Killing Rage

I bought this book for research purposes, but was pleasantly surprised at the hold it quickly put on me. Collins certainly had the story telling ability the Irish are so famous for. If you have any interest at all in the situation (is that a euphemism or what) in Northern Ireland, this is definitely a book that belongs in your library.

I just got done with this book, and just got done reading some of the criticisms aimed at it.First, this isn't a prolonged analysis of the IRA stuggle. There are serveral book/sites that will give you that in cold, unemotional detail. Second, this isn't a balanced, objective look at the problems of Northern Ireland involving the IRA, Loyalists, RUC, and the British Army.This is an autobiographical account of ONE MAN's tale of being in the IRA. Collins isn't out to make friends here. He states honestly and openly about his cold heartedness of his vicitims and at other times about his agony over incorrect targets. And when you think he should feel guilty or upset, he tells you he doesn't. That is what makes this an honest tale for me.Collins made a career for himself in the IRA. About the time he was getting promoted, both in the IRA "nutting" squad and in Sinn Fein, he was really starting to feel used by the IRA, but couldn't find a way to quit. This was his state of mind when he was arrested by the Brits and held for 7 days, a policy designed to crack suspected terrorists, and one which he had held up under before.I really enjoyed this book. I'll never look at the IRA again the same way. The movies tend to glamorize them, making them out to be a crack army of professionals. Read this book and you'll never think that way again.

"If I had to choose between my country and my friend, I hope I would have the courage to choose my friend" EM Foster. Collins chose the 'siren call' of tribalism, or country, and ending up killing at least one man who could have been his friend. He later hauntingly meets the man's daughter briefly. He admits that his Protestant neighbours had more in common with him than the Southern Nationalists with which he was supposed to be trying to unite. A deeply moving book, that makes one uneasy with what one thought were the certainties of Northern Ireland. One cannot read this book and come away thinking the IRA campaign justified, whatever the grievances suffered in the 1960s by Catholics in Northern Ireland. As good a memoir of a 'dirty war' as 'Despatches' about Vietnam, made worse by happening among Collins' workmates and in his home town.

This book was hard to put down. The author, Eamon Collins, was murdered shortly after the book was published. Collins touches every emotion as he takes you inside of the inner workings of the IRA. Not only do you learn how the IRA plans and carries out its missions, you receive a great deal of insight into human nature and the political conflict that has held Ireland in a grip for hundreds of years! I highly recommend this book. My copy has already been loaned out to a friend.

In the wake of Eamon Collins' murder at the end of January 1999, this account takes on even more force. As a posthumous record, this trenchant self-examination by an IRA volunteer from Newry in the 1970s turned--while in custody and only after repeated resistance--"grass" after years spent as an Intelligence Officer and then a member of "internal security" for the IRA gains its veracity from its unflinching look inside the mind of an idealistic Communist law student. Slowly, he transformed himself into the director of the "South Down Command" of a resurgent IRA, whose members carried out under Collins' command a number of killings of local figures linked (accurately but often inaccurately) to the RUC local part-time police who aided the British in the North of Ireland. As Fintan O'Toole, Dublin-based journalist, noted in an article after the killing, those thugs who avenged themselves upon the author--by bludgeoning him to death down the lane from his home--only seem to have proven ironically true what Collins had accused (by naming some names and barely concealing others in Killing Rage) those who still relied on such savagery of being--more ruthless brutes rather than principled fighters for a more just Irish nation. This same nation, throughout its occupation by Britain, has been often betrayed by informers, and so has little compassion for "touts." In a small town where both his friends and many enemies lived alongside him, Collins' narrative details step-by-step how his youthful idealism turned into detached, weary plotting and then killing against others he lived and worked with every day. Trying to fight British occupation, Collins could not fight his own descent into bitter self-recrimination. The methods used to resist weakened his inner convictions; the gap between high-mindedness and low-life executions became too great, and Collins describes his plunge into self-hatred as he began to hate others more than love a hope for a free Ireland. Whether writing this book--as a husband on the dole with a wife and family of four--was an act of courage or foolhardiness, Collins certainly stuck to his determination to make amends for his own past deeds and to begin to agitate peacefully for a united island. Those who silenced him cannot also silence this disturbing, essential autobiography. Any reader who seeks to understand the mixture of high motives and sordid practice which has sadly congealed into the mindset of many IRA volunteers should begin here, with one of the very few (and undoubtably the best) accounts from an IRA man himself. (It's instructive to compare his autobiography with those by Ernie O'Malley from the Irish Civil War of the early 1920s, by the way.) And, as Collins writes in his preface, we await similar accounts from those on the other side, those who still fight against one peaceful and united Ireland in the name of a foreign Crown. Collins' account deserves a careful reading; some may