A fateful year.

Hanley, Brian

ALAN F. PARKINSON'S NEW BOOK is a welcome addition to the growing literature examining the genesis and early years of the Northern Ireland conflict. In recent years Thomas Hennessey (Northern Ireland: The Origins of the Troubles and The Evolution of the Troubles 1970-1972), Simon Prince (Northern Ireland's 68: Civil Rights, Global Revolt and the Origins of the Troubles) and Anthony Craig (Crisis of Confidence: Anglo-Irish Relations in the Early Troubles) have added to our knowledge of these key years. My own The Lost Revolution (co-authored with Scott Millar) also examined this era from the perspective of the republican movement. The work being carded out on the early "Troubles" is important because for many who lived through them, they are now distant, if not happy memories, and for a younger generation they are simply history. The majority of students I teach have no personal memory of the Northern Ireland conflict at all, let alone of its early phase. So this book, dealing with the single bloodiest year of the conflict, is important, simply for telling us what happened.

Parkinson, as the author of Belfast's Unholy War: the Troubles of the 1920s, has already dealt with the subject of earlier political violence in that city. In this book he casts the net wider, encompassing not just the impact of conflict across Northern Ireland, but in the Republic and Britain as well. The ferocity of the violence during 1972 alone makes it worthy of study: nearly 500 deaths, thousands of injuries, car bombs across the North as well as in Dublin, Cavan and Aldershot, and escalating sectarian assassinations. The fact that the British army lost 108 regular soldiers in 1972 is indicative of the intensity of the conflict. This figure compares almost exactly to the worst British annual losses in the current Afghan conflict. 1972 also saw the first sustained campaign against locally recruited Ulster Defence Regiment soldiers and policemen. The particularly callous killing of a Catholic bus driver and part-time UDR man in Derry was an indication of how this campaign would develop. Over 60 IRA volunteers, many very young, also died during 1972, over half in premature explosions. But the biggest single fatality category was non-combatants: over 250 men, women and children lost their lives. Some were shot by soldiers, often in circumstances where it was clear they posed no threat; many were blown up while shopping, traveling to work or enjoying a drink in their local pub; others, mostly Catholic, were deliberately targeted by death squads in Belfast or elsewhere; and some were killed (by the British army, the IRA, or Loyalists) because they were mistaken for somebody else.

ALAN F. PARKINSON 1972 AND THE ULSTER TROUBLES. DUBLIN: FOUR COURTS PRESS. 2010. 35 [euro].

Parkinson, who himself lived through 1972 in Northern Ireland, manages to convey something of the chaos and fear of that year. The book's strength is its use of oral material from interviews conducted by the author as well as memoirs and contemporary sources. In this way we get some sense of what Bloody Sunday, the Aldershot bombing, Bloody Friday, Claudy and all the other horrors of 1972 felt like for those who were there. Parkinson is also good at including the voices of those at the sharp end of the conflict: not just members of the IRA or the RUC, but also hospital staff, firemen and bus drivers (who were disproportionably affected as rioters and pammilitaries invariably targeted buses for hijackings). But he does not neglect the wider picture. 1972 saw several events that had long-lasting impacts: Bloody Sunday in January, the abolition of Stormont and the implementation of direct rule during March, the granting of de facto political status to republican prisoners following hunger strikes during June, the fragmentation of Unionism and the growth of the Vanguard movement and the UDA, and two IRA cease fires (one by the Officials and one by the Provisionals). During the Provisional cease fire in June, key members of the IRA leadership were flown to London for top-level talks with the British government. There is no doubt that this represented the Provisional IRA's "Camelot" period (as it is described by one activist in the book). Successful prison escapes, dramatic gun battles and for the first time in fifty years something approaching mass support, gave them every indication that 1972 would indeed be the "year of victory." One of Parkinson's interviewees, Martin Meehan, a senior Belfast IRA activist in 1972, conveys something of this in his contributions. But for many others, not just Unionists, the violence seemed not to be coming to a "successful" conclusion but rather dragging society down into an openly sectarian war. Civil war looked increasingly likely, as thousands of uniformed UDA members marched in Protestant districts, and Unionist leaders such as Bill Craig talked about "liquidating" their enemies. While Loyalists had already killed fifteen people in a bomb at McGurk's Bar in north Belfast the previous year, 1972 would mark the real beginning of the constant targeting of places of recreation, which would soon define life in certain areas of Belfast for years to come. While Parkinson's relentless descriptions of kidnappings and killings, pub bombings and drive-by shootings might cause some readers to wish for more analysis, I think that they are justified as they depict something of the atmosphere of the time. Parkinson is also able to illustrate some of the complexities of the era; despite all the chaos, ice-cream vans still did their rounds in housing estates, people still went to see movies and showbands, and children continued to go to school. Some places were much more acutely affected than others and even in 1972 middle class districts experienced far less disruption than the working class areas of Belfast, Derry, Newry and mid-Ulster. Many, of course, encouraged by the various peace movements and initiatives that emerged that year, assumed that the violence could not carry on forever. It is safe to say nobody assumed that the war would last thirty years.

There is a welcome chapter on "Southern views," and Parkinson notes the impact of both Bloody Sunday and Bloody Friday in the Republic. For a period in early 1972 the very foundations of the southern state were shaken by the events north of the border, and though the state stabilized remarkably quickly, too many accounts of the conflict pay scant attention to this. He rightly notes the arrival in the south of over 5,000 people during July 1972; a recurring theme of southern life in the early 1970s was the growth in numbers of northerners living in the Republic, which directly challenged southern perspectives on the conflict. Parkinson does, I feel, fail to convey the intensity and spread of agitation in the South after Bloody Sunday, when there were three days of strikes and protests, culminating in the burning of the British Embassy in Dublin. In dealing with the bombs in Dublin during December (which left two dead), he underestimates the impact this had on southern attitudes. The bombs could be heard by TDs debating the controversial Offences against the State Act in Dail Eireann and convinced many of them that the very safety of the state itself was in imminent danger. The identities of those who planted them are still a matter of speculation, and British intelligence operatives were certainly active in several mysterious operations in the Republic at that time.

I take issue with the author's interpretation on occasion. He often misunderstands the relationship between the Official IRA (OIRA) and the civil rights movement. While he talks about the Derry civil rights marchers' worries about what the "maverick" OIRA might do on what became Bloody Sunday, it is important to note that the most senior O1RA officer in the city, Malachy McGurran, was also a member of the executive of the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association, the organizers of the march. In that sense, the civil rights organizers should have actually had a clearer idea of what the OIRA were up to, than for example the potential tactics of the local Provisionals, many of whom were of the view that civil rights marches were irrelevant. The OIRA's Seamus Costello did not personally take part in the Aldershot attack and that bombing was planned prior to Bloody Sunday. On a more mundane note, Belfast's Andersonstown is misspelt "Anderstown" throughout the book. Nevertheless, this book is an important and valuable reminder of the real horror of the "Troubles."

BY BRIAN HANLEY

--St. Patrick's College DCU