WHO is Jonathan Stevenson? Is the chairman of the SDLP also the American who has written We Wrecked the Place, (Free Press, New York) the finest work by a journalist on Northern Ireland's troubles? If so, then we should all watch out, for in the four years he has been here he has distinguished himself twice over. What will he be in another four years?
Wiser, perhaps. For the freshness and energy which Jonathan Stevenson brings to this work also has inclined him to believe what he is told. He lacks the scepticism which journalists in time embrace. But scepticism soon turns to cynicism, and that is a poor tool with which to explore a problem as vibrant and resourceful as the Northern troubles.
All sides in Northern Ireland tell stories - the British army, the RUC, the paramilitaries, government spokesmen, the lot. Lies, falsehoods, convenient myth, deliberate propaganda, all existing within a bacterial broth of overwhelming mutual incomprehension, form the most powerful single force in Northern Ireland. It is greater by far than any of the armed organisations at work, legal or otherwise.
Ghost Army
This ghost army of falsehood engaged in no ceasefire, for it predated these troubles, as it predated all other troubles. Its troops might be stood down for interludes, but they are never disarmed. Its skirmishers are out before Northern Ireland moves towards violence, stirring, reviving all fears, generating new fables; and the moment the first head is bloodied, the full army stands to, active on all fronts, the most powerful regiment in all of Northern Ireland's many regiments of war.
If the forces of law are one faction, loyalist paramilitaries another, republicans a third, the ubiquitous fourth force, Falsehood, arms them all. Falsehood rings throughout the pages of We Wrecked the Place, some of it detected by the author, some not. The Fourth Force was doing its duty in the tale of the Protestant lad, Robert Collins, who, we hear, wandered into a Republican area of North Belfast where he was mistaken for a British soldier, tortured and murdered and his tattoos cut from his arms and posted to his family.
I do not believe this. North Belfast republicans are certainly capable of sectarian murder - though such killings are normally done by the Catholic Defence League, the most secret of all paramilitary groups in Northern Ireland. But even the CDL would never have sliced the tattooed skin from a captured Protestant and sent it to the victim's family. And just as I am sure this story is not true, I am equally sure that Protestants believe it, and in a way, that makes the story true, much as the Fourth Force makes all tribal lies into truths.
Freed From Conscience
Such "truths" are essential. They validate one deed's and liberate one from one's conscience - as Ron McMurray was so freed by the story of Robert Collins as he set about massacring six Catholics in a revenge pub-bombing.
We read of another loyalist killer, Martin Snoddon, who presumably told Jonathan Stevenson that the pub he attacked was an IRA hangout. Certainly, the author reports it as such; in fact Conway's pub in North Belfast was anything but an IRA pub. It was, however, the softest of pubs for loyalists to conduct a massacre in because of its isolation. Not surprisingly, Snoddon killed no IRA men when he and his fellow terrorists attacked Conway's, but he did murder a 38-year-old mother, and we read that Snoddon was shattered with remorse; to which we may reply with a hoarse laugh - You rake a crowded pub with machine- gun fire and you expect your bullets to dodge women?
And we hear of "Grogary", a dentist and civil rights activist in North Belfast, who apparently threw bottles from his house at passing loyalists who replied by burning his house down "in the late `60s". The dentist was in fact Frank Gogarty, whose house was repeatedly attacked by loyalists from a neighbouring housing estate. Frank was constitutionally incapable of starting a conflict, and ironically, he had campaigned to have the working class estate built against the objections of his middle class unionist neighbours; his reward was the destruction of his home in the early `70s, not the late `60s. Yet curiously, the author uses the mangled version of the truth as evidence of the acuteness and candour of loyalist memory; in fact, it is proof of the enduring vitality of the Fourth Force.
Fourth Force Victim
For Jonathan Stevenson has, like everyone immersed in Northern Ireland's war, fallen, victim to the Fourth Force, though in fairness his wounds are - compared to most journalists - slight.
His deconstruction of IRA mythology and aggressive and unrepentant victimhood demonstrates the extraordinary power of myth and falsehood in governing these people's deeds, especially since he uses the words spoken by paramilitaries with whom he conducted extensive interviews.
His most chastening discovery was the complete lack of remorse on the part of republicans for whatever deeds they have done. However hollow the contrition of loyalists might sound, at least the words were uttered, repeatedly, by virtually all the Protestant paramilitaries he spoke to.
Such incessant expressions of regret finally must carry weight. But from the republicans, surveying the moral wasteland of the past 25 years, not a word of genuine regret, merely the formalised and ritualised expressions of the normal post-atrocity IRA apologies-to-the innocent, which have all the conviction of an abattoir-employee murmuring sorry, sorry, sorry as the bullocks shamble by.
In other words, the Fourth Force is still at stand-to, and will remain so, regardless of what "settlement" is on offer. For no settlement can disarm the Fourth Force, Northern Ireland's standing army whose hosts will peer through the gates of Stormont, with dangerolls murmurs rising from their ranks whenever politicians gather on the top of stone steps to shake hands and promise peace and plenty for all time.
The Fourth Force is poised, ever-ready with fire and fury, to wreck the place, and from unexpected directions. It was, after all, an English ex-RAF man whose name in Irish was Sean Mac Stiofain, who in 1971 thought sufficient IRA violence, "would end the conflict. It is an American, whose name in Irish is Sean Mac Stiofain, who wrote We Wrecked the Place in the belief that the troubles were coming to an end.
Both were wrong. But even in that error, the American Mac Stiofain is quite superb.