The Irish War: The Hidden Conflict Between the IRA and British Intelligence

Tony Geraghty has done a spectacular job of recounting the Troubles. He is objective and lays the blame of the conflict at the doorsteps of all of the belligerent's, the UDA, the British government, and the IRA. If I can find any fault with the author it is that he dramatically overestimated the IRA's ability in the late 60's and early 70's to subvert the civil rights movement. His most intelligent insight about the Troubles was that the British government failed to create and implement policies which would undercut the underlying cause that fueled the insurgency, discrimination against Catholics, and thus were left to fight a war that one SAS veteran described as 'a war without a strategy run with some times brilliant tactics'.

Tony Geraghty is uniquely well-placed to write this history, whose fine and precise balance surpasses the best Fairbairn-Sykes has to offer. No one can ever legitimately accuse Geraghty of favouritism in this fight, since he despises all three sides equally and with a perfect hate.A British Airbrone Vet born in England of Roman Catholic Irish immigrant parents, Geraghty was personally decorated by American General Norman Schwarzkopf. While reporting from Ulster, he had the distinction of being assaulted twice in one afternoon, first by Paisleyite irresponsibles, then by Rampart-like RUC uniforms. He was also arrested at gunpoint for curfew violations at the Falls, and interrogated at gunpoint by the PIRA. In 1998, the British Ministry of Defence's "Admiral's Gestapo" Inquisitioned him over this very book. There is one other important qualification not presently mentioned. In the late 1970's, Geraghty was nearly murdered by British mercenaries headed towards Angola, after he had taken the trouble to help them find replacements in the UK. One of these mercs had been dishonourably discharged from the Paras for running guns to Loyalist paramilitaries.Geraghty exposes Eddie Fitzgerald, O'Neill's Fenians, Wolf Tone Loc, Casement, Pearse and Connolly as embittered, vindictive idle RIF'd has-beens, salon-dwelling poseurs, and otherwise pathetic losers-without-a-clue. His linking of pre-1922 history with the current Troubles is the one weakness of the book. Before 1922, Ireland was genuinely occupied by England/Britain, and the majority of the population did suffer bona fide repression at the hands of various English/British organisms and persons. After 1922, however, Ireland was as free as America and Rhodesia, and chose to become a sectarian theocracy in the manner of Iran and Afghanistan. The majority in Ulster elected to retain their British identity, and the Williamite guarantee of freedom of worship, known to Americans as the First Amendment.This detail, however, pales in comparison to Geraghty's comprehensive and morally unassailable unmasking of the Sinn Fein/PIRA mafia as, in the words of Roman Catholic Priest Father Dennis Faul, "a crazy outfit" that "should be disbanded." He shows how virtually the entirety of Irish Catholic identity is defined as the negation of being "not British." He exposes how violence in Ireland, instead of being a means to justify an end, is rather an end in and of itself, as reflected in 1960's IRA capo Cathal Goulding's whining that Irish Americans would not send him money unless violence was involved. Similarly, he points out how the Republican murder machine operates unencumbered by Good Friday.Geraghty also goes out of his way to remember the Catholic victims of Nationalist terrorism: Bob Nairac; thirty-seven year old Jean McConville, mother of ten, abducted and "disappeared" because she gave comfort to a wounded British soldier; nineteen year old Marta from the Bogside, tarred and feathered for dating British soldi