The Butcher's Bill

by Jack Beatty

THE IRISH TROUBLES : A Generation of Violence 1967-1992 by J. Bowyer Bell. St. Martin’s Press/Thomas Dunne, $35.00.

THE IRISH Troubles have not been an altogether fruitless agony. Belfast’s Royal Victoria Hospital, from twenty years of practice, has become a leading trauma center (“the best place in the world to be shot is the Lower Falls”), and the city has a name in medical circles for reconstructive knee surgery, its surgeons having grown nimble in restoring kneecaps blown apart by Irish Republican Army gunmen administering the savage discipline for which they are notorious. The Troubles have also been the subject of a gripping documentary film, Marcel Ophuls’s A Sense of Loss; have spawned moving poetry from Seamus Heaney and Thomas Kinsella, among others; have been woven through at least one outstanding novel, Bernard MacLaverty’s Cal, and superb short stories by Benedict Kiely and William Trevor; and, in Conor Cruise O’Brien’s States of Ireland, have even extruded a work of political theory. Now, with this book of J. Bowyer Bell’s, they have occasioned a monumental narrative history. Monumental in two senses: in its 855 smalltype, weekend-killing, engagementcanceling pages, and in its scholarship, style, and great-book tone.

Some 7,000 books and articles have been written about the latest round of the Troubles, which began only in 1967, and Bell appears to have read them all in working up his synoptic history, A former research professor at Columbia’s Institute of War and Peace Studies and currently the president of an international consulting firm, he is an expert on terrorism and counterinsurgency and the author of earlier books and monographs on the IRA. Thirty years ago he went to Ireland to spend a summer by the Barrow River, and the country caught him in its doomy spell—“I could not get away, ever.” He ends his foreword with a Joycean

J.B.B.
New York
Dublin
New York
1965-1992

that is testament to a dedication rare in these mercenary times.

The level of the writing in The Irish Troubles is consistently high; Bell never settles for mere denotative adequacy when eloquence will do. Whole dense passages read like prose poems richer in suggestion than they are in statement. Bell has a Conradian gift of phrase (“the reverberation of atrocity,” “normality by decree,” “the dynamics of brutality”) and a habit of ending paragraphs with terse summary formulations (“The republicans killed for the faith and the loyalists because they lacked it”) that fix his meanings in the mind. So much writing today is a kind of tonal imperialism. The writer, having found the grail of his “voice,”won’t alter it to fit the circumstances he is describing. Bell shifts his tone with the life under his pen. Now ironic, now sardonic, now elegiac, now tragic, his voice is at the service of his material, so that you don’t notice the writing for the feeling it conveys. Finally, as the fruit of his aesthetic commitment to language and its objectivity, Bell has managed to be as fair as humanly possible to all sides in this fearfully complicated war—“the most protracted armed struggle of modern times” —without diluting the deliverances of his exacting moral intelligence. No IRA man, no Protestant paramilitary, few decisively relevant British Ministers or Republic of Ireland statesmen, could read The Irish Troubles without confronting their varying complicity in murder and maiming.

Bell is not writing political history so much as “an analysis of the evolution of the gun in Irish politics since 1967”— for the gun, along with its more lethal cousin the bomb, has driven politics off the stage in Northern Ireland. Yet the gun did not enter into this latest round of the Troubles at the very outset; and for some months it appeared that nonviolent action would lead to justice for the oppressed Catholic minority in the North. That a story conceived in hope should become “an Irish tragedy in endless acts,” one spilling out of Ireland and into the shops of Manchester and London and the garden of No. 10 Downing Street, makes for sorrowing reading.

NORTHERN IRELAND is a province of the United Kingdom. That threshold fact about it is often overlooked by Irish-American nationalists, brave as lions from the safety of their barstools, prating their childishly simple solution to the Troubles: “Brits out.” Northern Ireland is part of the Brits. It has been so since it was created, in 1921, in the wake of the struggle for Irish independence that began in bloody earnest in 1919 and that ended with Britain’s abandoning the south of Ireland and the creation there of the twenty-six-county Irish Free State. T he six counties of the North remained British because a majority of the people who lived there did not then want—as they do not now want—to cease being British citizens. This majority, Protestant by religion on an island overwhelmingly Catholic, proceeded to set up a democratic despotism in Ulster, the ancient name of the province of which the six counties are a part, ruling over the Catholic minority left in the North after partition with what Bell rightly calls a “raw, crude, cruel politics of domination,” akin to though in some ways worse than the system of segregation in the American South.

