Provos: The IRA and Sinn Fein, by Peter Taylor, Bloomsbury 376pp, £16.99
This is the book of Peter Taylor's excellent television series on the IRA, shown on BBC over the past four weeks. During the last twenty-five years Taylor has built a justified reputation as by far the most knowledgeable British - or Irish - television reporter on Northern Ireland affairs. This is his fifth book on the "Troubles".
It is very much a journalist's book, with the strengths and weaknesses of the genre. It will certainly become the standard reference work for the next few years, superseding Eamonn Mallie and Patrick Bishop's book as the most accurate account of the republican side of the conflict so far.
Taylor's courageous investigative work in uncovering security force abuses - notably the RUC's beating of suspects in Castlereagh at the end of the 1970s - has long made him welcome in republican circles. The access he gained is reflected in some of this book's best passages, reproduced verbatim from television interviews with former IRA men. The English reporter's liking and admiration for the gunmen and bombers he is profiling often come through.
Thus the legendary north Belfast "hard man", Martin Meehan, tells of his pride in joining the IRA : "We had to come down in our best suits, in our ties and our shoes spit-polished. It was a big occasion, like joining the priest hood."
Billy McKee, one of the Provisionals' founders, and Brendan Hughes, former Belfast commander, emerge as near-heroic figures. McKee was badly wounded when he led the defence of a Catholic Church against loyalist attackers in the Short Strand enclave in June 1970, the first time the Provisionals emerged as a credible defence force in the Belfast ghettoes.
Hughes is one of Taylor's most valuable sources. His knowledge of the IRA in the 1970s is voluminous, whether he is talking about the build-up of the early days, the killing of British soldiers and being beaten and tortured by them in return, organising prison escapes or running the Belfast IRA from a posh house in the Malone Road while posing as a toy salesman.
Gerry Adams is a particularly impressive figure, a far-sighted strategic thinker from the mid-Seventies on. He "obviously had a terrific future ahead of him whatever he did, because of his qualities," comments Frank Steele, the MI6 man who facilitated the 1972 talks between the then IRA leadership, including the young Adams, and the then Northern Ireland Secretary, William Whitelaw.
Taylor quotes British officials who share his regard for the Provisionals' strategic and military capabilities. A Northern Ireland Office official told him many years later that the 1981 prison hunger strike, which laid the foundations for the Adams leadership's successful move into politics, was "a magnificent achievement". A senior London policeman describes the 1991 mortar attack on Downing Street as "technically quite brilliant".
However, if Taylor has a grudging admiration for the gunmen, the real heroes of this book are the unknown figures in the background who kept open the lines of communication between the British Government and the IRA for twenty-five years. Frank Steele comes across as a wise and prescient man, telling the IRA early on that violence would not drive the British out and the only way forward was for Republicans to start persuading Unionists that they would have "some sort of satisfactory life" through links with the South.
After Steele came Michael Oatley, who ran "fearful risks" to re-open channels to the IRA leadership. The intermediary on the Irish side was a Derry man whom Taylor calls the "Contact", who for more than twenty years worked with great courage and ingenuity to find ways by which the two sides might come together and end the violence.
What the reader will not find in this careful journalistic account is any sustained exploration of the psychology of those who took up the gun or the sheer terror they inflicted on the ordinary people of Northern Ireland. In this, it is inferior to Kevin Toolis's unjustly underrated Rebel Hearts, with its revealing insights into the lives of leading republican families, its chilling accounts of how informers live and die, and its attempts to explain the depth of the hatreds which fuel the conflict in rural Northern Ireland.
Many watchers of the television series were struck by how Taylor seemed to be treating the IRA's armed struggle in historical terms, as if it were now a thing of the past. His book ends on a more cautious note. "At the conclusion of all my many, detailed interviews with the `Provos', I asked one final question. `Is the "war" over? Very few of them said it was."
Andy Pollak is an Irish Times staff journalist