CBR Bingo: History
I’ve been doing a lot of Irish fiction and poetry over the past couple years, and informative as both of those can be
about the past, sometimes you just need to read some history, too. So I have been picking my way through this fairly exhaustive history of the IRA from its early days in Ireland’s revolutionary decade up through the immediate post-Troubles era. And between everything else I was juggling, it took me a solid six months to finish this one, but it was a highly worthwhile read.
The less glowing reviews on Goodreads and such tend to remark that English’s prose is dry, and that he isn’t seeking to draw the reader in, which is true: English is an academic historian and this book was first published by Oxford University Press, so it’s frankly not aimed at a lay reader. English isn’t trying to present to you the compelling lives of IRA members, but rather how an organization changed and modified itself over and over again throughout the twentieth century in order to match its moment. He’s also highly focused on the intellectual ground and formation of the IRA and how this informed or clashed with its actions out in the world, too, and this can be dryer stuff to get through.
But having taken it all in, it’s a valuable and highly intelligible work, and one that was useful for my own teaching. English isn’t aiming at hot takes, but he presents some spicier examinations of key moments, such as the notion that the civil rights movement in Northern Ireland, while wishing to transcend the sectarianism of the place and time, ironically can be seen as having deepened it: not maliciously, but because its connection to nationalism would of course provoke a disproportionately defensive response from unionists. He also carefully parses the tension between, say, the IRA’s Catholic roots as well as its frequent Marxist/socialist underpinnings, as well as its uneasy alliances, i.e. accepting money and arms from Irish-Americans during the Troubles while simultaneously buying weapons from American foes like Libya. A couple of professional reviewers, while generally quite favorable on the scope and scrupulousness of English’s work, also questioned English’s optimism that peace could have been reached sooner, suggesting he perhaps is too light on the intransigence of the unionist opposition to the claims of either nationalists or civil rights activists.
English (the irony of that name! which he himself is quite aware of) was born in Northern Ireland, to a Protestant family, and while he only allows himself to reflect on the very personal stakes of this subject in the final pages, the book demonstrates what seems to be an earnest effort to take the IRA seriously as an organization with complex motives and genuine grievances without letting it off the hook for its inconsistencies and violence which too often worked itself out on civilians rather than military, paramilitary, or law enforcement targets.
Tim Pat Coogan’s The IRA might be a more digestible read for a mass-market audience (several Goodreads reviewers expressed a preference for him), but this was still a strong (if slow) read in its own right.
