Volume 4, No. 7, July 2003

Over the last thirty years, a significant number of books have been published on the Irish Republican Army. Ed Moloney’s A Secret History of the IRA is likely to become the standard — if not the definitive — work on the history of the Provisional IRA.

Moloney is a serious journalist who has covered the conflict in the North of Ireland for over twenty years, and has proved himself by not being afraid of asking difficult questions. Challenging the orthodoxies of journalistic coverage of the conflict and being sceptical of the 1998 Good Friday Agreement recently resulted in him being sacked as the Northern Ireland editor of the Dublin-based Sunday Tribune.

Moloney’s history of the Provisional IRA is an authoritative work of investigative journalism and political analysis based on the author’s privileged access to inside information, both within the IRA and the British and Irish governments. Never before have the internal workings of the IRA been so well described.

Moloney shows how Adams led the Republican Movement for more than twenty years, in which time IRA volunteers were killed, tortured and imprisoned for a British declaration of intent to withdrawal and a 32-counties Irish Democratic Socialist Republic. Yet Adams had agreed, as early as 1982, in secret talks behind the backs of the IRA leadership, with the Redemptorist priest Alec Reid and the Catholic Church — a church that had just helped to defeat the H-Block struggle — a programme that negated everything Republican militants thought they were fighting for.

Moloney then shows how Adams made a secret deal with Fianna Fail and the SDLP — on Fianna Fail and the SDLP’s terms — before cutting with the British government, with whom he was already in contact since 1986/87, what amounted to more or less the same sort of deal that was on offer during the Sunningdale conference in 1973. The Sunningdale "power-sharing deal" had, of course, been totally rejected by the Republicans.

Adams’ secret deals were made sometimes behind the back of the leadership and most often behind the backs of the grassroots members of the Provisional Republican movement, to whom the actual contents of the deals were not made known. One just has to remember how Republicans were called by their leadership to demonstrate in support of the "Hume-Adams Document" while ignoring the actual content of that document.

Moloney provides the best description published so far of the development of the Peace Process and is at his best when describing how the Adams faction sold the Good Friday Agreement to a sceptical Provisional IRA. The strength of the book is not so much the author’s description of the dishonesty of the Provisional leadership and their betrayal of the fundamental principles of Irish Republicanism, but his detailed depiction of the actual mechanism of the Provisional leadership’s sell out and surrender.

The media was quick to jump on the more sensationalist aspects of Moloney’s book. For instance, that Adams had prior knowledge of the IRA involvement in the killing of Jane McConville and other "disappeared" — a group of alleged informers kidnapped and executed by the IRA, but whose fates the organisation until recently had always denied involvement in. Also, that a double agent placed at the highest level in the leadership of the IRA (with the code name "Steak-nife") was responsible for the capture of the Eskund arms shipment that would have allowed the Provisionals to lauch an Irish equivalent of the Tet Offensive, the failure of which significantly strengthened Adams’ strategy.

Moloney hints that British Intelligence might have helped remove those in the IRA that could have caused problems to Adams — like Jim Lynagh and the others killed in a British ambush at Loughall in 1987. The British may have used agents within the IRA to push the movement towards the peace strategy.

Moloney portrays the IRA as being brought down by treachery and British onslaught rather than as the "undefeated and defiant army" presented by the Provisionals. He gives valuable insights into the various individuals who lead the IRA. For example, he shows that the way Brian Keenan is presented as some "hard line radical Marxist" is just a myth. The book is a good antidote to many of the self deluding myths promoted by the Provos.

Moloney’s mixture of good investigative journalism and high standard political analysis makes The Secret History of the IRA an indispensable book for anyone interested in Irish politics.

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