review This year marks the 50th anniversary of the formation of the Provisional IRa. This new book, One Man’s Terrorist: A political history of the IRA, is therefore a timely study of this movement. seán BuRns looks at the book and the lessons that can be learned for today. Napoleon once said, “History is a fable agreed upon”. In Northern Ireland, there is no agreed upon history, or rather there are multiple competing accounts. In nearly all of these, the independent role that the working-class has played is written out. Unfortunately, the author of this book also falls into this trap. One Man’s Terrorist is an account of the political developments of the Irish republican movement, with a particular focus on the North. The introduction begins with quite harrowing statistics of the death and injury toll during the conflict known as ‘the Troubles’ comparative to the population of Northern Ireland. “They were the equivalent of 125,000 deaths and nearly 2 million injuries in Britain”.1 This immediately puts the scale of the Troubles into perspective. Many workers and young people lost their lives, and tens of
thousands were either injured or imprisoned during the conflict. The severe mental strain placed upon the population has yielded an extraordinarily high rate of suicide and mental health problems which continue to express themselves today. More people have died as a result of suicide since the ceasefires than were killed over the course of the conflict. The divisions which drove the conflict have not been resolved. They continue to largely define the political terrain in Northern Ireland to this day, more than 20 years after the Good Friday Agreement. The ‘ceasefire generation’ got a taste of the reality of paramilitary violence in the killing of Lyra McKee, a young journalist who was shot dead by a ‘dissident’ Republican gunman during a riot in Derry. Her killing sparked widespread anger. Vigils and protests were organised by her friends and family, as well as sections of the trade union movement. The popular sentiment was ‘no going back’ to the days of the widespread violence. The armed dissident republicans who continue to wage their “war” are, on the whole, marginalised but still able to connect with some of the most hardpressed sections of Catholic working-class youth, in areas such as the Bogside and Creggan where poverty and unemployment are facts of life. These are the conditions out of which paramilitarism can redevelop if an alternative is not posed. The existence and 31 l SocialiSt altErNativE l SuMMEr 2020
