Agents of Influence, and Political Purgatory: Two accounts of the North

Agents of Influence by Aaron Edwards (Merrion Press, 332pp, €19.95)
Political Purgatory by Brian Rowan (Merrion Press, 264pp, €19.95)

Military history, a British officer once remarked, must always be misleading: “On the actual day of battle naked truths may be picked up for the asking; by the following morning they have already begun to get into their uniforms.”

In the case of Ireland’s late 20th-century conflict, naked truths have been getting into uniform for some time. Depending on the purpose for which truth is being kitted out, the Provisional IRA left the field an “undefeated army” solely because it judged its objectives to be imminently attainable by constitutional means, or it folded its tent as the British had so thoroughly infiltrated it that it could no longer prosecute the war.

In Aaron Edwards’s telling, the British were all over the IRA like a bad suit. MI5, he argues, had agents throughout the organisation, reporting on internal developments while also influencing its direction of travel – first, in the early 1980s, buttressing advocates for republican involvement in electoral politics and, later, covering those steering it to cessation.

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Although objectivity has never been more than a “noble dream” for historians, Edwards’s politics are stitched on his sleeve like a corporal’s two chevrons: agents and informers were “heroes”. And his breathlessness when describing his heroes’ doings raises eyebrows. Notably, he claims that anybody “green-booked” (inducted) into the IRA was given access to its “innermost secrets”. If such were the case, that teenagers got the keys to P O’Neill’s filing cabinet, the wonder is that the conflict lasted so long.

‘Shadowy figures’

His tales of spooky derring-do – heavily reliant on chats with  “shadowy figures” in “shadowy figures” in

he police, military and secret service – do not cut muster as history. In the early 1990s, the IRA was better armed than ever and during its back-channel negotiations with the British, as Brian Rowan’s

Political Purgatory

reminds us, “escalated” matters with several “spectaculars”. They included mortaring 10 Downing Street in 1991 and, in 1992, detonating a device at the Baltic Exchange, London, that killed three civilians and caused £800 million damage (over £1.6 billion today)—more than all previous IRA bombs combined.

And so Edwards’s sprucely uniformed contentions beg a question: How did P O’Neill figure out the days that the all-seeing spooks were on leave?

1969 is conventionally taken as the starting year of the Troubles that concern Edwards. And 1969 is closer now in time to 1919, when the early 20th-century troubles started, than it is to 2021. Reflecting on the earlier conflict, Taoiseach Micheál Martin recently remarked that “History cannot be a dehumanised, reductive, simplistic or self-serving narrative. And when we look back to a period of conflict we must be especially careful to recall that history is the complex story of individual men and women, their lives, their flaws, their strengths, their struggle and their suffering, however they identified, whatever uniform they wore.”

Most IRA men never donned a uniform in 1919-1921, but the point is well-taken. And historians – and, indeed, politicians – should adopt that approach to the later conflict rather than constructing “simplistic” narratives to score points. If history always dresses truth, cannot it be in “mufti” — rather than uniformed for a purpose?

The late Bobby Storey has been associated in the press with several “spectaculars” that puncture Edwards’s thesis; indeed, the PSNI questioned him about a raid on Castlereagh in 2002 that netted a trove of classified documents – an incident that does not feature in Agents of Influence.

Storey, who reputedly became the IRA’s head of intelligence in the 1990s, merits only one mention in Edwards’s dispatches on “Britain’s secret intelligence war”, for his arrest in possession of a weapon (not a file) back in 1981. But Storey and people like him – paramilitaries who became politicos – loom large in Political Purgatory; such men and women, Rowan argues, made peace possible.

Fine-grained account

Rowan’s absorbing book is a fine-grained account of “political stasis”, from the ash – or, rather, the arrogance – that broke the camel’s back and collapsed Stormont in 2017 through to early 2021; put another way, it surveys the “interesting times” between unionism losing its majority at Stormont and the census widely expected to show that cultural Protestants no longer constitute a majority in the North.

However, Political Purgatory is more than a journey into unionism’s end times. Rowan ponders the stops and starts of the peace process, and he peers into what Peter Robinson hopes will be “a more prosperous, shared and peaceful future”. Robinson is one of many players whose insightful reflections punctuate the book.

In short, Rowan’s concern is not simply to narrate what happened in 2017-2021, but rather to illuminate, from different vantage points, how change has come before and how it will likely come again. And as the kaleidoscope turns, building trust repeatedly comes into focus.

The one disappointment is that Rowan shut down surveillance of the “state of stasis” just before the DUP landed itself in a “state of chassis”. Now, there’s a tragicomedy, long foretold, crying out for a review by Peter Robinson.

Breandán Mac Suibhne’s The End of Outrage: Post-Famine Adjustment in Rural Ireland (Oxford University Press, 2017) won the Royal Irish Academy’s inaugural Michel Déon Biennial Prize for Nonfiction