very easy to use these organisations to dismiss the sense of injustice that led to their creation and thriving.
Over many centuries Ireland went through traumatic events. Harsh foreign rule, plantations, repression etc. As a result of this History the Island is partitioned. Once has just to deal with this fact and be very careful.
That's a very interesting observation actually Freddie, one of the things I notice about the British view of Northern Ireland and the IRA etc is that it draws almost exclusively on information relating to events which have transpired since the beginning of the Troubles in the 1960's.
It's as though the the psychological and political space which this situation occupies for most British people extends no further than the RC civil rights movement and the British crack down which galvanized the reformation of the IRA (later known as the Provisional IRA) and the campaign it then waged on the British army and within the island of Britain itself.
Most British people are for instance completely unaware that as part of the process of having the Good Friday agreement endorsed by the people of Ireland on both sides of the border a referedum was held to change the Irish constitution to remove the section which directly claimed the six counties of Northern Ireland and viewed it as illegitimately occupied Irish territory and that essentially this change to the constitution amounted to a formal (though not necessarily final) end to the most significant political bone of contention between the governments of Ireland and the UK, a bone of contention which had existed at least since the adoption of the constitution but which in fact had existed ever since the signing of the treaty of the Irish Free State after the war of independence.
From an Irish perspective this extends the way the conflict in Northern Ireland is viewed to include the history of the war of independence and much of the history preceding it. Indeed for many people the conflict between the UK government and the IRA is in a very real sense only the most recent phase of a violent struggle which has defined much of this country's history for several centuries.
Naturally even with that perspective this does not mean that the actions of the IRA in Northern Ireland were viewed as the natural or morally justifiable or even inevitable outcome of those historical processes, and no one would claim that the Provisional IRA has ever enjoyed the kind of widespread or mainstream support which the Old IRA did during the war of independence. But it does mean that where the mainstream of Irish people have regarded the actions of the Provos with horror they have done so from an entirely different perspective.
When British people express their disgust at the actions of the hunger strikers, they often do so without any knowledge of Pádraig Pearse's potent justifications of the concept of "blood sacrifice" and how those justifications would have influenced the thinking of men like Bobby Sands. Whatever one may think about the hunger strikers they didn't exist in a historical or cultural vacuum, they viewed themselves as the latest in a long line of martyrs. Plenty of people simply saw them deranged murderers and criminals, but that doesn't make the opposite view or a more subtle view of them impossible or logically non-viable.
British people often also seem too ready to dismiss the conflict in the north as a sectarian one, and I'm not going to pretend that sectarianism wasn't a major, perhaps the most potent accelerant to that conflict. But the problem with writing off that conflict as a purely sectarian one is that it ignores a far more subtle set of information which adds non-sectarian, socio-economic and ethnic nationalist factors in to the mix. It has caused many British people, and indeed many poorly informed Irish people also, to view the entire Irish struggle for independence as a sectarian one, when that couldn't be further from the truth. Many of the greatest patriots of this country have been protestants, and many of the staunchest Unionists were Roman Catholics. The division along these lines only became more stark in the north because of a partition which concentrated a vehemently Unionist Protestant community in an almost closed cell in the six counties as though the distinction between the six counties and the rest of Ireland were a natural and ineluctable one.
Much as the partitioning of India gave the impression that areas of what had been northern India were almost exclusively Muslim zones when for centuries those areas had been as mixed as any other part of the subcontinent so the partitioning of Ireland gave the impression that Northern Ireland was an exclusively Unionist and Protestant zone of Ireland. In both cases the arbitrary imposition of borders warped public consciousness and engendered an entirely false kind of logic on the places they had divided.
I might add that MB's highly prescient comparisons above are extremely instructive and useful. I recommend anyone trying to understand this situation consider what she said carefully.
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