Making Sense stays true to its objective, to tell ‘a straightforward and gripping story … in an accessible way’. It is a straightforward read.

urn:oclc:850193292 Republisher_date 20180111100324 Republisher_operator [email protected] Republisher_time 629 Scandate 20180110211430 Scanner ttscribe5.hongkong.archive.org Scanningcenter hongkong Top_six true Tts_version v1.57-initial-82-g2b8ab4d Worldcat (source edition) The names of Ian Paisley and Gerry Adams were mere boogymen. To be conjured as insult on the teenage playground. “You fancy Gerry Adams!” “Would you rather kiss Gerry Adams or marry Ian Paisley?”Peace came to Northern Ireland because the truculent parties got the best that was available to them after taking decades to work out that they had been pursuing political fantasies, not because Blair or anyone else showered them with wisdom and grace or applied any particular genius to contriving a deal." Elections to the new assembly were held in June 1973. During the campaign the wily Faulkner repeated that his party would not share power with any party ‘whose primary objective was to break the link with Great Britain’. Some Unionists appear to have voted for him on the assumption that this meant he would not share power with the SDLP. Afterwards, when it emerged he was indeed prepared to sit in government with the SDLP, opponents accused him of misleading voters. His reasoning was that ending the Union, while perhaps the ultimate ambition of the SDLP, was not its primary objective.

Compellingly written and completely even-handed, this is by far the clearest account of what happened in the Northern Ireland conflict - and why. I felt the book would have been much improved had it opened with a scene far in the future, describing the carnage of a roadside bomb, leading up to the question: "So how did we get here?" That would be a dramatic way of setting up the book and making the reader more interested in how the ancient conflict began. But I’ll say one thing for the Troubles – they kept your attention. Just when you were beginning to lose interest with the interminable tit-for-tat shootings ( see Alan Clarke’s grim but excellent film Elephant ) something really ghastly would happen. But is it a good read? Yes, if you don’t want to be bogged down with pre-Troubles history (too simplistically outlined in the book) or don’t need to understand the ideologies of unionism and nationalism per se. In this way, Making Sense feels written for a general English/benign foreign audience.However, if you know some Irish history and/or can appreciate the ethno-nationalist competition in Northern Ireland, then you may very well be let down. Horror piled on horror in July 1972. The restlessness of the mid-1960s had first degenerated into the violent clashes of August 1969 and now descended further into killings at a rate of three a day. That month had many of the features which were to become all too familiar as the troubles went on. Republicans killed Protestants while loyalists claimed Catholic lives, often with particular savagery. On 11 July a number of drunken loyalists broke into the home of a Catholic family, killing a mentally handicapped youth and raping his mother. At the resulting murder trial a lawyer told the court: ‘The restraints of civilisation on evil human passions are in this case totally non-existent. You may well think that in this case we have reached the lowest level of human depravity.’

The Troubles in Northern Ireland rolled grimly on for almost thirty years from the late 1960s until the onset of the current shaky peace process. In that time, the conflict never strayed far off the news schedules of the world’s media. Thousands of books, articles and theses were published, dissecting every possible aspect of the problem and making it the most researched civil conflict in history. All parties had difficulties with Whitelaw’s proposals. For many Unionists, powersharing with nationalists and a Council of Ireland were objectionable, for all Whitelaw’s stress on Northern Ireland’s guaranteed status within the UK. For the SDLP the initiative was in most aspects a huge advance, even though it fell well short of the London-Dublin joint authority the party had advocated. The continuing use of internment also posed a major problem for the SDLP.

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Then things went up another gear. A Nationalist MP died in Northern Ireland, and the IRA had the brilliant idea of putting up Bobby Sands as the candidate for the by-election. On 9 April 1981, when he was already losing his sight and was very ill, he was elected as Member of Parliament for Fermanagh and South Tyrone. The discussion document laid down that unfettered majority rule was a thing of the past and that future devolution would be on a basis of partnership. New institutions, it stipulated, must ‘seek a much wider consensus than has hitherto existed. As a minimum it would mean assuring minority groups of an effective voice and a real influence; but there are strong arguments that the objective of real participation should be achieved by giving minority interests a share in the exercise of executive power.’ In putting the concepts of powersharing and an Irish dimension on the table as the pillars of a future settlement, London had defined what were to be the main constitutional battlegrounds for the next three decades. By this point Unionism had splintered, with Faulkner prepared to negotiate, Paisley pressing for integration, and Craig apparently bent on confrontation. Prominent Unionist former ministers such as Harry West and John Taylor demanded a return to the old Stormont system, while many other politicians added to the general confusion by changing their minds and their political lines, sometimes several times. Faulkner found it difficult to hold his party together, particularly since he was advancing the problematic policy of negotiating with a British government which had, in the eyes of most Unionists, been guilty of a betrayal in removing the Stormont system. Some liberal Unionists drifted away from politics entirely, depriving Faulkner of potentially useful support. In parallel, the British and Irish governments “came to see the Northern Ireland question as a common problem which was best managed jointly.” Another important political figure, Irish Taoiseach Garret FitzGerald later commented that “In the 1970s London and Dublin were thought to be pursuing different policies with different attitudes, because the focus of attention in people’s minds was on Irish unity versus Northern Ireland remaining part of the UK. It was therefore thought to be a conflict of interest. But the reality, because of the IRA, has been that that long term divergence of interest has been subordinated to the common concern, the restoration of peace. That change from a position of polarised attitudes to one of common purpose has been the fundamental change of Anglo-Irish relations in the last twenty years.”

In 1972 a total of 498 people were killed in Northern Ireland, which had a small population of around 1.5 million. It was a very violent place. The total body count of The Troubles is 3,739 between 1966 and 2012 (but the murders have not been in double figures since 2004.) Now – can anyone tell me how many people have died in Iraq’s complex internal wars since 2003? Is anyone counting? And that’s just one example. How long have you got?

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Born in 1999, into a post-troubles heavily Protestant east Antrim, there was a lot of my upbringing that I never questioned or considered. It is certainly true that violence increased greatly in August 1971, though it is also probably true that it would have gone up in any case, given that both the IRA and loyalist groups were becoming bigger and more organised, as the increase in IRA violence and the bombing of McGurk’s bar testified. Nonetheless, three events taken together - the introduction of internment, Bloody Sunday and the fall of Stormont -served to trigger the worst violence ever seen in Northern Ireland. Faulkner portrayed Stormont’s end as primarily the achievement of the IRA, declaring: ‘Chief amongst those who have sought the emasculation and ultimately the downfall of Stormont have been the IRA terrorists themselves.’ Heath also admitted that he was shaken by the violence, and that he feared complete anarchy. The incident had enormous ramifications, taking a place in Irish history as a formative moment which not only claimed fourteen lives but also hardened attitudes, increased paramilitary recruitment, helped generate more violence, and convulsed Anglo-Irish relations. In 1998 Tony Blair, as prime minister, announced the establishment of a full-scale judicial inquiry.