The Irish Troubles:  A Generation of Violence 1967-1992
By J. Bowyer Bell
St. Martin’s Press

Clive Dunn and I went to school together; both of us were shy, both of us had the best of good intentions, and when we left school, Clive joined the army and I joined a rock’n’roll band.

I did a tour of working mens’ clubs and army bases and Clive did a tour of Northern Ireland. After a year, Clive came home and professed his disdain and all round frustration of having been sent to solve a problem he knew nothing about. In fact, he said he was thinking about buying himself out of the army, coming home and forming a band of his own. ‘’Why not,’’ I quipped, ‘’I’ll show you the chords to ‘A Hard Day’s Night’…’’

Shortly after, the street in which I lived was abruptly woken in the middle of the night by a semi-conscious stream of flashing blue haze. Five, six, perhaps ten police cars had descended outside the front door. Armed with angst, worry, haste, and drunk on occupational hazard, they came to inform Mr. and Mrs. Dunn – who lived next door – that their son had been blown to pieces about an hour ago.

Clive and six of his mates, along with the Queen’s uncle, Earl Mountbatten of Burma, had all in one way or another, been ambushed and killed within the last twenty-four hours. When morning came, the street was buzzing with remorse, angst, tears, confusion.

Sopped in tragedy, the entire community was at a loss. Mums and Dads, punks and coal-men, skinheads and paperboys – it seemed that everyone, in one way or another, was affected. None more so than Clive’s mother, who to this very day, remains a broken woman.

Since The Troubles began in 1967, over 4,000 people have died for a neurotic fantasy, a demand that the present repeat the past. Yeats said it years ago, during the earlier Irish Troubles: ‘’We had fed the heart on fantasy/The heart’s grown brutal from the fare.’’

Ever since the IRA (Irish Republic Army) launched its war, with money and weapons supplied by self-righteous Irish-Americans who would never pay the price for subsidising murder far away, the dynamics in brutality have almost taken over in Northern Ireland.

IRA killings provoke excesses from the security forces, which in turn, provoke sympathy from the Catholics who are not normally pro-IRA (the overwhelming majority), which provoke Protestant militancy and terror, which provoke more IRA killings, which in turn, provoke the security forces to yet more harrowing excess, which the provoke the Catholics, who provoke the Protestants in a cycle of paramount hatred and relentless revenge.

It is because of this kaleidoscope of crazed violence that the British Army was sent to Northern Ireland in the first place. And simple (and rational) fact that is more often than not, overlooked by Irish-American nationalists, brave as lions from the safety of their bar-stools, berating their childishly simple solution: ‘’Brits out.’’

If it were that simple, what a perfect world it would be.

Moreover, for a perfect and utterly poignant understanding of The Troubles, read J. Bowyer Bell’s The Irish Troubles. It’s as giving as it is authoritative, as clear as it is eloquent, and what’s more, it’s written by man who’s as haunted by the whole rancid affair as Mrs. Dunn.

In its 855 small-type, quasi-depressing, actual and factual and all encompassing pages, the book lays out everything – from warts to wisdom – that everyone and anyone (all sides and factions included) would ever need, or indeed, want to know about this towering tumult of turmoil.

That’s not to say The Irish Troubles is a political history, because it isn’t. It’s more of ‘’an analysis of the evolution of the gun in Irish politics since 1967.’’ A symptom of which, has driven dialogue into the dirt.

That the British government won’t talk to the IRA (which some consider a gross error), only perpetuates the antagonism on all sides. An antagonism espoused by the gun, which may explain why much of Bell’s book reads like a (shockingly real) casualty list: babies shot in the head, old men gunned down on their doorsteps, British soldiers blown to bits by bombs, innocent passers by shot in British ambushes, interned Catholics tortured by their British captors, Protestant gunmen hacking the faces off Catholic victims, Republicans shooting other Republicans to settle odiously petty feuds, and of course, Provisional IRA hunger-strikers (such as Bobby Sands) dying for their wretched, cruel, impossible dream.

An element of the IRA’s obtuse stubbornness is brought to the fore when Bells writes: ‘’The Catholic difficulties and grievances, and they were legion, had faded away in the consciousness of Dublin as the years passed and nothing could be done. Better forget than remain guilty over impotence and an unwillingness to sacrifice. Those who did care in Sinn Fein seemed to spend much of their time engaged in the theological discussions of blame for the movement’s endless schisms and feuds, the universal pastime of the revolutionary. These faithful seemed a mix of embittered old women, unrepentant gunmen, and a scattering of very idealistic men with limited education and towering pretensions.’’

So what’s the gain, the point, the answer – if any?

J. Bowyer Bell best summarises the realistic pessimism that equates the Troubles with a feeling of ongoing helplessness when he writes: ‘’The problem has no solution – that is the problem.’’

Of course, there’s no gain.

Of course there’s no point.

One need only look at what’s going on in Bosnia to realise that war doesn’t deal with such fundamental issues.

So far as an answer is concerned, of course there’s an answer; it’s just that humanity is too darn blind to see it.