IRISH HISTORY: The last 30 years have seen a vast array of studies of aspects of the Northern Ireland conflict, many of them by journalists with good contacts amongst the various state, paramilitary and political groups involved. Ed Moloney's A Secret History of the IRA is a superior example of that genre, writes Ed Moloney
Despite its title, however, it is not about the Provisional IRA but about Gerry Adams MP, the president of Sinn Féin and the acknowledged leader of militant Irish republicanism.
Adams is reportedly unhappy with Moloney's claims about his military role in the Northern Ireland conflict, but it is hard to see why. He emerges as a political strategist and party leader sans pareil, a man who, for more than a quarter of a century, has moved inexorably away from traditional republican millennarianism and towards more limited though highly ambitious political goals, and who has managed to bring the bulk of the republican movement on both sides of the Border with him. In the course of this journey he has made Sinn Féin into the dominant political force in nationalist politics in the North, and has secured the party a significant niche in Dail Éireann. Incongruously for a man whose party currently clings to the decayed anti-capitalist shibboleths of state socialism, he has since 1994 been repeatedly fêted by corporate America and he remains a respected visitor to the Bush White House.
For Adams, the peace process started not with the Hume-Adams dialogue of 1988 but in the late 1970s, when he began to reflect on the political possibilities for Irish republicanism on both sides of the Border. It has reached a point where mainstream republicanism now accepts the interim legitimacy of Northern Ireland, of British rule, and of the 26-county Irish republic.
Adams and the British government appear to have agreed one thing as early as 1980: he was the key thinker in the Provisional movement, and he was likely to be the man who could eventually negotiate a settlement which would end republican violence. The intermittent dialogue with the British government, built up in the wake of the 1980-81 hunger strikes and maintained throughout the horrors of the succeeding decade, was managed on the British side by intelligence officers, on the republican by trusted intermediaries such as the Redemptorist priest, Father Alex Reid. Moloney argues that Adams's planned path towards peace was necessarily a highly secret one, its implications concealed from many of his military and political comrades - though not from the British and Irish governments - until very late in the day. This, he argues, explains the apparent contradiction between the IRA spectaculars of the late 1980s and early 1990s and the secret word Adams was putting out to the two governments.
Moloney points to suspicions among some republicans almost too terrible to name: that some of the disasters which befell the IRA in the late 1980s - the capture of the arms-laden Eksund, and most spectacularly the Loughgall and Coalisland ambushes in 1987 and 1992 - were the result of treachery at very senior levels within the organisation. Such betrayals had the incidental effect of weakening dissident forces in the republican movement.
The book has its faults. Moloney's narrative hops backwards and forwards, beginning in 1987 with the complicated and indeterminate story of the interception by the French of the Eksund. The policies and actions of successive Irish governments up to the late 1980s receive little comment, yet it is plain that the consistent rejection of IRA violence in the Republic, together with the deepening of Anglo-Irish dialogue after 1972, were crucial for Northern nationalists and also encouraged Britain's redefinition of its interests and role in the North in the 1990s.
Of unionism, there is virtually no consideration, yet under Adams in the 1990s Sinn Féin obviously deepened its analysis of that contending ideology.
Despite its centrality to the argument about the means by which Adams imposed his will on the military arm, discussion of the IRA's structure and organisation comes only in dribs and drabs throughout the text. Finally, readers should be outraged by Moloney's repeated use of "gasoline bomb", a term unknown in Northern Ireland.
In public, Sinn Féin continues to adhere to the Belfast Agreement and to the Mitchell Principles, despite current embarrassments relating to Colombia, to arms purchasing, and to IRA targeting activities. For the party, a united Irish socialist republic remains a historic inevitability, but one which will now only be achieved by non-violent means and effectively with unionist consent.
In the meantime, Sinn Féin must content itself with interim aims, to be pursued through participation in the new institutions of the reformed Northern State, and in the hitherto despised Southern parliament, rather than by force of arms. The next time Martin McGuinness addresses the republican movement in open forum or in secret conclave, he can remind it that, while Irish unity may seem almost as far off as ever, in his final act as Education Minister last week he at last got rid of the 11-plus.
Is that, then, what the armed struggle was all about?
Eunan O'Halpin is professor of contemporary Irish history at Trinity College, Dublin. His edition of MI5 and Ireland 1939-1945: The Official History will be published by Irish Academic Press in November
A Secret History of the IRA. By Ed Moloney. Penguin, 601pp. £25