This review was commissioned by Books Ireland at the end of 2005 and I submitted the following text in January 2006, conscious that it might need to be edited down. I am leaving it in full here. If it subsequently appears with cuts, these I will bracket.

This is an important book, and it does break some new ground. For the present writer (whose name occurs in the index) it helps to refine further the definition of the problem of what constitutes a nation, how a nation defines itself. The author Thomas Hennessy takes as given the ethnic-nationalist model which is embedded in the British imperial culture, and is dismissive of the civic/economic model which tried to emerge in the 1790s under Enlightenment influence, within which a Marxist class-based model might credibly have evolved.

The United Irishmen had a vision in which Protestant industry, constructively combined with Catholic commercial acumen, would have been able to develop a thriving modern economy, with food production in a land-reformed environment without parasitic aristocrats, in an emergent Europe dominated by democratic republics.

This the imperial-minded British saw as a threat, and they took the classical steps to 'divide and rule', enhancing the Protestant Ascendancy principle with the foundation of the Orange Order, and encouraging the Catholics to develop as a perceived threat to democracy by financing the foundation of Maynooth College with the aid of emigre priests from France. Both these events took place in 1793.

This I would see as the 'origin of the troubles': the nipping in the bud of the inclusive Enlightenment democratic republican model. The decades after the Union provided an environment in which this cultural division thrived. Despite this, successive attempts to develop national movements of one kind or another all had conscious participation by progressive-minded Protestants who clung to classical inclusive republican principles, against the rising tide of tribalist politics which the 'Protestant Ascendancy' environment favoured.

Hennessy however dates his 'origin of the troubles' from O'Neill's well-meaning attempts at reform, with a view to winning over the Catholics to support for Stormont and British rule. Partition he took as inevitable, a given. He doesn't even look into its origins in the Tory-Orange conspiracy which introduced the gun destructively in April 1914 into 20th century Irish politics, subverting the democratic constitutional Home Rule process; this is another genuine more recent candidate for the 'origin of the troubles', if going back to the 1790s is seen as too deep.

Hennessy however has done a service by giving an account of the British and Northern Ireland Establishment's view of the developing situation; his sources are almost exclusively the State records and the mainstream media, mostly the Belfast Telegraph. Once a reader accepts this as the perspective, it is a useful book. There are also useful insights from the Dublin State papers, giving insights into how the Republic reacted to the developing situation, for which they were quite unprepared. What is lacking however is the worms-eye view, from those who were attempting to influence the situation from below, though there is a nod in this direction towards the end, with some post-1969 comments from Goulding, O Bradaigh and others.

In Chapter 1 Hennessy sets the scene in terms of Protestant fundamentalism and the perceived Catholic threat, in which context the Lemass O'Neill meeting was seen as Lundyism, triggering the rise of Paisley. In Chapter 2 we follow the problems of O'Neill in the Unionist Party arising from his softening of the line; these were fuelled by the development of secret hard-line militant groups under Paisley influence, in response to the 1966 Easter Rising commemorations, seen as an external threat. Attacks on British-related locations in the Republic were seen in the North as evidence of this threat; in fact they had no relation to the republican movement, and were seen by contemporary politicising republicans as the work of agents-provocateurs or of head-cases under their influence.

I have trouble with Hennessey's Chapter 3, 'Catholics in the Six Counties', in which he treats their second-class citizenship as subjective, merely perceived, basing his researches almost totally on the Belfast Telegraph. He adds a section on the IRA, based mainly on the Special Branch data from the Irish national archive. This is dominated by the September 1966 Army Council documentation found on Sean Garland when arrested, which indicated the extent to which the IRA was attempting to politicise itself, under the influence of Goulding, supported by the present writer (who is named correctly as 'Director of Political Education').

The documentation however included also a draft 'military plan' which had originated with Mac Stiofain; this bore no relation to the political plan; it contained evidence of Mac Stiofain's EOKA-influenced background and it certainly was not the policy of the IRA leadership as it was then, while approximating to what emerged later under the Provisionals. Its juxtaposition however helped fuel the illusion of military threat during 1966, which the Special Branch in the North was then promoting.

The inclusion of this misleading section on the 1966 IRA as a sub-section of a chapter on the Catholics in the North is irrelevant and misleading. A serious chapter on the attempted 1960s IRA politicisation process would have made more sense, and the present writer has contributed source material for such a chapter in his book Century of Endeavour (Academica/Maunsel 2003, Tyndall/Lilliput 2006). I could have helped Hennessey had he asked.

In Chapter 4 'The Gathering Storm', which is fuelled mainly by newspaper reports, though this time with a higher Irish News ratio, we first meet the Republican Clubs and the NICRA, both however being dismissed as IRA fronts. No credit is given for our then attempt to introduce republican activists to the procedures of civil politics, nor to the attempt to link the civil rights campaign with the interests of democratic organisations of Protestant working people; this is dismissed as fantasy. There is a coy reference on p111 to the 1914 civil war threat as a factor influencing politicians in Britain against taking any interest in Ireland; he could have explored this further and given us a run-down on the forces behind the 1914 Larne gun-running, as my father tried to do in is 1913 book 'Civil War in Ulster' (re-published by UCD Press, 1999).

