Who won the war in an Irish town 1 ? From the tyranny of fear to fear of freedom

Abstract

Sartre once said that in football, ‘. . . everything is complicated by the presence of the opposite team’. This observation can be applied to events in the last decades of 20thcentury Northern Ireland. When writing about that period and its principal actors, it is axiomatic that the insurgency was a long time in the making. Indeed, it could be argued that it is at the heart of the matter of these two important assessments of the fate of the long insurgency in the north of Ireland (1969–1998) and that of the leading actor in that insurgency, the Provisional IRA. While both books offer a sympathetic assessment of the origins of the conflict, they provide different orientations in their focus on actor volition and history. Yet, there is a rather large elephant in the room, more evident perhaps in O’Ruairc than Finn, as we shall see. Daniel Finn is concerned with the lineage and trajectory of the Provisionals in the context of periods of colonial and then imperialist control. By contrast, Liam O’Ruairc addresses the question of the nature of the outcome of the armed struggle judged in relation to the origins of the conflict in the history of the repressive Orange State (Northern Ireland) and the means pursued by the Provisional IRA to end the myriad injustices that characterized that state. For O’ Ruairc, the modus operandi of armed struggle was an illchosen means by which the Orange state would be defeated and the outcome, judged from his standpoint, was at best of limited gain if not in the end fruitless. More than this, it leads to the defeat of those who needed most but lost most during the war and the incorporation and subordination of those they fought with, and for, during the insurgency. Because both books, albeit from different intellectual traditions and current political commitments, base 1018014 CNC0010.1177/03098168211018014Capital & ClassExtended Book Review book-review2021