NORTHERN IRELAND: Richard Englishreviews Gunsmoke and Mirrors: How Sinn Féin Dressed up Defeatas Victory by Henry McDonald Gill and Macmillan, 206pp. €22.99
'THEY'VE TRIED to sell a defeat as a victory." So Marian Price described Sinn Féin and the Good Friday Agreement, when I interviewed her in Belfast in 2002. The ex-IRA woman will probably enjoy Henry McDonald's brilliantly provocative new book, Gunsmoke and Mirrors.
McDonald's aim is to undermine an emerging orthodoxy about Northern Ireland, namely that the Provisional IRA's violence was carried out "in order that somehow Ulster Catholics could become equal citizens in the North of Ireland".
The book reminds readers that the Provos' aim was in fact to destroy a Northern state which they then considered irreformable. During the 1970s and 1980s it was the SDLP, not the Provisionals, who argued from within Northern nationalism that the peaceful pursuit of equality was the best way forward, on the road to a consensual united Ireland.
McDonald is a lucid, honest and courageous journalist, and this book reflects those qualities. It points out some embarrassing truths. Despite the current vogue for referring to ex-paramilitaries as having been "combatants", one of the striking things about the Northern Troubles was how little head-to-head "combat" there actually was. And McDonald is clear about this, pointing out that only 10 republicans were killed in direct military confrontation with British forces during the whole 1969-94 period.
The book also reminds us that the IRA killed more people than any other agent in the conflict, and McDonald is insistent about what he calls "the overall futility" of their blood-stained campaign. For one thing, he argues that "for the last three and a half decades the IRA's message was constantly being delivered to the wrong address": the Provos sent their message to the British government, when in reality the greatest obstacle to a united Ireland lay closer to home in the unionist community.
And as this book also makes clear, for too many years the Provos effectively treated that latter community as a non-people.
McDonald rightly gives credit to those figures, such as Tom Hartley, who have played an admirable part in shifting republican attitudes towards a more serious understanding of unionism. And he is sharp-sighted too about the fact that others besides republicans pursued futile, ill-judged and at times very brutal politics over the past four decades.
He also rightly acknowledges the difficult work done by those who did end the violence in the North, among whom prominent Provos must be numbered. And he stresses the understandable resentments which the nationalist community in the North long possessed.
But the book's central target remains the Provisionals, whose campaign McDonald sees as having been an unnecessary and failed project.
He rejects the idea that the Troubles ended in a draw, instead seeing the Provos as having been defeated. Some will think the conflict in fact ended in stalemate, but that the IRA had always needed a win. Yet the truth remains that the Provos' "armed struggle" came to an end without their central objectives having been achieved.
A united Ireland had not been established, any more than Catholics had been protected by the IRA, or socialism brought any closer by Provo violence.
In McDonald's view, indeed, there are stark realities which demonstrate the true extent of the IRA's failure. In particular, there is the "fundamental fact about politics on the island - there were two states which were and still are very much places apart".
In September 1974, the SDLP claimed "The Provisional IRA can achieve nothing by carrying on their campaign of violence but they can achieve almost anything they desire by knocking it off".
Nobody's politics in the North - including the SDLPs - emerges from the Troubles unblemished. But the unarguable reality is that non-violent compromise is where we have ended up, and on the nationalist side this was recognised far earlier by the Provos' rivals than by themselves.
This compelling, powerful and important book suggests that the violence of the Northern Troubles was "utterly unnecessary" and that we could have reached our current settlement "well before one of the most futile mini-wars of the late twentieth century was ever started".
And its author observes, without any celebration, that "Northern Ireland meanwhile has ended up being run by the twin destructive forces of Provoism and Paisleyism".
• Richard English is the author of Armed Struggle: The History of the IRA and Irish Freedom and The History of Nationalism in Ireland, both published in paperback by Pan Books