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Studies in Intelligence 68, No. 1 (Extracts, March 2024)

Reviews of Three Books on Ireland's Time of Trouble

Reviews by Joseph Gartin

Ireland's Time of Trouble

The Padre: The True Story of the Irish Priest Who Armed the IRA with Gaddafi’s Money

Jennifer O’Leary (Merrion Press, 2023), 254 pages, photos, epilogue, endnotes, acknowledgments.

Stakeknife’s Dirty War: The Inside Story of Scappaticci, the IRA’s Nutting Squad, and the British Spooks Who Ran the War

Richard O’Rawe (Merrion Press, 2023), 253 pages, epilogue, endnotes, acknowledgments.

There Will Be Fire: Margaret Thatcher, the IRA, and the Two Minutes That Changed History

Rory Carroll (G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 2023), 397 pages, prologue, photos, epilogue, endnotes, acknowledgments.

Introduction

Suddenly as the riot squad moved in, it was raining
exclamation marks, Nuts, bolts, nails, car-keys. A fount of broken type. And the explosion Itself - an asterisk on the map.


- Belfast Confetti, Ciaran Carson

Twenty-five years since the Good Friday Agreement drew an uneasy close to the Troubles, new scholarship, memoirs, oral histories, and documentaries are shedding light on the war that wracked Northern Ireland from the late 1960s to the mid-1990s. The additions to the literature are welcome because the Troubles defy simple explanation, and intelligence in its myriad forms played important roles that are only now coming into view. Three recent books focus on different aspects of the conflict, but in the claustrophobic world of the Troubles these stories inevitably intersect.

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