In Chapter 5 'London Intervenes' we get a blow-by-blow account of how the Wilson government attempted to persuade Stormont to implement local government reform and democratise the franchise, and how Stormont resisted. It also emerges how the role of the B-Specials contributed to worsening the situation, and how the invented threat of IRA intervention was used by Stormont to feed British contingency plans for military intervention. I can find myself beginning to agree with some of the analysis: the granting of police protection to the Peoples Democracy march that led to Burntollet was in fact a trap which pushed the civil rights movement into the Catholic ghettoes; the march succeeded in polarising all the communities it passed through.

Chapter 6 'Towards Disaster' covers the period February to August 1969, and includes the call by the Young Unionists for full use of the B-Specials as an alternative to 'weak and indecisive government'. It also mentions the Silent Valley explosion, which left Belfast without water; this was done by the UVF and blamed on the IRA, the objective being to overthrow O'Neill, who is replaced by his cousin Chichester-Clarke. There are references to B-Specials being used to 'protect' Catholic houses in Protestant areas, and to 'dilution' of the RUC with B-Specials, and much concern as to how military intervention might be handled. I must say that from this chapter I gain a distinct impression that somewhere in the undergrowth there did indeed exist a 'committee' planning the August 69 pogrom, with a view to provoking a serious re-invention of the IRA, being the enemy they needed to cement Protestant unity under the Unionist banner. McPhelimy's book I know is in discredit, but such a 'committee' would be quite capable of feeding him with enough disinformation to ensure their tracks were covered, and the author discredited.

Chapter 7 covers the August 69 events, again from official records and mainstream press, mainly the Telegraph. The sequence of events is correct; the NICRA in Belfast did attempt, under Gogarty's leadership, to organise a demonstration in support of the 'Battle of the Bogside' in Derry, at the request of McCann and the Derry activists, and this fuelled a Protestant backlash. This however was primarily PD and ultra-left influence; the republican clubs get no mention; there are however references to a concerted IRA insurrection in the Falls area, which is subsequently exposed for the nonsense it was by the people's complaints that there was no IRA to defend them. Yet the RUC was so convinced by its false intelligence that they deployed armoured vehicles along the border. Hennessey interprets the events as a fortuitous accumulation of acts based on false community perceptions. The chapter ends with the Downing St Declaration and the role of the B-Specials being questioned.

Chapter 8, the 'Cold War - Sept 69 to May 70' is dominated by the Cameron Report and the impact it had on the development of hard-core Protestant opposition; the analogy with the role of the 'poor whites' in the US post-Confederate States is noted. Then in Chapter 9 Hennessey goes in some depth into how the early Provisionals received active encouragement, including finance, from the Irish Government, key actors being Colonel Hefferon and Captain Kelly from the Army, and Haughey, Blaney and Boland in Government. The Fianna Fail government felt so threatened by the emergence of a political republican Left in the Dublin context that they were prepared to wreck it by funding the Provisionals. The key source of funding for Fianna Fail politics was, and remains, contributions from speculative developers derived from added-value due to land-rezoning, and this was beginning to be exposed; some details of this deep-rooted corrupt process are emerging currently via various Tribunals.

Hennessey's analysis reinforces for the present writer his conviction that influential elements in both British and Irish Establishments, for different strategic reasons, collude systematically in acting to keep the traditional IRA in existence as a means of preventing the emergence of an effective political Left, fit to unite working people irrespective of religion. Hennessy, from his ethnic-nation perspective, dismisses this as fantasy, but the evidence presented in this chapter suggests some trails to follow. The full story has yet to be told.

In his concluding chapter Hennessey homes in on what he calls an 'ideological black hole': the question of the existence of an Irish nation. I would tend to agree with this. There are two aborted unviable pseudo-national concepts: a 'Catholic' pseudo-nation and a 'Protestant' pseudo-nation. The key act in the abortion process was Partition, which was fuelled in 1914 by Tory gun-runners, in the context of what amounted to an anti-Liberal coup-d'Etat. British policy, pursued relentlessly since the 1790s, has been to prevent a unified Irish nation from emerging. It has been largely successful, and reinforced in the context of the 'troubles' by disastrous decisions of people without political experience, like the PD's march in January 1969 which provoked quite unnecessarily a Protestant backlash, and, much more destructively, by the decision of the Provisional Army Council in 1970 to go to war against the British State, which under left-Labour pressure was in the process of encouraging the Stormont Government to introduce a range of reforms which would have begun to make an inclusive republican political campaign feasible.

Overall, this is an important book, which manages to come to some positive conclusions, despite its flawed philosophical perspective and almost total dependence on Establishment and mainstream media sources. It will be an important source-book for future critical analysis.

Some navigational notes:

Copyright Dr Roy Johnston 2006