In the late 1960s, partly influenced by the example of the African-American civil-rights movement, small groups of Catholics in Northern Ireland began organizing marches and demonstrations against gross inequities in public services and the denial by brazen gerrymander of basic voting rights for the minority. These marches and demonstrations were met with violence by the almost exclusively Protestant police force of the province, the Royal Ulster Constabulary, or RUC, and by mobs of angry Protestant civilians, who scorned the Catholics’ demand for fair treatment as a screen for the guerrilla-terrorists of the Irish Republican Army.

The IRA had never accepted the division of Ireland into two states and had mounted violent campaigns against the British connection down through the years. Nonetheless, when Protestant mobs burst into the Catholic ghettos in Belfast and Londonderry, the IRA was nowhere in evidence, having all but melted away a few years earlier, its dream of reuniting Ireland by force broken against the ramparts of the Northern Ireland garrison state. But when, in August of 1969, British troops had to be sent into the province to restore order and protect the Catholics—who served them tea and cookies—from Protestant mobs, the IRA saw its chance to transform a semi-hopeful chaos into a war against Britain.

No more than Irish nationalists in America has the IRA ever recognized the Protestant majority of Ulster, Irish all, as the chief obstacle to its ambition. If it did, it would see how insanely counterproductive its bombings and assassinations are, each outrage pushing the Protestant majority deeper into intransigence, into loyalism to the British crown, into hatred of the Republican dream. No; as Bell is at pains to show, for the working-class gunmen of the IRA, raised on race memories of “perfidious Albion,” as for the great Irish revolutionary hero Wolfe Tone, the one obstacle, the sole enemy, is the British imperial state, the everlasting source of all Ireland’s “political evils.” The 3,000 people killed in the Troubles so far have died for a neurotic fantasy, a demand that the present repeat the past. Yeats said it years ago, during the earlier Irish Troubles: “We had fed the heart on fantasies/The heart’s grown brutal from the fare.”

Ever since the IRA launched its war, with weapons and money supplied by Irish-Americans who would never be held accountable for subsidizing murder far away, the dynamics of brutality have taken over in Northern Ireland. IRA killings provoke excesses from the security forces, which provoke sympathy from Catholics who are not ordinarily pro-IRA (the overwhelming majority), which provokes Protestant militancy and Protestant terror, which provoke more IRA killings, which provoke the security forces to yet more grisly excess, which provokes the Catholics, who provoke the Protestants in a cycle of hatred and revenge. There have been efforts to restart politics in the North, notably the so-called Sunningdale Agreement of 1973, which would have allowed Catholic parties to share power in a considerably devolved government. But a Protestant general strike smashed Sunningdale, as one would no doubt smash any future efforts along similar lines. So the gun has ruled, and much of Bell’s book is a casualty list, a tale of babies run over by fleeing gunmen, old men gunned down on their doorsteps, British soldiers blasted to bits by bombs, innocent passersby shot up in British ambushes, interned Catholics tortured by their British captors, Protestant gunmen hacking the faces off Catholic victims, Republicans shooting other Republicans to settle pathetically petty feuds, and Provisional IRA hunger-strikers dying for their wretched, cruel, impossible dream.

“Dirty wars have no heroes, only victims,” Bell writes, and though the number of Troubles victims is small next to the harvest of mayhem in our cities (“In less than two years more people are murdered in New York City than were killed in twenty years of the Troubles”), that is no comfort to the bereaved.

“The problem had no solution—that was the problem”: thus Bell summarizes the pessimism that is realism about the Troubles. Though he relates the hopeful details of the agreement on security and symbolism reached by the Dublin and London governments in the mid-1980s, the pessimistic view is one he seems to share. British withdrawal from Ulster, once advocated by Paul Johnson in his New Statesman days, would mean capitulation to the few dozen gunmen of the IRA and might even trigger civil war between Protestants and Catholics. Cracking down even harder on the Provos, long advocated by the Reverend Ian Paisley, the Protestant divine and Ulster incendiary, would drive an already militarized state to tyranny, and every gunman caught in the net would win the IRA ten recruits from among the mass of poor Catholics who would be its victims. Reform, the middle way, has not been tolerable to the Protestants, who want as much as the IRA to return to the past—in their case the past of safety and domination, which ended forever in Ulster with the Catholic civil-rights demonstrations of a generation ago. Moreover, even if by some miraculous conversion to common sense the Protestants embraced reform, it would be vulnerable in the short term to a standard IRA tactic— the use of promiscuous atrocity to polarize an already divided society. Of course, the IRA could eventually bomb the Protestants out of the North, make the place so miserable that they would up and leave. But that tremendous improbability does not seem likely to happen soon. Meanwhile, for the people of Northern Ireland, Protestant and Catholic alike, “There are years to go and butcher’s bills still to pay.”